Google's War On Content Farms To Benefit Digital Marketing Companies

In February 2011, Google announced that they had updated their search algorithm to purge 'low quality' content from showing up on their search result pages. Most digital marketing specialists believe that this 'low quality' content includes content farms.

Content farms are basically companies that hire large numbers of mostly freelance writers, who generate massive amounts of textual content, stuffed with SEO keywords. This content is designed to fox search engine algorithms into giving them high ranks, for certain high-value digital marketing keywords. Usually written by authors who have little or no knowledge about the fields on which they report, this content typically contains many inconsistencies, grammar and punctuation errors.

The main goal of content farms is to generate revenue from digital marketing advertisements displayed on their web pages. The basic idea is to get high rankings on Google, and attract a large numbers of viewers, who would click on the advertisements displayed on a page, generating huge amounts of revenue.

According to a statement by Google, this change of algorithm is expected to affect approximately 12 percent of its search results. This could be a huge amount considering the immense number of websites crawled by the search engine spider. In the past few years, the number of poor quality digital marketing websites has grown substantially, which is why it was important to make changes to the algorithm. Before finalizing the changes, Google has spent a lot of time fine-tuning the algorithm, for which they also considered feedback received through an extension added to their Chrome browser.

Google's campaign against websites offering spam content is not a new thing. Since 2006-07, Google has made regular changes to its algorithm to penalize websites that did not contain content that they promised. The main complaint against such websites was that they copy-pasted content from authentic sources, and passed off the content as their own. Usually, this content was based on trending topics, so that the website could collect a huge amount of visitors, and generate revenues through digital marketing ads.

This action of Google comes after criticism from the digital marketing media that the results currently being shown by its search engine, are not as good as before. Also, many people have been praising their competitor Bing's search results.

Though some digital marketing websites that display original content have been hit by this change, more than 90 percent of sites that have been removed by Google are spam websites. It is easy to understand why Google made this move. When you consider the situation from the viewpoint of a searcher, there is nothing worse than clicking on a link and finding identical content which you have already read, or a list of links pointing to other websites.

Qudos Digital is a leading digital marketing agency and can be contacted on 020 8891 2077 or info@qudosdigital.co.uk.

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