Back in September 2009, I published an article called “Auto Blogs are Unethical and Downright Wrong” and apparently Google feels the same as I do about content farms. These content farms are blogs that re-purpose content without permission from the original author.
Google’s official blog stated the following;
“The next Google algorithm update will focus on cleaning content farms from positions of unfair advantage in our index. This will likely affect websites with considerable content copied from other online sources. Once this update is complete, preference will be given to the originators of content. We expect this to be in effect in no less than 60 days.”
Read the entire article: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/01/google-search-and-search-engine-spam.html
The effect is that searchers are more likely to see the sites that wrote the original content rather than a site that scraped or copied the original site’s content.
Why copy other peoples content? Good question and I love answering myself, but here’s one reason why site owners do this.
These content thieves use auto blogging software to crawl other websites and blogs for content based on certain keywords and re-publish the content on their own site. The purpose of this is to build content so that the copycat site can rank high in search queries on Google. Once they have established a good ranking in search, they then sell the site for profit.
Flippa.com is a site where you can buy and sell blogs and if you explore the site, you will notice many sellers indicate that the site their selling is an auto-blog. There’s nothing wrong with what Flippa is doing, it’s the content thieves that are to blame for building content farms.
I am very happy that Google is taking action, but like all changes, let’s hope there are not too many false positives that could hurt some sites that aren’t content farms.
Thanks Frank.
We do take a fairly hands-off approach when it comes to the websites listed on Flippa. We do ensure sellers call out if their content is unique or not and immediately suspend listings where this has been insufficiently called out.
We ran a blog post on this to ensure buyers are fully informed on the risks around autoblogs – it really polarized the Flippa community as you can see in the comments: http://flippa.com/blog/autoblogs-what-are-they-worth/
Must agree that these sites may be of limited value once Google corrects their algorithm.
Andrew,
Thank you for your comment! It is great to know that Fippa provides a choice to sellers to indicate whether the site they’re selling has unique content or not. I am glad Flippa moderates and takes action to any false claims…Good job. I am a fan and have used your services in the past.
In my opinion this update is more interesting because of targeting content farms. Definition of content farms have little to do with auto-blogging (though there are some automatically generated content in them), but the differences between good and bad content site is very unclear at best. Just check this list: http://www.jongales.com/blog/2011/02/14/list-of-content-farms/
For example, it is quite unclear how Squidoo, Mahalo or Ezinearticles landed on this list and Knol and Wikipedia did not. All of Wikipedia, Mahalo and EzineArticles review content. Squidoo and Knol are even more similar. And so on.
Giedrius,
I have searched using content from auto blogs and was able to find the original author of the content. Auto blogs are classified as content farms as they steal the original works and use it to game search results. Thanks for sharing your insight and the link. I will read that article at jongales.com. Hope you are doing well my friend.
Frank: Acording to wikipedia :
“In the context of the World Wide Web, a content farm is a company that employs large numbers of often freelance writers to generate large amounts of textual content which is specifically designed to satisfy algorithms for maximal retrieval by automated search engines. Their main goal is to generate advertising revenue.[1]
”
So it is not limited by automated content, that is the problem. If we limit it for content generated automatically, then the limits are more or less clear.
Giedrius,
The point is other peoples content whether automated or not. Your point is well received.
Google is considering now these terms so better be alert before something wrong happen to your dreams. Copy is Wrong habit. Thanks for updates.
@Giedrius………….Great work……really good to see such stuff in your site