This week, Google tweaked their algorithm to favor high quality content over low quality content, particularly punishing "content farms" which put out a lot of shallow content to capture popular search terms, such as (allegedly) AOL, Demand Media, and Huffington Post.Many webmasters complained that the change negatively affected their web traffic and their business. However, I don't see the big deal. If they want revenue, they should generate better content so that people want to come, rather than make Google feed them. Quality talks; trying to game the system through "search engine optimization" is just cheating, and I'm glad Google tries to fight it.
2 comments:
The side by side comparisons so far look good according to many websites. Hopefully, these new results will start to become more useful. Content farms have become a major problem on the web, occupying valuable front page results, for something that is not so important. It is nice to see search engines starting to move in a more effective direction regarding these new content farms. Google and other search engines are only going to have to keep improving results especially after Google's Instant Search debuted.
I can see the obvious reasons why the content farms are upset, but I agree with Anthony and Jonathan and commend Google for trying to fight them. This would be outrageous and suspicious if the U.S. government was trying to regulate search results (*cough China cough*), but I think Google as a company is sincerely doing what it thinks is best for its users, and I don't think the U.S. government would ever come down to that.
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