Are You A Content Marketer Or Content Farm?

Posted: 12 Mar 2011 10:03 PM PST

Are You A Content Marketer Or Content Farm???

Guest Post by Jack Harold.

For a start, I will just like you to ask yourself with a clear conscience: are you a content marketer or is your website just another content farm? I do not know about you but I am seriously irritated by the presence of content farms on the web. For a taste of my rants, you can have a look at my guest post on John Chow's blog a few weeks back(182 comments). That's how debatable this topic is.

To me, content farms are just low-quality websites with little or no original content. They merely lift scads of contents elsewhere. Alright, they are quite clever in their approach that they do not copy the entire article. Instead, just a couple of paragraphs here, a few sentences there, stitch everything up nicely together, edit the entire article a bit more and this becomes a totally "original" article … just that it is not original! While nobody can stop these websites from stealing your original content, it really irks people especially ME when they are consistently able to attain high search rankings for the long-tailed search keyword phrases that they are trying to rank for. Talk about search engine results manipulation.

Are You A Content Marketer Or Content Farm?

However, many content farms (and I will like to mention Demand Media in particular) claim that these accusations paint with a broad brush and that they do not scrape any content from others, instead paying writers (small amounts) to create truly original content. While most forms of spam are relatively easy to identify, in some ways Demand Media is doing the same things that other content marketers do.

Content Farm Or Content Marketer? Demand Media The Defendant

Low quality writers producing low quality content. Demand Media simply focuses more on quantity in churning on tons of articles rather than putting the emphasis on the content quality. What about Wikipedia? The pioneer of content farms? You are absolutely wrong if you have thought in this way. Wikipedia pays its writers nothing and its articles are all about quality. See the difference?

While Demand Media CEO Richard Rosenblatt tried to stand firm that Demand Media was ready to set out and rigorously start defending its content as it falls victim to a great deal of criticism over quality, it is without doubt that the criticism does come with clear evidence and unhappiness among us Internet users. As I have emphasized again and again, content farms like Demand Media only serve to benefit the SEO marketer, not search engines or searchers.

Google The Judge

Are You A Content Marketer Or Content Farm??

I have always been a strong believer of Google in its mission to deliver the highest quality search results for user queries and so far, Google has not failed me. On 24 February 2011, Google made an official announcement on its blog that it had just implemented a change to its search algorithm that had impacted around 12% of its search queries. The update was mainly targeted at penalizing low quality websites with lower search rankings. By low quality websites, I am referring to "sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful".

So are content farms still going to rein the rule?

I will say their demise is near.