Latest search algorithm updates from Google are expected affect 11% of the websites. Buzz is that content farms like “eHow”, “ezinearticles” and others like those are the targets. Idea is to downgrade the relevance of content farms in the overall search ranking system. It is considered that many content farms have low grade content which is either bought (crowd sourcing platforms) or is been plagiarized or aggregated.

Content farms: Troublemakers

There are some genuine concerns about the fair search; content farms apply SEO techniques to come on the top of search rankings and infest the results with not-so-valuable content. This is a double edged sword. First, Web searchers spend time in searching through these results, and secondly, loosing advertizing revenue to low value websites deters the future advertisers.

Content farms also increase overhead for Google. These not-so-valuable results have to be indexed, re-indexed, stored, managed, searched and presented.

Hail storm of search engines launches (recent years) has raised the bars for online search community; netizens expect better results, if not quicker. In the era of IBM Watsons, Google can’t let content farms spoil the party.

Error in judgment:

A Noble idea, without noble Karma, leads to nothing. At the first look, the Idea of attacking content farms appears to be bright and logical. But the way Google is tackling this problem is not going to make any difference in the long run.

Google does not have the semantics to pick valuable content over non valuable.  Stemming is the biggest stretch of linguistics inside Google search and no stemming algorithm can differentiate “content farm” from “content of the farm” (Artificially Intelligent).

Google runs on the keyword frequency analysis not on the contextual understanding. Content is judged important based on some input, say keywords. Same content can be more important for one set of keywords but not for others. In absence of semantic algorithms, reducing the relevancy of web results using some pre programmed algorithm, against the domain names, is against the free nature of the Internet. To kill a bad fish, no need to poison the water source.

Google has no way to segregate content of one website from another, except statistical proximities. Remember that Flubber movie; content farms are flubbers; predicting their shape is not possible. Google needs to judge their semantic overlap against the knowledge they represent. Otherwise, new domain names are sold at less than a dollar a month, and the Flubber can take new shape.

Google searches for the characters, it can neither understand what you are typing in, nor does it make sense of what a web page is conveying. Content farms have thrived on this weakness and SEO hormones. If the content farms decide to just reverse the order of their low value sentence, they will succeed in fooling statistical algorithmic changes.

I have been harsh on Google. But until it starts to apply semantics, syntactic and structural constructs in tandem, nothing is going to change for the web-searchers. Applying semantics is not easy and cannot happen overnight, so; in the mean time I have an extra suggestion.

One Suggestion:

I want to point towards Google’s SearchWiki, my personal favorite. SearchWiki was Google’s mass scale, collaborative search effort. It was a way of customizing and personalizing search results, by user. Each web searcher can re-rank, delete, add, and comment on every single result (domain), which Google throws at him. And his preferences will be applied in all future old/new searches.

SearchWiki was released on November 20, 2008 and discontinued on March 3, 2010. Google replaced it with two things, one was Google Stars and another was SideWiki for sharing annotations. But they are nothing like SearchWiki.

As a piece of unasked advice, let the web-searchers control the quality of their search results/domains (Till we have semantic capabilities). Let us decide on the content farms (Bring back SearchWiki); don’t impose. Someone’s pennies can be other ones wealth, let the content farms live; after all Wikipedia is also a great content farm.

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