Did Google Panda DESTROY Content Farms? (article) - GoFuckYourself.com

$5 submissions · 12-16-2011, 02:28 PM

Very interesting analysis from the University of Glasgow regarding CONTENT FARMS' fate after successive waves of (ongoing) Google Panda updates

One takeaway: It is PAINFUL to be a stockholder of Demand Media right now... Ouch. Live by Google. Die by Google.

Source: http://www.newscientist.com/article/...d-results.html

Quote:

The results show that Google and Microsoft have won a major victory in the fight against such content farms. In the process they may have inflicted serious pain on two organisations often cited as providers of content farm material: Seed, a project from AOL, appears to have stopped commissioning content from freelance writers, though the firm declined to comment. And Santa Monica-based Demand Media has seen its stock price fall by over 50 per cent since it went public earlier this year for $1.5 billion.

Quote:

To test how successful Google and Microsoft's Bing have been at fending off content-farmed results, McCreadie ran 50 search queries known to be a target of content farmers, such as "how to train for a marathon", in March and August this year. Then he paid people to examine the results for links to low-quality sites, where "low quality" was defined as uninformative sites whose primary function appears to be displaying adverts.

The results are striking. In the case of the marathon query, sites that contained lists of generic tips, such as "invest in a good pair of running shoes", were present in the top 10 in March but had disappeared by August, while high-quality sources, such as Runner's World magazine, now appear near the top. Similar trends were found throughout the 50 queries.