Commentary
Content Farms Revisited: Panda Needs To Go Further
- by Janet Driscoll Miller , April 26, 2011
Back in February, I wrote a post about content farms -- defining them and laying out the problem content farms pose for SEO. In the meantime, Google has released series of algorithm updates (Panda) to combat the problem. But has the Panda update really lived up to the goal …
4 comments about "Content Farms Revisited: Panda Needs To Go Further".
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Thanks, Janet. You educated me with your first article about content farms. Now I'm wondering if a legitimate site can be negatively impacted by being referenced multiple times by articles on a content farm?
Duplicate content has one other legitimate use. Our company syndicates specialty content to websites run by local media outlets — everything from newspaper and radio station websites to independent entrepreneurs. We supply a mix of daily original content and aggregated content in 12 niche categories like bridal (Brides365.com) or holidays (Holiday365.com). Ideally our local clients add original local and local ads, business directories and the like, but even if they don't localize the niche it is surrounded by other types of original local content on their sites and offers site visitors an online vertical that is as deep and rich and ever-changing as anything on the web.
Jay,
Good point... many real estate listing could be duplicate content across sites too. But I think, like ecommerce, Google will likely need to come up with a way to identify these sites. It will be interesting to see just how far Google will go to reduce duplicate content and content farms. Like I said, this is a good start, but there's so much more that could be done.
Janet
George,
I think that is the great fear and possible reality... Google has to be very careful when treating things strictly algorithmically, because how can an algorithm always ensure that sites are one type or another? It's a big challenge.
The way legitimate sites can avoid it is simple... use the canonical tag if you have duplicate content WITHIN your own site. If you have duplicate content across multiple domains, I think you do risk appearing as a content farm. But I also wonder what other factors Google looks at to identify a content farm? Something to keep an eye out for as Google continues to try to reduce content farms through algorithm updates.
Janet