“Content farm”? “Spam farm” is more like it. “Quality content”? Absolute drivel. Not one “article” with worthwhile information among their 3 million pages. As bad as Wikipedia and YahooAnswers. Meanwhile, Google continues to bury or outright exclude untold thousands of sites with valuable, well-researched content.

Some of the greatest concerns with these farms is the content being written by authors who really have little idea of the subject. They can simply scan a few other sites and then write a piece. Authority of the existing TLD is passed onto new content as is links etc which bolster an artificial importance for SERP’s.

By creating mega farms, even Wikipedia falls into that category, the domination continues and when Google is attempting to match the enquiry to a site it fails as some-one searching for a vehicle respray doesn’t care about the encyclopaedic facts but the location and price. Google may have to offer more refined results and allow the user to determine if they are after a business/service or information.

Google and the web spam team have done this before, more than once, where content farms and link farms are concerned. I don’t know how they will do it, but it doesn’t seem hard to imagine that Googlebot will add 2+2+2+2 together that 8 pages are about the same subject, pick one and just drop the rest. That’s fair.

If I had eight pages saying basically the same thing eight ways, I know what is going to happen to at least 6 of those pages and I’d be lucky if I get one page out of 3 different 8 page subjects (one page in 24) might make it to page one of a SERP. Really, I got that in my soul now, so the real trick has been writing for people and just do the best you can to present the best content for each subject or keyphrase that you can. With that believe in mind, if I could crank out that many articles that fast, You’d have STR82U in this page’s URL, right?

What about all those poor authors who can turn out such well SEO’d articles naturally but are giving it away to Demand Media? The day that they decide they have enough articles to last forever, they will quit accepting submissions and un “employ” a lot of people just before the company itself turns into a stone turkey. That’s happened before too hasn’t it?

The fact that Google posts content at all is a testimony to their profit strategy. They are very good at what they do. They rank content so as to avoid posting web sites of companies that are otherwise forced to pay for Adwords exposure. They intentionally make SEO so hard and so unreliable that businesses are forced to bid for adword positions. They USE content to meet the search demands in a way that encourages paid click-throughs. If they don’t get the click throughs on the Adwords ads, they get click throughs on the embedded Adsense ads on the pages of “content” in their organic listings. Why are you complaining? Use it. There is no purity to be found. If Google stops ranking content and switches to web sites. everyone will just go back to buying domains. A search engine must deliver something? This or that.

My web rank 1on google

This debate seems to be ongoing but as long as Google has an established relationship that is mutually beneficial, not much is going to change. Demand Studios is the flavor of the month for now, but who will be next? At the end of the day, quality plays a minor role as opposed to quantity when it comes to ranking. A few strategically placed keywords i.e. acceptable density will do wonders for your rankings and the absolute relevance of the content becomes less important.

I did a search on how to fix a car scratch after reading the article saying google favors ehow, but after 3 pages only one article for ehow came up. I think people shouldnt worry about it.

It seems no matter what is going on with Google’s Search Results strategies quality focused content on your website, quality back links from websites with better page rank than your own, and social media implementation accomplishes better website visibility

I agree that Demand Media sites are little more than content mines and add little value. Articles on eHow are more often than not very superficial and badly researched with little authenticated referencing. There are far better sources of information on the web and Google is not serving specialty niche publishers or the public by allowing sheer masses of information to be so strongly weighted in its search results. It also makes a mockery of Google’s extensive ‘level playing field’ advocacy. I for one completely ignore eHow search results and move on to lower ranked resources.

Maybe google realize and seen from their statistics that many people who search first on google then get results from ehow and other same demand media sites. And on next day when the people search again for certain words they may just go directly to ehow site and type into their search box the keyword they searching instead of going to google search.

This could become a threat to search engines when one demand media sites become popular to people like wikipedia, ehow and others. Because maybe next time when people seeking for information they want ,they could just go directly to demand media sites and search there the solution to their information needed. In this case google and other search engines loses some potential visitors. If google is wise they should make the people dependent on their searching power instead of going to other demand media site company.

Let me put this straight then where are sites where you get info rich articles that give right ful insights to searchers…No there are not every article site whether they get submissions from expert are SEOd to divert traffic to their sites. Now since it was not scalable they never became demand media. What demand media does is palying with a loophole that Google algo has. Anything that is not caught by google anti-spam team is legal & relevant.
No major site in www has provided articles that is info rich for readers. Every other site has UGC that is created to target particulr keyphrase. Its google to be blamed not demand media, tommorow you might find other you does the same if not demand media. Content farming is there since the emergence of search engines. Previously it was scattered now it is lead by demand media.
Google cannot sit back with its age old page rank technology and think they are masters of search. they should innovate & improve their search engine’s quality.
Moreover DO NOT FORGET EVERY RESULT IN GOOGLE FOR COMPETITOR KEYWORDS is DOMINATED by content which is SEOd by people like us. So google is not smart the way it is potrayed. It shows results what SEOrs like us want to show them.

Cheers,
Lalit Kumar
Ten Years in Online Marketing

I have written a few articles for the purposes of SEo in my time but I write my best and longest stuff on my own websites. Really e-how have no rewards for writing a quality piece but rather they encourage many pieces which in my mind come at the cost of quality. I have had a look at articles relevant to my field and I wish I could use some on my site but a good 95% are overly generalized and under researched rubbish. I really hope that it doesn’t start to overpopulate the top results because that will just mean more trawling for quality like 1o years ago.