Last week, Google’s Matt Cutts put up a blog post talking about a shift in focus to content farms, which he defines as "sites with shallow or low-quality content". Most people that read this assumed he was talking about sites like some of those offered by Demand Media (eHow.com, for example), which launched an IPO this week valuing the company at $1.5 billion. 

Google has launched a change in its algorithm, following a post a week ago from Matt Cutts talking about the search engine’s approach to spam and content farms. However, it is still unclear whether this new update is the related to the "content farm" side of things.

If you’re a regular WebProNews reader, I probably don’t have to tell you that content farms have been in the news a lot lately – mainly Demand Media. While that company uses technology and algorithms to come up with its story assignments, it does utilize a large team of humans to craft the content before it goes out to the masses. 

Matt Cutts from Google, Harry Shum from Bing, and Rich Skrenta from Blekko spoke on a panel today at the Farsight Summit. Much of the conversation was around the Bing/Google results copying ordeal, but part of the conversation was about search quality in general, and the impact content farms are having on it. 

The business of content farms like Demand Media is creating content in the form of articles and videos that search engines will crawl and feature prominently in the long tail of search results. Demand Media and all content farms’ Achilles’ heel is that much of their Internet traffic and revenue relies on Google.

Sometimes sites like Demand Studios, Yahoo’s Associated Content, AOL’s Seed.com, and Suite101 are called names like "content farms" or "content mills". You can call them whatever you like, but the fact of the matter is that they’re attracting a lot of writers and producing a lot of content, which is appearing in a lot of search results for better or worse.

Some major news organizations that make up the Internet Content Syndication Council are reportedly working on some guidelines for content syndication for their own collective membership, while providing an example for others to go by.

The council includes the Associated Press, Reuters, CBS, The Tribune Company, and many others. Here’s the full list of companies represented:

So-called content farms draw a lot of criticism for a supposed lack of quality and some consider them a threat to quality on the web in general. We’re talking about entities like Demand Media, Associated Content, the new AOL, etc. (the definition of the term content farm itself is also debated).

Demand Media CEO Richard Rosenblatt doesn’t understand much of the criticism geared toward his company, which Time Magazine columnist Dan Fletcher refers to as "the Web’s least understood and most vilified juggernaut." I attended a panel at SXSW this week in which Fletcher and Rosenblatt discussed Demand’s content strategy that has become the basis of so much controversy (Read here for more background