Google algorithm change may hurt content farms
Original content is king.
Google algorithm change may hurt content farms
James Temple, Chronicle Staff Writer
Saturday, February 26, 2011
Google Inc. is down on the farm.
Late Thursday, the Mountain View search company announced a major change to its algorithm designed to lower the rankings of sites that copy content from elsewhere or are otherwise not particularly useful. Though Google didn’t use the term in its blog post, it was widely perceived as another attempt to foil what have come to be called content farms.
A number of businesses, like Demand Media and Yahoo Inc.'s Associated Content, specialize in throwing up quick stories, videos or how-to instructions on popular topics, often relying heavily on original material from other publications.
Though the quality is often low, the material frequently ranks high in search results thanks to the use of headlines and popular keywords that catch the attention of search algorithms. Consumers and technology critics have increasingly complained that the material clutters up search results, and undermines the value of Google.
As such, the company has been working to address the issue for more than a year.
The change announced Thursday has already been implemented in the United States and will roll out overseas eventually. It noticeably impacts 11.8 percent of queries, dropping the rankings of low-quality sites and boosting those with original content, research and analysis, the company said.
“Google depends on the high-quality content created by wonderful Web-sites around the world, and we do have a responsibility to encourage a healthy web ecosystem,” Google fellow Amit Singhal and principal engineer Matt Cutts wrote in the blog post. “Therefore, it is important for high-quality sites to be rewarded, and that’s exactly what this change does.”
Google is wading into tricky territory by acting as the arbiter of what’s legitimate content and what isn’t. It essentially requires training its algorithm to distinguish good writing from bad, original content from repurposed and valid analysis from bunk.
Some of these matters are subjective, not technical. One notable challenge is that lots of legitimate blogs use material from elsewhere, but still provide a thoughtful layer of analysis. Meanwhile, some argue that sites like the Huffington Post, recently bought by AOL, do a lot of important original work, as well as a fair amount of what can be construed as content farming.
No mention of specifics
The company didn’t discuss the specific signals it’s using to distinguish one type of site from the next, as those sorts of hints could possibly be exploited to work around the changes.
“You can expect sites with shallow or poorly written content, content that’s copied from other websites, or information that people frankly don’t find that useful, will be demoted as a result of this change,” is all the company said.
Early last week, Google released an experimental tool for its Chrome browser that allows users to block what they believe to be low-quality sites and send that information to Google. The company said at the time it will study the feedback and potentially use it as a signal in future search results.
The algorithmic change addresses 84 percent of the top several dozen most-blocked domains so far, the company said.
The Atlantic did a quick independent analysis of Google’s old and new results by performing the same search in the United States and again through a proxy server that made it appear the query was coming from India.
The latter search for “drywall dust” served up seven sites with low-quality or aggregated content in the first 10 results, senior editor Alexis Madrigal wrote.
The domestic query showed only one. The other top results from the new algorithm were mostly speciality sites and discussion forums, and included a link to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention page on the health risks of drywall dust.
“The information delivered by the new algorithm is much, much better,” Madrigal said.
Demand Media
Demand Media, which operates sites like eHow.com and Trails.com, disputes the content farm label often attached to it. In a blog post on Thursday, Executive Vice President Larry Fitzgibbon said the company applauded Google’s change, stressing that Demand Media focuses on “creating the useful and original content that meets the specific needs of today’s consumer.”
“As might be expected, a content library as diverse as ours saw some content go up and some go down,” he continued. “It’s impossible to speculate how these or any changes made by Google impact any online business in the long term - but at this point in time, we haven’t seen a material net impact.”
