I have always been a die-hard, quality-content SEO kind of person. No garbage content. No spammy press releases. This is because it didn’t make sense to me: how would search engines justify returning results that irritated and turned off their customer base? They wouldn’t it turns out – and for good reason. You give your audience garbage, they leave your search engine. Therefore, to do quality search engine optimization you need to invest in quality content.
It’s interesting that the latest major Google algorithm change (February 2011) made content farms sit back and take notice. I’m sure Google was hearing about frustrated searches getting the same low-quality content on the same sites for EVERY single topic they searched. Have you ever read any of those ehow or other content-farm articles on how to bake a cake, change your oil, walk your dog, attract hummingbirds, fix cracked tile, find a good doctor…the list goes on. No matter what you would search, one of these brainless, useless articles would come up, with a trail of equally useless articles from other content sites. I mean, what is this livestrong.com site? That content is usually pathetic. And you know the model. They pay “writers” a pittance and you get what you pay for.
Many of these content farms have had to rethink their business model. While they weren’t completely crushed by the “Farmer Update” they likely saw a really really big dent in their profits. They are putting new guidelines together regarding the quality of content. They are recognizing that people who write for free are not always actually writers.
Whenever someone asks me, “How do you get good positions?” (Note: I don’t bother with this site – it’s just for fun and venting), I tell them, We publish a lot of really well-written content that is USEFUL to the public. It answers questions. It doesn’t treat the audience like they are in 3rd grade (which is what content farms seem to think their target audience is), and we attract links naturally because people want to share it with others.
