Matt Cutts (head of Google spam team) most recent blog post mentions that Google is actively striking against content farms and other sites that have copied or duplicate content.
Before discussing further details on the Google Algorithm changes, here is some background info on content farms and link farms.
Content farm: A collection of sites that contain scrapped content. Scrapped content can be from article sites, Yahoo! Answer site and other blog sites. Scrapped content is often generated by bots like WP Robot and other autoblog plugins.
Content farms are used to earn money from Adsense and be a link sales hub. Unethical marketers use shady techniques to rank a content farm website higher in search engine results and can then benefit from the search volume to earn a decent amount money on Adsense. In addition, the website can be used to sell links once that website has got some PR.
Link farm: Different to a content farm. Link farms are a collection of social bookmarking sites that you can post your link often and then get higher rankings for your main site.
What this Means for You
Google has declared a “war” against content farms. This means that:
- It will be better for users, as long as Google knows how to differentiate between original content and copied content.
Here’s an interesting scenario to consider. Your site is new and therefore doesn’t get indexed too often by Google. You publish a post on your website and of course, a scrapping script can get it right away. In this case, the scrapping website that has the copy of original content will be indexed by Google first and my question is, how can Google know which one is the original? - But what happens to low PR article sites?
Some low PR article sites contain a lot of copied content because marketers often use automatic scripts to spin and submit articles automatically. What happen to them? What does Google think about this? - Do users think this is going to help them?
When I search online, I prefer to be presented with search results from the original source. People often scrape my content from the RSS feed, but my articles always appear higher in the search engine results. Make sure you put some internal links in your posts so at least you will have backlinks to your site.
What you Need to do
Simply create original, unique content. Forget about using autoblog plugins and article spinners. Just be yourself and write decent content. Other people that scrap your content will be the ones that will be punished by Google for trying to game the system.
By Alex@Jocuri
Google’s approach to stop spam and “make the internet a better place” is laudable but I am pretty sure people will find a workaround this algo.
On paper this all sounds nice and I would really like if this new spammer detection will function as they said it should.
About getting your content view as the original, not this is a real problem. Because usually content scrappers have the googlebot at their door non-stop as they publish content every few hours/minutes and I think this might be the problem. I think they could have some algorithm that detects or determines the date by analyzing the post (of course this can be counterfeited too).
I really don’t know what to say the measures sounds good but now it really matter how it’s applied.
One way to avoid this is would be to avoid being scrapped and to only use an excerpt on your rss feed or even protect your feed in some way.
By steve
I think this is great news. About time Google paid back the real article writers.. the likes of wp robot take all the hard work bloggers put in, and hand it out for free. Good on Google for acting against content scrapers!
By Matt
I think that anything that means that content scrapers get penalized for what they do, or at least don’t keep benefiting from their dodgy tactics, is ultimately a good thing. I’ve had my content scraped and although it’s not the end of the world it’s really annoying.
It does seem that with policy changes like this by Google you will be rewarded if you just keep working on creating good unique content on your blog or website.
By Gabriele Maidecchi
Well what can I say, as producer of original content every move by Google which favors it is very welcome. I can’t wait to see how this is going to affect result pages.
By Michael Aulia @CravingTech.com
I’ve read about this. That’s good, bring them all down! I had a spammy site copying my articles (and others) so I’m happy that Google makes this move
By Amr Boghdady
I’m glad Google is targeting them now!
)
Those suckers are ranking higher than me in many of my main keywords without even writing a single post! (yea, I’m pretty envious
By Maria Pavel
Excellent article, neutral news, I can’t say that it is good or bad news. I have a website very powerful in my niche (and my website is very plagiated by other ‘competitors’) so my website is ranking very high for my content, but my content is copied in various places by my competitors that copied a lot of texts from me (including the motto). So, I rank high for my content, and the more people copy from me, the higher I rank and the lower they rank, it was an absolutly great – very good Google algorithm, we also got to keep in mind that Google is the biggest company in the World and they still have a lot of money and employees to keep. It is also very important to ‘think outside the box’ in order to getting some great results, people don’t want sites that look like other sites (originally) but you know .. You will see it will get reasier.
Thank very much for sharing this great article with us!
Best wishes,
Maria
By Kirk Maxi
If you catch your competitors copying your content, you can always request Google to remove their sites out from their index or call their web hosting company to remove the website. Since the content on the net is well protected by the DCMA, you should take straight actions to prevent risks for your business.
By Udegbunam Chukwudi
I sure do think that it’s about time they deal with the content scrapers and get them off the first few pages of the SERP ’cause they can be so frustrating when one is searching earnestly for authentic info.
The us of date stamps have been suggested in the past but some blogs get indexed a lot faster than others and in a scenario where the spammer gets indexed before the legit author, the legit author gets penalized
By Kevin
I have sites with 100% original content, which have been impacted, so to say that this algorithm update targets scraper sites only is inaccurate. Once again this update seems to play into domain authority and is giving preference to big brands over lesser known domain – even if their content is original and detailed.
By Website developers
Google’s approach to stop spamming, and provide quality result to the user..it’s good thing that Google is going to change is algorithm
Website designers india
By Lakshmi Muralikrishnan
I thought this is one of the important news. Thanks for giving great information.
By www.bluedotdumpsters.com
Well the algorithm will be robot based so I am sure it will take out some sites with good content on.
Matt
By Rakesh Kumar
Definitely Google has declared a war against Copy cats. Well this is good news for a hardworking freelancer. Thanks for the updates.
By Richard
I actually think the concept behind this idea is a good one. Content farming just results in a lot of noise around the internet and leaves users with a bad experience overall. If they are able to discourage content farming, then the bloggers that write original content will benefit overall and their audience will benefit.
The problem is that every time google changes their formula, people will find some other way to game the system. This is just a constant battle by google to stay ahead of the spammers.
By Aloys Jacobs
Original content rules! Original content will never go out of fashion, because this is the lifeblood of Google, right? Granted, it is a lot more work to make and promote unique content, but in the end it’s what gives a website true value. If you have a unique content site with established traffic, you’ll be able to sell it like candy.
By Patel Urvisha
I hope Google finally will take down the spam sites. Personal i fight with some “news” sites that copy my blogs posts. This kind of sites are well indexed in Google and take advantage from my work. I wish that Matt Cutt and his team will stop more spam sites.
By Aliza Shehpati
Thank goodness, there is nothing worse than having your original article ripped off!
By Ali Mujtaba@Tinnitus
I hope Google find the right algorithm to differentiate original and scraped blogpost. I think google should keep the algorithm secret so people will be hard to game the algorithm.
for me original content is not enough, it should helpful
“Original content is GOOD, helpful content is GREAT”
By marciana
Google has a formidable array of tools at its disposal to combat duplicate content. This mainly rests on detection of ngrams – small groups of commonly encountered words. Some ngrams are sampled at random from content, and this is used to generate a hash. The hashes for all documents are stored in a fast access database, which gives google the godlike power of determining document duplicity in seconds or less.