On 24th February 2011, Google rolled out major algorithm changes which clamped down on so-called ‘content farms’, and websites with little to no genuine, useful content, otherwise known as spam websites. Which would be amazing!…
…until it identified itself as spam. In particular, Google Places. Google Places was actually dropped from search results automatically for several hours.
In order to understand exactly how this happened, we have to look at what a ‘content farm’ or a ‘spam website’ actually is…
So what exactly are ‘Spam Websites’ and ‘Content Farms’?
Spam Websites are identified when Google crawls a website’s content and detects the presence of very poorly written content, keyword stuffing or just plain nonsense crammed into a page. Content Farms are identified by cross referencing sections of the website’s content with other websites in an attempt to detect duplicate content. Some people make it hard for Google to detect this, by automatically ‘scraping’ (copying) content from other related websites. These are often set up to generate relevant page content for link building and other SEO reasons.
Basically, Google Places copies most of it’s content from directly from company websites, review websites and directories… So the algorithm recognised this, immediately identified it as duplicate content and binned it from results! Oh, the irony.
Google has always insisted that they don’t use humans to identify spam content and rely entirely on mathematical algorithms and conditional logic to calculate if a website is spam or not. Which would be fantastic!…
…except that computers still lack common sense (at the moment). No matter how complicated the programming is, we still cannot program common sense to the level of an average human being. So maybe this is a good lesson to us all, that computers are not ready to take over from human beings… yet.
Written by Gavin Potts
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