After receiving numerous complaints from content providers now under siege by content scrapers, Google update its mighty algorithm to target these type of websites. When I say content scrapers, I actually mean websites that publish content already produced by other sources. In many occasions, websites that originally create content -- fresh news or blog entries -- fall behind an army of site scrapers in the search engine ranking battle. Losing the positional tussle means loss of potential traffic they could have gotten had they been ranking more prominently.

 

And ultimately, they'll bear the potential loss of advertising revenue they could have enjoyed had they captured the same volume of traffic they deserve. Instead such traffic is siphoned by websites who continue to enjoy prominent ranking despite providing duplicate content. Such experience is definitely unfair for websites who not only invested time and resources on providing original and compelling content, but also relied on a popular theory that Google will impose penalty to duplicate content. I guess before Google could make such move, content scraper sites have gone more sophisticated in their approach, leaving the manual copy and paste strategy towards the automated syndication of content found elsewhere.

 

Enter Google's 'Farmer' algorithm update -- a change in the way it evaluates candidate pages for search engine ranking. Google has this to say on the deployment of 'Farmer' update:

 

"We’re evaluating multiple changes that should help drive spam levels even lower, including one change that primarily affects sites that copy others’ content and sites with low levels of original content. We’ll continue to explore ways to reduce spam, including new ways for users to give more explicit feedback about spammy and low-quality sites. As “pure webspam” has decreased over time, attention has shifted instead to “content farms,” which are sites with shallow or low-quality content."

 

The result of this update is more impactful than previous ones launched by the search engine and announced publicly. Affecting 11.8% of all websites in the United States, the update has already caused staff reduction on some companies involved in content development as they observe traffic reduction in recent days. The problem is that while Google acknowledges that the algorithm changes have good results, it was quick to point out that no algorithm works 100% according to plan; some sites that didn't deserve the wrath of this update -- sites that display authorized RSS feeds -- also appeared penalized. 

 

Personally, I still see a lot of these low-quality websites appearing on search results for both popular and long tail keywords characterized by pages littered with Google Adsense ads and poorly constructed navigation layout. It may take time to see the real effect of Farmer update, a name derived from content farms, a major target of this algorithm change. Similar to the past where spammers worked around Google's updates, this one could just be another layer of the proverbial cat and mouse game. Google has made its move, let's wait how spammers devise their strategies.