Google declares war on content farms

Ok so this is actually a week or so old (as of this news posting) but Google has made a change to its search results to prevent the artificial ranking of "content farms" when you do a search.

So why is this so great?  Well it once again puts content before quantity and pushes site owners to create original content for their sites instead of copying large chunks of content from competing websites and calling it their own.

Some snips

With this move, Google is targeting content farms -- a common name for low quality sites whose main goal is to attract search traffic by piling up (mostly) useless content, usually by either producing large amounts of low-quality text or by copying it from websites with original content.

And the reasons behind this change?

The popularity of Google's search engine is still second to none, but Google has been plagued by black hat SEO practices and content farms for a while now, with the complaints from users slowly mounting over time. 

In the hardware world I have seen several sites practice this and while their tactics are questionable there really isn't much you can do to stop them short of ignoring the problem and hoping for the best.  Well it would seem Google has finally figured out a way to curb the problem.  Let's just hope it works.

Related Web URL: http://www.cnn.com/2011/TECH/web/02/25/google.cont...