Over the weekend I was thinking about the following question: Will Google Instant kill the content farm? The short answer is I don’t know. But I believe the impact on content farms could well be negative.
Yahoo recently acquired Associated Content for about $100 million. Demand Media is set to go public. And AOL has placed a big bet on a similar strategy with Seed and Patch. Much of this “content strategy” is about Google SEO plain and simple. Some of it is about actual content.
Not all of what’s coming about of the content farms is pure crap, but much of it is or mediocre at best. In my view the proliferation of low-quality content (as SEO strategy) was and is becoming a problem for Google.
Instant effectively reduces the SERP to a few links on all but the largest screens, pushing out everything other than direct hits and the highest ranking sites. If content-farm content has managed to rank then it will appear among these top links (as with “how-to” sites like Demand’s eHow). But if it’s not among the top five sites it may see diminished traffic.
To the extent that content farms are directed at the tail and instant expands discovery and exploration of the tail, which it could, then they might not suffer. What do others think about this issue?
September 13th, 2010 at 8:19 pm
or it could have the exact opposite effect. By more prominently pushing the popular variations of a given query, GOOG may be getting more users to mid-tail variations that content factories are fairly adept at targeting and ranking for.
September 14th, 2010 at 1:12 pm
Indeed . . . For myself I notice fewer ad clicks in the week since it launched.