Escaping the Content Farm
What's a Content Farm?
The mental picture is to be a field, covered in cow flop with a few sprouts sticking up. Every two feet is another billboard advertising products you can live happily without and services you don't need or want.
The reason people wind up in this field is because they went off on their own excursion, without consideration.
Getting it
Years ago there was a feature on Hubpages called; 'hubhopping' . One would go from article to article.
About ten years ago the feature existed and I tried it and found the vast majority; 98 - 99% were unredeemable SPAM.
Many articles were crap writing , others were selling products, services, trying to rope people into various organizations.
What made a lot of the articles invidious iwas the use of Search Engine Optimization 'key words'
When people search for information. They put the terms in the little search box on their browser or go directly to whatever search engine they use.
Content Farms which hosted crap articles would repeat the SEO many times, which would attract the search engine. The searcher would be brought to the field of Cow Flop; The Content Farm.
An Actual Example
Over a decade ago, persons would do a search for the top trending term. They would then pop the term into their pre-written article.
On Monday, 'Exercise' was a top trender.
The crap writer would use the 'find and replace' to put the term 'Exercise' into the article.
Hence:
"Everyone is talking about exercise. All over the world people are interested in exercise. I'm sure you are interested in exercise. Some people are afraid of exercise. But exercise is nothing to be afraid of."
The article continues for 1000 words, saying absolutely nothing at all. But! Using the trending term so many times that the search engine assumes the article covers the topic.
The next day, the trending term is 'vegetarianism' and the find and replace of exercise by vegetarianism is done, the article posted, the search engines put the item on the front page.
Writing sites that allowed this kind of trickery were labelled 'Content Farms' and were evicted from Google.
This means that if you wrote a real article on the Content Farm which was spot on the subject it would NOT APPEAR in a GOOGLE SEARCH.
Replaced by an Application
There is no replacement for a Human Editor.
Various sites have tried all sorts of applications; whether they are to check for 'plagiarism' or 'spell/grammar' . But an application is not an A.I. which can read the article and discern that it is cow flop labeled as chocolate.
Only a human can appreciate that the item published is Cow Flop. Only a human can discern that some guy is too cheap to pay for an ad so publishes it on a writing site as an article.
Adsense pays money to post its advertisements.
Let's all laugh at stupid Google, which owns Adsense paying for Ads and views of Ads which are decorating an Ad that was published for Free!
How long did writing sites think they could rip off Google Adsense?
The Solution
To have a quality site requires human editors. These persons must not hold bias or use their power for evil.
They must ensure that there's a lot of great stuff on the site and just a few pieces of Spam.
No writing site did this. They let A.I. do the 'proofreading' . Google labeled these sites, Content Farms.
Traffic dropped, and most of the sites went down. Those few that stagger on don't pay.
Excellent writers were left in the cold, going to blogs or other sites, their work disappearing into the void.
If writing sites had implemented a policy in which the top writer would be published, spammers dismissed, and only 'ify' writers get the eye, the sites would have remained, popular and paying.
Over time, every article on would be reviewed a portion removed from the main site to a side area under a different name. This would regain the interest of Google and other search engines.
