Google attacks content farms by altering search algorithm, early results are promising

Last week, to make inroads against the deluge of page-scraping content farms, Google carried out some changes to the way it ranks search results.

The slow-but-sure subsuming of search results by content farms begun last year, but only really came to a head in January with a post by Stack Overflow co-founder Jeff Atwood. An outcry from the community followed, and culminated in a post by Matt Cutts on the Official Google Blog.

Google still seems to be downplaying the problem, saying that most Search users simply weren't affected by the content farms. Cutts says that the recent changes will only alter "less than half a percent of search results."

The net result, though, is that you should find the original source of content when searching Google -- and judging by our own traffic graphs here at Download Squad (there are a lot of content farms that replicate our posts), it does seem to have made a difference.

Tags: algorithm, content farms, ContentFarms, farms, google, google search, GoogleSearch, original content, OriginalContent, scrapers, search, site scraping, SiteScraping, web