Blekko and The War on Content Farms

Editor’s note

This is an 11 March 2011 snapshot of the argument around Google’s fight with content farms and Blekko’s attempt to exclude low-value results. The traffic figures, products, companies, and predictions below belong to that moment; Blekko’s later history and search quality systems have moved on. The archive remains useful as a record of how search ranking, advertising, and content-production incentives were being debated then. It is not current guidance about Google, Blekko, or any named site.

Read the post as a dated case about dependency on search traffic and advertising. Do not use its 2011 figures as a current market baseline or its named services as current product recommendations.

The original argument

All we have to say about the previous week’s search shenanigans is ‘wow’. There was likely to be major fallout from the ranking change Google had just announced for content farms and aggregation sites.

The short version:

The post reported that Google had announced a major ranking algorithm change affecting about 11% of search results. Google spokespeople said the change would mostly affect ‘content farms’ and low-quality duplicate-content sites. At the time, the post observed that the number of indexed pages for hubpages.com had dropped from around five million to about 1.2 million. Other sites, including eHow, were affected too.

The post also connected the change with Blekko, a search start-up launched the previous year. Blekko was promising results centred on sites with real value and tools for blocking content-farm sites. It had published a list of sites it was blocking and a running tally of the spam pages it had found.

Sites whose business model depended on aggregating content and earning AdSense revenue had reason to rethink that strategy in 2011.

What the change meant at the time

Unless a site owner ran a user-generated-content site or aggregated and borrowed a lot of content, the immediate expectation was that the change would mostly remove some competitors from search results. The broader hope was that ranking changes would produce more relevant results.

The post also asked what the change meant for Google’s profits. Google had helped make content farming profitable through AdSense, while also earning from ads displayed across user-generated-content and aggregation sites such as eHow, eZineArticles.com, and HubPages.com. Those commercial incentives were part of the story, but the post did not have evidence to predict how they would affect future earnings.

The lasting point is narrower than the headline: when a business depends on search traffic and third-party advertising, a ranking change can expose a structural dependency. That was the concern this 2011 post was trying to capture.