What Is A Content Farm?

Date First Published: 26th October 2022

Topic: Web Design & Development

Subtopic: SEO

Article Type: Computer Terms & Definitions

Difficulty Level: 5/10

Learn more about what a content farm is in this article.

A content farm, also known as a content mill, or a content factory, is a website that publishes large amounts of low-quality and often duplicate, rewritten, auto-generated, spun, or scraped content that has little to no value for users. Content farms put little to no effort into the actual content and the user experience. Instead, they are solely created to maximise page views and revenue generated from ads and minimise the time needed to create the content. Most content farms are also MFA sites.

How Are Content Farms Created?

Content farms sometimes pay large numbers of writers to generate large amounts of textual web content. They will often get paid a very low rate in order for the website owner to make as much profit as possible from the ads. A very low pay and strict deadlines can lead to writers with little to no knowledge or experience of the topic writing posts without properly checking the facts, resulting in the spreading of false or misleading information. Some content farms may focus on a specific topic, but most publish articles on a bit of everything.

Content farms have ethical concerns as a website rewriting articles and posting them as their own without permission is a form of plagiarism. Most people also believe that content farms underpay their writers. Most of the time, the rate is much lower than a writer would normally receive when working for mainstream online publications. However, some content farm writers may produce a large number of articles per day and earn enough for a living income.

Signs Of A Content Farm

The following signs indicate that a website is a content farm:

• Lots of low-quality or short articles posted on a regular basis.
• Lots of false or misleading information or fake news.
• Lots of keyword stuffing.
• Lots of duplicate, auto-generated, rewritten, scraped, or spun content.
• Little to no unique content.
• Too many ads on the website that cannot be differentiated from the main content.
• Continuous popup ads that take up the whole page and reappear after closing them.

Do Content Farms Still Rank High In The Search Results?

Content farms used to rank high for large numbers of keywords, leading to lots of clutter and almost identical articles in the SERP and causing problems for multiple website owners. In one of Google's promotional videos for search published in summer 2010, most of the available links were reported to be produced at content farms.

However, in February 2011, Google announced that they had made changes to their algorithm to increase the number of high-quality search results, causing the rankings of content farms to greatly drop and lose most of their organic website traffic. This was reported to be a reaction to content farms and an attempt to reduce their effectiveness in manipulating the search results. As of now, content farms are viewed as a form of spam by search engines because they intentionally use large amounts of content that violate their webmaster guidelines.

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