Google introduced Chrome extension to tackle content farms

Generally speaking, content farms are a real headache for search engines. In this case, by “content farm” we mean not a company that produces a large number of more or less useful content “tailored” to high relevance for highly specialized queries (Demand Media, for example), but sites that are literally crammed with very weak content, often not just weak, but consisting of a meaningless set of words. Most of these sites are created solely in order to receive traffic from search engines, in order to further "drain" and monetize traffic (ie visitors).

Such sites are sometimes very high in the search results of Google and other search services, and search engines are struggling to deal with such resources. However, there are no reliable methods of fighting so far, and last year, Matt Cutts, head of Google’s search and anti-spam search quality department, admitted a temporary defeat in the fight against content farms.

The standard article on the farm was written by a “schoolboy” (to reduce the cost of the post) and contains a certain number of keywords to get to the top of search results for a specific request (well, for example, “buy a Martian”). It’s clear that no one is going to buy Martians, and the top displays content with commercial key phrases that allow you to monetize incoming traffic.

So, here we go back to Google and its extension for Chrome. The anti-spam department decided not to create another automated tool, but to seek help from users. Now a Chrome user who has installed the Personal Blocklist extension for his browser can tag dummy sites, and thereby hide them from the results of personal delivery. The extension is available in English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian (!), Spanish and Turkish.

In the future, sites that have been marked with the maximum number of users as a “content farm” will go down in Google’s search results. So far, this extension is positioned as experimental, however, apparently, such a method may turn out to be quite working.

ViaCNET