The Pollution of Google News

In a recent article written by Scott Rosenberg on the Open Salon website, Rosenberg discusses the use of content farms  to take advantage of Google bots through exploitation of keywords. The surprise did not come at the use of content farms, they are prevalent on the Internet, but in Google’s providing one with top ranking:

The Content Farm’s “appearance in the Google lead position surprised me.”, Rosenberg writes. “I’d always assumed that, inundated by content-farm-grown dross, Google would figure out how to keep the quality stuff at the top of its index. And this wasn’t Google’s general search index recommending [the content farm], but the more rarefied Google News — which prides itself on maintaining a fairly narrow set of sources, qualified by some level of editorial scrutiny.”

In essence, a content farm is a site that pays writers a subsistence wage to produce vast amounts of short, contrived news articles which are designed not to cater to human interest but specifically to catch the attention of Google’s bot system by exploiting words that are trending. When successful, the return is top rankings in Google’s search results.

The corruption of Google News is worrying. In a post written by Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineLand, Sullivan walks us through how content farms work. Towards the end he states:

“This is Google, where we’re supposed to have the gold standard of search quality. Instead, we get “news” sites […] jumping on the Google Trends bandwagon, outranking the actual article […] polluting the news results and along the way, earning Google some cash.”