Does Google Consider Article Sites Content Farms?

The crackdown is already negatively affecting entire directories and Web 2.0 sites.

Best guess at this point is that you have unique content. Until recently they've been ok if the same article appears on multiple websites because they have different templates and every site usually has extra things integrated into it's page to make it different. I'm suspecting that Google is now going to ignore page code when deciding whether to penalize a site for duplicate/quality content issues.

Everybody that does anything with low quality content will be affected. Google has the power to affect almost every website in some way or another.

Is that what all the ezine jumps were about?

According to an AP article on Yahoo Finance today, Google is cracking down again - and yes, on places like eHow.com from Demand Media. As long as writers keep submitting garbage to article directories, I imagine it might take effect.

This won't last long, I remember when squidoo got slapped down and it came back stronger than ever. Google is just a bot on juice, they may talk a lot about user experience and quality but untill they replace the bot with humans keywords still drive the bot.

Google have more humans checking the contents than you would imagine.

I hope it does. I would rather my own site be able to rank for those spots. Think about how many visits you create for EZA with YOUR content.

If this isn't a prompt to reconsider your plans to use spinning and other various forms of crap content to build the foundation of your business, I don't know what is.

Makes me more confident than ever to have decided to write long quality articles. I was very close to starting a spinning/multi-blogging/back linking approach.

SO glad I switched strategies. Will be interesting to see how this shakes out as I build my site up.

The backbone of Googles business model depends on providing a quality user experience so that users keep coming back and using Google as their primary search engine. In order to do that they have to continually strive at providing the highest quality and most relevant search results for every user search query.

The reality of content farms, auto blogs and most affiliates sites is that they are filled with content that is utter garbage. What is happening now with ezine articles, eHow and other spammy sites is going to continue to happen as long as Google is in business.

Those sites will have to raise their quality standard or they will lose authority and rankings in Google. It's simply a matter of time.

All you need to do is put your self in Googles position...

What would you do if you where Google and sites like Ezine articles where dominating crucial search positions that could be held by sites that have higher quality and more relevant content...

We as marketers have a choice...

We can fight Google and exploit holes and loopholes in their algorithm and try to "game" them over time. Which honestly works and is a valid way of getting traffic. But if we choose this philosophy we have to understand that we will forever be trying to manipulate Google and find ways to out smart their algorithm. (which will always be doable to some degree as long as a bot is involved)

Or...

We can work with Google and build quality websites and use the Internet in the manner that Google envisions...

For us, that means legitimately participating in the conversation within our market and creating websites that have quality content that users value and perhaps also providing a continual stream of fresh content.

What Google really wants is for top ranking websites to be ran by people who are passionate about their subject matter and who actually give a damn. It's really common sense when you break it down...

The choice is ours...

The other option we have is to focus on other traffic sources. (paid,etc)

With Google make algorithmic 'improvement' every now and then, it's time to ditch SEO and switch to other traffic sources such as media buys. It become quite tedious to make adjustment whenever Google want to encourage healthy web ecosystem so as to improve the users' experiences.

yeah google enough smart to check article!

It's not that Google doesn't want to tell you what good content is, the problem is they wouldn't know good content If it was in front of them.

Have you ever seen a Google product that didn't scrape some type of content (I doubt it very much).

Google wouldn't exist without scraping content, that doesn't belong to them.

Yep I think this levels out the playing field somewhat. People who are plugging away writing good, user-friendly content are going to (hopefully) perform better than the sites who spin articles likes there's no tomorrow.

Backlinks from unique pieces of content that you submit to ezine, hubpages,
or squidoo are multiple times more powerful than submitting the same article
to 50+ sites. A backlink is a backlink, but it´s not always about the quantity,
rather about quality my friend.

very good question. those who scrape content and reproduce content in so many words that sounds similar to the originally written article will see a drop in ad revenue, as well as search engine rankings