Photo Credit: Allen Hsu

Content is King – that is the mantra online and for good reason. Content keeps your traffic up, the interest going and keeps people looking at your ads. But today we are comparing the ‘content farms’ of the online world to the average Joe blogger.

Outsourcing is a great way to give your readers a constant flow of content. But for this example, talking about content farming, let’s pit the average Joe professional blogger to the corporate ‘The Man’ monster company in it for the numbers. We are looking at traffic, we are looking at quality and we are looking at content. Normally, you can expect your quality of content to reflect your traffic and vice versa. This is a very simple reward system.

In the online world, should you write quality content you are rewarded with traffic to your site. To explain simply without getting into the nuts and bolts of SEO, Google decides you are more relevant by throwing you in the search  and seeing how many people click on your site from there. No one nominates you besides your readers. You get ‘Dug’ and ‘Tweeted’ about and thus you start your own viral marketing for having quality on your site.

A quick overview of what a Content Farm is: a ‘catch all’ website that covers every topic possible, with low quality to medium quality writing and low amounts of actual information written to turn a quick post and a quick profit.

With some websites out there, called ‘Content Farms’, you will see a breakdown of this ‘reward’ system. The breakdown happens when places like EZine.com produce mass amounts of low quality product and floods the search engines. It makes it hard for quality to surface because the ‘surfer’ has to wade through pages of search engine results of, well, crap.

What happens? The person that ‘queried’ (searches a term) finds crap but instead of looking on page 20 of the search results, gives up and tries a different query. This is a serious problem. And there is good a good rumor on the horizon. I have heard: Though I can’t remember where: That Google, who prides itself on its secret algorithms, is taking a serious look at battling the flood of low quality articles coming from content farms.

(I delayed publishing this post for almost a week trying to figure out where I heard this rumor online and I can’t validate it. Please take it at face value. I have no actual proof that Google is working on this algorithm other than ‘I think they are, I heard they are…I think’ and I’m sorry for that.)

This presents a problem but I don’t know how serious. If you are running a medium or small sized content farm, chances are that you outsource a large portion of your post writing. If you are a small enough company/operation, then you probably make sure to pay for quality. (I hope.) And if that is the case you don’t have a lot to worry about. If, however, you are posting zero-information-high-external-link content, you may want to watch out for this rumor I’ve been hearing.

Does this mean abandon your little content farm immediately? I couldn’t, in good conscious, tell you to do that if it is making you money. It’s up to you and even I wouldn’t abandon something turning a profit until the last minute. You may as well just ride out the content farming wave as long as you can if you have a substantial amount invested and are seeing good returns.

Do I think this is a good time for the average Joe to get into content farming or to start outsourcing articles and posts to compete with the big boys? No. I don’t. Simply, You may be building slowly, but you have a few advantages over the ‘big boys’ that will have you rising to the top.

• You have a personality and it is embedded in your posts (We call this Branding)
• Your posts, while slow to write and accumulate, are ( I assume) of the highest quality because you care about pride and respect, etc.
• You are building a person-to-person loyalty slowly out of your readers. I’m sorry but have you ever heard someone say, ‘I can’t wait until So-and-So who writes for eHow.com puts another interesting link ridden article out about randomness!’ It just doesn’t happen.

So if you are thinking about getting into content farming, STOP! Stop thinking that outsourcing articles for fifty cents a pop will save your blog and increase your readership. If anything, you are going to drive away the fan base you have because the quality will plummet.  If you are going to outsource, be sure to paying for the quality, well constructed articles that will have your site/blog rising to the top of the internet ‘slush piles’ of these content farms. That’s right, I’m not knocking outsourcing. I’m saying :

• Take your time in finding writers that match your style and interests
• Don’t Encourage Sweatshops in India and around the world by paying .50 per post
• Keep your quality at the same level or higher
• Don’t rely on outsourcing – Your readers will begin to tell or worse: will forget your ‘writing style’ in the flood of ghost writers posing as you.

Will Google attempt and/or succeed at weeding out and penalizing content farms? Only time will tell but with the research and funding that Google throws at its main money maker, Search Engine Results and the adjacent ads, I am sure they will fix this monkey-wrench-in-the-machine.

After all, the real threat to Google are Subscription Services offering high quality content in return for filtering out the slush piles. They are coming…content by subscription because…people are tired of spam, landing websites that are 100% ads and articles dancing around an idea but not offering any information or solutions.

Our Lesson? Quality is going to be winning out over Quantity very soon. Stop counting your pages and start counting your loyal traffic numbers because the numbers will lay in loyalty and that will get you skyrocketed to that exlusive Top 10 spot in Google Results soon enough.

Of course, the majority of this post was opinion. I heard a rumor, can’t remember where I heard it but want to know what people think. Do you think Google is working on an algorithm to combat content farms that are clogging up the search results? Do you think it helps or hurts Google that so many content farms are pumping out as much as 4,000 articles/posts a day? Will this affect you in any way? Are subscription services for quality content the wave of the future?

Thanks for reading and as always, please comment, subscribe or just send me an email to tell me what you think!