2011 may turn out to be the year the search engines finally conquer the "quality" problem... at least I hope so.  There's been much recent buzz about Google's announcement that they are taking steps to take on the "content farms".  This bodes not well at all for companies such as Demand Media, which just went public, and which produces reams of shallow, low-quality web content every day, cheaply and carelessly funneling search visitors towards one marketing message or another.

As a professional SEO person, who admittedly helps businesses drive visitors into sales funnels as much as possible, I applaud Google's announcement, because I am getting increasingly disappointed every time I run a search in Google.  In the past few years, as the web has exploded into trillions of pages of content, our expectations for quality search have only grown.  While we used to be grateful just to have access to search tools, we're now increasingly frustrated to find search results teeming with spam sites, junk content, and articles only minimally useful in addressing the query, and which don't constitute anything close to good writing.

While it's true that one man's Spam is another man's Tasty-and-Satisfying Luncheon Meat, it seems to me that the quality standard for web content just keeps getting lower, leaving more folks feeling particularly unsatisfied.

If I do a search on "how to remove ice dams from my house", for example, I may get, on the first page of results, one of these "content farm" articles.  It will probably be called "How to Remove Ice Dams From Your House", and it will have that exact phrase in the title tag, URL, page description, and headline.  It will, technically, cover the topic, but it will be too short, and badly written, but hey... surprise, surprise, the page will contain all kinds of links and ads for ice-melting products.  We’ve all seen these sites, and know the empty feeling we get from the endless clicking through pages of disingenuous mediocrity, looking for the "real" answer to the question.

These results do not serve the modern, intelligent searcher.... if I wanted to buy ice-melting products, I would have searched for "ice-melting products". Duh!

This type of marketing is common, and while certainly not immoral, it's not helping the average Google user, especially one who has ice blocking up his gutters, and water dripping down into his kitchen, and is truly looking for a DIY solution that that can help him remove ice without involving mail order (yes at this point I'm ranting a bit, but make note that I am ranting with correct grammar and spelling, and that this post shows some degree of research, visual spacing, and interesting word selection... I mean, hey, I used the word "disingenuous" back there... gimmie some credit).

Anyway, the best result for my query might be on Bob Vila's site, or maybe it's on a DIY Home Solutions site maintained by professional roofing types who really know what they're talking about.  Problem is, many of these guys don't know SEO, don't know how to put a keyword in the title tag, and as a result, their content is probably sitting on Page 2 (or 10) of my search results, pushed down by the crafty content farmers who don't know jack about ice dams, but have figured out how to sell a cheaply-produced page to ice-melt companies for a small profit.

The Google announcement offers some hope that Matt Cutts and his team are closer to cracking "quality" angle of search, which to date has been the most elusive element in the science of finding stuff.  Here's a few things they are doing, according to Cutts' post:

• Two major algorithm changes focused on kicking down "low-quality" sites
•  Launching a redesigned document-level classifier to make it more challenging for spammy on-page content to rank well
• Improved their ability to detect hacked sites
• Looking into changes to that affect "scraping" sites, or sites that take others' content with or without attribution and reproduce it with little else of their own
• New extension for Chrome to allow quick reporting of spam by Chrome users

Google has always been the best at figuring out how to give users the most useful results, but they still approach it in a mechanical fashion.  The fact that their ranking algorithm is open to ANY sort of reverse engineering is the only reason there is an SEO industry at all, or at least one that is as large as we know it to be.

The fact that Google hasn't yet perfected the task of returning the best quality content (vs the most optimized, linked-to, etc) to searchers is why there is a market for content farms to begin with, and why the SEO industry is continually plagued by an undercurrent of cheap and shady tacticians, looking to game the system in the short term.

If we ever reach a point where the first result of a Google search is actually the best-produced, best researched, most authoritative piece of content, then Google will have truly succeeded.  Only then will the practice of SEO be centered around writing, research, value, and usefulness, not to mention correct spelling, and other things I truly love to see in my web content.

I hope Google, Bing, and the rest of the engines figure this out, because like many web users, I'm getting really sick of Spam.  I've got no use for the stuff, unless it can be used to melt ice from my roof (hmmm...will that work?).

ok

JM