Blekko and The War on Content Farms

 All we have to say about last week’s search shenanigans is “wow.” No doubt there will be major fallout from the recent bomb Google dropped on content farms and aggregation sites. In case you have no idea what we’re talking about allow us to catch you up to speed.

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The short of it:

Last week Google announced a major ranking algorithm change that they said effects about 11 percent of search results. Spokespeople from Google said the change would mostly effect “content farms” and low-quality “duplicate content sites.” Since that algorithm change we saw the number of indexed pages for hubpages.com drop from around 5 million to currently about 1.2 million. Other sites like ehow.com were effected in a big way too.

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All this slashing could have something to due to with a little search engine startup called Blekko. They launched last year sometime with a shotgun in one hand and noose in the other promising to serve search results that catered to sites with real value and to block content farm sites from even appearing in results all together. They even published a list of sites they were purposely blocking and keep an up-to-date tally of all the “spam” web pages they find (currently at over 700 million).

Sites whose sole business model is content aggregation and adsense revenue should probably be rethinking their strategy in a big way.

So is this change bad? What does it mean for the rest of us?

Well unless you are a user-generated content site owner or aggregate / “borrow” a lot of content the worst that can happen is you may lose a few search result competitors who fit the bill. And who doesn’t want that? Also, shaking things up like this means better, more relevant search results.

The big question we have is… what’s going to happen to Google’s profits now? They are the ones who made content farming profitable in the first place with adsense, and they themselves have made billions of dollars serving ads displayed across user generated content sites and aggregators like eHow, eZineArticles.com and HubPages.com. Sites like those have traditionally been Google’s largest outside ad network partners.

We’re not recommending you sell all your Google shares before next quarter’s reports hit, but it will be interesting to see what happens and if better search results will prevail over stake holder screams for profit.