Prior to today’s lecture, I was vaguely aware of SEO and how websites analytics work. I have a software development background, so I have spent time developing sites, although SEO is not within my domain. The lecture did give me insight onto how to improve a site’s SEO and how analytics works, but there’s something else I’d rather talk about.
Content Farms
By content farms, I mean those awful sites that have an article for everything under the sun and are pushed by the SEO algorithm to the top of the search results, but don’t actually offer any meaningful content.
I find that this is more relevant when it comes to gaming. I absolutely abhor gaming blogs with my every being. If I were to search up how to find a certain item in a game, chances are the top of the search results will be littered with articles from these gaming blogs. Something that could be easily described in a single sentence suddenly becomes an entire article.
Is that because the article would prove to be useful to the reader? Or instead, is it so they can bolster their SEO by including as many keywords as possible? All of that just to increase views and ad revenue, at the cost of wasting readers’ time and polluting search results.
Sometimes when I search for things on Google, I have to add “reddit” to the end of my search query just to ensure I find actual answers, instead of mass produced articles made to farm clicks.
It is definitely a good thing that SEO pushes helpful and relevant sites to the top of the search results. But not every relevant result is a helpful one. As for what can be done to improve this issue, I don’t have a single clue. Maybe the rise of AI can help SEO algorithms filter out the junk. Or maybe it will filter everything out except for the junk.
I swear Google search was a lot more helpful back in the day. Maybe I’m just tripping on my own nostalgia though.
Leave a Reply