How Matt Cutts Leveraged The Stack Overflow And Hacker News Communities In Redefining The Phrase “Content Farms”

A little over a week ago, on the Friday before last, Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s Web Spam Team, wrote a post on the Official Google Blog titled “Google search and search engine spam”. This post, and the upcoming changes it discussed, were most likely in response to a growing trend of dissatisfaction with Google’s results that have been cropping up around the blogosphere. In the post Matt talks about how Google feels that things are in fact not as bad as people are saying, and that “Google’s search quality is better than it has ever been in terms of relevance, freshness and comprehensiveness.” He does say that recently, due to increase in both “size and freshness” that of course some spam did get indexed, and also states that as the old, tired, run of the mill spam decreased in Google’s index that Google will now be shifting it’s focus on to content that just sucks:

As “pure webspam” has decreased over time, attention has shifted instead to “content farms,” which are sites with shallow or low-quality content. – Matt Cutts

Whoa. This, especially coming from Matt Cutts, is huge. For those who don’t know, “content farms” are

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Matt Cutts Criticizes Deceptive Ads, Doesn’t Realize Google Is The One Serving Them

Yesterday over on Daggle.com Danny Sullivan published a post titled, Of Misleading Acai Berry Ads & Fake Editorial Sites. In the article Danny discuses a rising trend of deceptive marketing practices involving fake news sites, the way they rip people off with products they are selling, and the fact that authority sites such as the LA Times are the ones carrying these ads, lending them some credibility in the public eye. Danny states in the post that the ads showing are being served by Zedo, and that he wishes the ad network should raise it’s standards and not allow such blatantly misleading advertising:

Personally, I’d like to see Zedo up its standards for the type of ads it will accept. This type of junk shouldn’t be allowed. – Danny Sullivan

He’s right, too, the ad networks should be policing this type of deception, by all means. Matt Cutts, Google’s head of the web spam team, agrees. He tweeted about the story, and also

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Google Censors Torrent Sites – Except For The Pirate Bay

Yesterday Search Engine Land reported about Google removing piracy-related terms from it’s Instant Search, which includes the word torrents, names of torrent sites, names of torrent clients, and other file sharing sites such as RapidShare and Megaupload. This does raise some concerns, seeing as how, as SELand’s Matt McGee mentions, torrents and file sharing sites in and of themselves are not inherently illegal. Of course, neither is porn, but Google seems to have seen fit to remove that genre from it’s Instant Search as well.

Does this mean that Google really hates torrent sites? Well, not all of them, apparently. The Pirate Bay, world’s largest bittorrent tracker,

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