Today Matt Cutts who is the Principal Engineer at Google, posted on Google’s blog that they was gunning to eliminate junk sites, including what many would refer to as mini-sites and content farms from being indexed in Google.

      “Just as a reminder, webspam is junk you see in search results when websites try to cheat their way into higher positions in search results or otherwise violate search engine quality guidelines.”

      “As we’ve increased both our size and freshness in recent months, we’ve naturally indexed a lot of good content and some spam as well. ”

      “To respond to that challenge, we recently launched a redesigned document-level classifier that makes it harder for spammy on-page content to rank highly. ”

      “The new classifier is better at detecting spam on individual web pages, e.g., repeated spammy words—the sort of phrases you tend to see in junky, automated, self-promoting blog comments.”

      “And we’re evaluating multiple changes that should help drive spam levels even lower, including one change that primarily affects sites that copy others’ content and sites with low levels of original content.”

      “We’ll continue to explore ways to reduce spam, including new ways for users to give more explicit feedback about spammy and low-quality sites.”

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

      In 2010, we launched two major algorithmic changes focused on low-quality sites. Nonetheless, we hear the feedback from the web loud and clear: people are asking for even stronger action on content farms and sites that consist primarily of spammy or low-quality content. ”

      This could be very troubling for companies like Demand Media which has frequently been referred to as a content farm and those companies that seek to build out “mini sites” in hopes of getting the sites ranked in Google.

      The good news if any for such companies is Google is not the only search engine although it does have a market share in excess of 60%

Source from The Domains