Is Triond a Content Farm?

It is important if a website is labeled as a content farm. And when people on the Internet talks about content farm, they would usually pick one of the biggest content farm in cyberspace, Demand Media which has now gone public and is now worth just over 1 billion US Dollar.

Demand Media owns eHow and other websites with user generated content. So you might have guessed what a content farm is.

A content farm is simply a website that produces massive amount of content on a daily basis. Content farm owners may or may not produce the content themselves but may pay minimal amount of compensation to the content producers by giving them upfront payment (as in the case of Helium and Associated Content), page views earnings (as in the case of Triond, Helium, Associated Content, ExpertsColumn and Wikinut) or revenue sharing usually via Google Adsense (as in the case of Triond, Infobarrel, Bukisa and Hubpages).

It is agreed by many in the online world that content farms don’t produce quality content. The content is usually shallow with no in-depth research.

Because these content farms invite membership globally, they have a variety of writers. Some good and some not so good. Therefore, it’s unfair to say that all content farms produce low quality content. Some of these content farms do have articles that are very high quality with in-depth research.

Anyway, who is to say what quality an Internet searcher looks for? Some Internet searchers want immediate information listed in bulleted form and others want in-depth analysis. So perhaps these content farms do cater for a type of readers.

I think it is when these content farms are seen to dominate Google search engine, that is when some webmasters start to complain because their “quality content” doesn’t get any readership. And whose fault is that anyway?

It is easy to point their fingers at content farms. Blekko, another search engine, has in fact banned content farms like eHow from their index but their search results don’t produce anything better.

Demand Media Co-Founder, chairman and CEO Richard Rosenblatt stated that eHow provides content for the Internet and fills the empty gap where content is missing. As such eHow is seen as providing a valuable service to fill up Google index.

By the above definition, Triond is a content farm which makes it very vulnerable to Google latest algorithm change. I think some Trionders may have experienced the reduction in page views to their articles.

So how can Trionders maintain their page views? Google didn’t straight out announce that they are targeting content farm. They are targeting any websites, not just content farms, that have low quality content. And how exactly are they able to do that?

One thing is for sure, Google is filtering out regurgitated or rehashed content and duplicated content. Only the original content will be favored in the search ranking. Now you will see that Huffington Post which is notoriously well-known for its regurgitated content not ranked before other news websites that reported the news first.

As for deciding the quality of content, I think Google will use the length of the article as an indication if the content has discussed the topic in depth. This is the reason why EzineArticles (EA) has decided to demand longer articles from their authors. Instead of the usual minimum of 250 words, EA authors are required to produce articles longer than 400 words and they’re planning on increasing the length in future.

This is what I think all online writers should do to rank well in Google :

- Write original content.
- Do not rehash content from other websites.
- Individualize your content by giving your own analysis.
- Write longer articles preferably longer than 400 words.
- Stay away from over-saturated niches.

It is hoped that the changes made by Google only affect a minority of online writers as Google had pointed out that the change only affect 11.8% of all queries. I hope it hadn’t affected you.