As the SEO expression goes: "to the search engines, content is king." However, it appears Google is working to change that to a small degree. Google has officially announced that they are updating their algorithms to target content mills and other sources of content spam.
"In a move that internet content creators have been dreaming about for years, web search giant Google has moved to crack down on spammy and derivative content that has been largely copied from other sources on the web and which somehow manages to bubble higher in results than the original.
“At Google we are constantly tuning our algorithms to improve the relevance of our results,” the Google statement read. “Sometimes we’re simply doing a better job catching pure webspam with paid links, hidden text, scraped content and other violations of our webmaster guidelines. Other times we are tuning the algorithm to do a better job surfacing relevant, authoritative, interesting, on-topic, original content.”
“We made more than 490 improvements to search last year alone, so this is an ongoing process and a complicated science,” the spokesperson added."
- Wired Magazine
Unique Content Is King
Google is telling the SEO world it's time to move away from the spam. A few years back, the SEO industry focused on somewhat underhanded tactics (loading meta tags, ghosting text, gateway pages, etc.) to achieve their rankings. As Google updated their algorithms, search engines became friendlier to the average user. Now, Google is seeing a similar trend in Pagerank 'doping' with paid links and other forms of link buying. To add to the mess, the quality of the content being created by many SEO firms is now robot generated and lacking any sense of intelligence whatsoever. We've all seen it on our favorite blogs; "Good post. We wish you amazing libido product. Click Here for details."
Real People, Quality Content
Search engine users are not looking for the person who builds the most content, they're looking for an answer to the query they entered. While this may sound obvious, not all search engine optimization companies focus on both rankings and user experience.