As they often do, Google rolled out a change in their search engine on 2/24/11, which targeted scraper sites and content farms. What’s the big deal?

Scraper sites grab content from other websites and usually display it as their own. Content farms are websites that produce web pages just to serve up ads. The actual content on the page is of little or no value.

Google’s Spam Chief (Matt Cutts) said that of 84% of the top 50 sites reported as spam that were affected by this change. There is so much of this scraping and content farm stuff on the internet that this Google change would affect 11.8% of internet searches. By the time you read this, perhaps you have seen a difference in your search results.

Demand Media is usually mentioned as the biggest content farm and one of the most guilty of not providing quality web pages. They immediately saw some of their content go up in ranking and some went down, as you might expect. Which is a PR speak way of saying “yes, we took a hit but surprisingly, some of our content actually ranked better. We’re watching to see how this plays out.”

Demand Media can simply look at their millions of articles and easily pick out what is penalized and what is rewarded. Demand Media will just wait and see what now ranks well and figure out what Google is looking for. And then they’ll publish thousands of articles per day that meet the new requirements.

The facts are that Google gives wiggle room for a while to some of the bigger names that others don’t always get. If your website gets links on from bad or dead websites then your site is supposed to get penalized. If that was true, JC Penny’s poor inbound links would have triggered a drop in rankings instead of promoting JC Penny to number one for many, many keywords.

The good news is it appears that some of the bigger content farms have taken a hit on traffic. Eventually what people actually want will find a way to the top. Google may or may not always be the best vehicle for that.