A content farm is a company that purposefully generates large amounts of low-quality text content using the services of hired authors. This is done to raise the site’s ranking in search engine algorithms (SEO). Such sites earn by attracting a large number of users to Internet pages with advertising content.
Often, articles on such sites contain modified excerpts from several other media sources, which puts this kind of business in opposition to traditional journalism. When writing material, the emphasis is on raising the ranking in search engines and not on creating a quality product. Back in 2009, the CEO of Demand Media announced that their site would publish one million articles a month, four times more than an English-language Wikipedia in a year.
However, this business model is highly profitable. Some content farms are valued at tens of millions of dollars
Recently, search engines are starting to fight these kinds of sites. Already in 2011, Google announced that it would suppress attempts by creators of content farms to manipulate the ranking of search results.
