Google has announced they’re going to more aggressively take on content farmers:

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.

It’s good to be reminded that content farming is a reaction to search engines getting better at filtering out pure spam.

Lauren Weinstein considers the likelihood of success of Google’s new SearchWiki feature. Here’s the official announcement from the Google blog. The basic idea is that users will be able to provide feedback on search results, ranking them up or down in the list and entering comments on them.

It’ll be interesting to see whether spam and other forms of abuse render this feature useless. I can see the black hat SEOs burning the midnight oil this weekend to figure out how to exploit this feature.