Content farm

A content farm is a website with a huge number of pages made only to be found in Google. The pages are usually low quality and not written for the people reading them. Content farms stuff their pages with keywords in the hope of ranking for valuable search terms.

What does a content farm look like?

A well-known example of a large content farm was About.com. Far more common were smaller content farms in the form of affiliate websites. These sites published a large number of articles on one subject, often of poor quality, and added affiliate links to them. An affiliate link is a link to a web shop that earns the site owner a commission on every product sold through that link.

Google's fight against content farms

Since the early 2010s Google has actively gone after content farms. The Panda algorithm was built mainly to keep low-quality pages out of the search results. Google has become so good at this that content farms are hardly found anymore, and most of them have disappeared.

What you can learn from content farms

Practically all content farms have vanished from the search results. Content farms never put their visitors first, and that is exactly why Google took them on. Google always wants the best page in the top spot.
So if you want to rank well in Google, deliver quality and write for your visitors. Go ahead and optimize your site for search engines as well. That still matters, but what search engines want and what users want keeps getting closer.