The Internet is magical, it is all-encompassing, there is nothing strange, every netizen can get the information they want.
But also because of the explosion of information, if you don't use a little means, it is difficult to catch a good treasure from it in a short time.
Netizens have the need to quickly retrieve information, and Internet manufacturers have begun to launch a variety of online search engines.
There are many types of search engines, mainly divided into full-text search engines, vertical search engines and metasearch engines.
Among them, full-text search engines like Baidu are the most popular, which extract various website information from all over the Internet and create a database.
When we search, Baidu will find records in the database that match the user's query conditions, and then optimize the order to display the search results.
To sum up, it is: the amount of information is large, anything can be searched, easy to get started, and the versatility is strong.
But from another point of view, "big and miscellaneous" also brings a lot of side effects to search engines.
If you think about it, if there are more things in a basket, is it more difficult to find the information you want accurately?
And that's just in the case of "no human intervention".
Search engines are tools for us, but for advertisers and webmasters, it's a long-simmering business.
If they come in and "optimize" the search results, our search experience will inevitably be degraded.
For example, the "content farm" that Xiao Lei wants to talk about today is a big tumor in the search engine.
One of the cancers of the Internet - content farms
Today's search environment is getting worse and worse, and a large part of the "credit" is due to those "content farms".
First explain to everyone what this thing is.
Content farms are actually spam sites that specialize in low-quality content.
The webmaster does not care about the user's search experience at all, and frantically "dumps garbage" to the search engine.
This leads to a phenomenon, every time Xiao Lei goes to Google to search for information, he can search for farms such as "XX Knowledge Network".
At first glance, it still looks like a whole, and now the webmaster loves to answer professional questions?
It wasn't until Little Ray clicked into one of the websites that he realized that it was just gibberish...
Take a paragraph for everyone to enjoy, although it is full of Chinese, but after reading it, the inner taste is not right.
Xiaobian found on the Network that many netizens on the STM32 assembly instruction set of attention is relatively high, small partners are now certainly also very interested in the content of the instruction set of STM32, all want to know the specific STM32 instruction set C language programming is what is the content, we are divided into three parts of the detailed description, the first part is stm32 can be programmed with assembly, the second part is the stm32 startup file detailed explanation, the third part is the Stm32 assembly instruction detailed explanation...
You should have found that these content farm articles are very similar to the previous popular marketing number special body.
They are all about putting certain hot topics into a format, the style is fixed and boring, the logic is extremely confusing, and it is a complete waste of the reader's time.
If you just create spam content in a set of formats, there is still room for forgiveness, at least it does not affect other creators.
However, according to Xiao Lei, the webmaster of the content farm will also plagiarize articles everywhere and send other people's originals to their own websites.
What's even more disgusting is that these sites are proficient in shadow twins, and they have made a lot of twin domain names in order to increase their search weight.
Like some time ago, there is a "small encyclopedia network" dominating Google search, as long as you dare to search Chinese, it will inevitably appear in the front of the search results.
Why? First, because the website produces a lot of low-quality content, from astronomy to geography to achieve all-round coverage.
Just the domain name of The Encyclopedia Network, Google has included 320,000 search results.
In contrast, Xiao Lei's official website leikeji.com has also been operating for several years, during which time he has been outputting original articles.
But in Google Search, the domain name only has 27,800 search results, and it is crushed by a content farm truck.
Needless to think, these content farms must have used automated scripts to crawl other website articles.
At the end of the day, it is estimated that hundreds of articles can be plagiarized, and the original author information can be removed, and it can be sent as your own.
The second is that most of the webmasters of these content farms are proficient in website SEO optimization.
Some friends may ask, what is this SEO optimization?
As you can understand, the search engine itself has a set of "search result ranking" algorithms.
For example, if the content of a website is of high quality, or there are many people visiting, it will be ranked very high.
The webmaster only needs to figure out how this algorithm is played, and he can hide the sky and optimize his website to the top of the search results.
This kind of "know thyself, know each other, win every battle" gameplay is called SEO optimization.
For websites that rely on advertising to sustain themselves, SEO optimization can be said to be the root of existence.
After all, when users search for something, they generally only notice the search results that come first.
If a webmaster can keep himself at the top of the search, he will have a high click-through and impression rate, which in turn will convert ads into revenue.
And reasonable SEO optimization of the website is actually not at all humble.
In the age of everyone SEO, even if your website content is good, it may not necessarily rank ahead of search engines.
Just like although we walk very slowly, but there is a means of transportation, just to be an honest person will suffer losses.
Serious webmasters rely on reasonable SEO optimization, and can also bring benign development to the search ecology.
However, but a content farm like XX Encyclopedia Network is completely malicious use of SEO to destroy the user's search experience....
The information I wanted was not searched, but I was polluted by the spirit of the small X encyclopedia network.
As for how to SEO, Xiao Lei will not talk too much here, if everyone is interested, we will open another issue of the article to talk about.
When Xiao Lei wants to break it more, what is the motivation that makes these content farms so flooded?
From a moral point of view, I have been producing and handling low-quality content, and my conscience cannot pass it.
Until Xiao Lei went to pick up the profit model of those content farms, he knew why these webmasters were willing to do Internet tumors.
Content Farm: This wave I earned hemp
For example, when Xiao Lei searches for information on Google, he often searches for a website called "Daily Headlines".
At first, I thought it was a serious website, after all, the layout of this website is still concise, and there are advertisements next to it that are slightly diaphragm, but the website has to be profitable, and the problem is not big.
But After a long Google search, Xiao Lei found that this daily headline often appeared at the top of the search results.
The articles inside also overlap with the content of many original websites...
Well... Even Xiao Lei himself was stolen, and he knew what the situation was.
This is another content farm dedicated to plagiarizing articles, and it is particularly powerful in Google's eyes, even treating it as an original platform.
Because the daily headlines are crawled by articles such as WeChat or headlines, and neither platform allows search engines to crawl content.
In this way, if you search for WeChat-related articles on Google, it is easy to search for daily headlines.
These articles are all written by Xiao Lei...
Google searched and thought, I have not seen this article on other platforms, ah, that should be the original of the daily headlines.
In this way, Xiao Lei's article was not only stolen, but also stolen in a fair and upright manner...
In Google's eyes, the daily headline content is large, and it is still original, which will naturally give high search weight.
The daily headlines rely on Google's "support", which can be described as the traffic is growing day by day.
Simple traffic may not be useful, but after adding advertising to the website, this is living money.
In October alone, daily headlines were visited by nearly 35 million people.
This wave is really lying down to achieve wealth freedom.
Some friends may be curious, this daily headline contains so many WeChat articles, does the author not sue?
Under normal circumstances, there will definitely be, but the daily headlines are very clever, it directly blocks mainland IP, only earns traffic from Taiwan Province, making it more difficult to protect rights.
After years of porting, Daily Headlines have even become the Top 50 website in Taiwan Province.
By moving the privatized content of the Internet and arbitrage from it, this profit model can be said to be both novel and troublesome...
At last
If you define a website full of a lot of porting and low-quality content as a content farm, there are actually many such websites in China.
These websites are even included by Baidu with extremely high authority...
Ming's not to mention, it is the cloud community of those companies.
Friends who often use Baidu or Google to search for technical articles should know what the situation is.
To put it bluntly, it is because this model has a profitable head, and the cost is very low.
On the one hand, Google is not attentive to Chinese search, on the other hand, the wildfire of the content farm is inexhaustible, and as a user, it can only be a bad luck egg.
What we can do is try not to click on the content farm, or install some special blocking plugins, and the eyes are not net.