The Financial Times has drawn attention to what it sees as "an uncomfortable paradox": the fact that content farms such as Demand Media are being created to "ride on the back of search engines." Such a company creates content that is highly optimized for search engines, tracking who is searching for what and hiring freelancers to write articles on these topics.

"As its influence across the web grows, Google's algorithm is starting to shape the world it describes," the article notes. It quotes Shelby Bonnie, co-founder of CNET, who commented that "people have made a business out of gaming its [Google's] system."

Companies can appear higher in search engine results by producing many articles on one topic, by trying to use their existing brand recognition in other areas to improve their ranking, or by liberally using keywords, the FT writes.

As well as Demand Media, Yahoo!'s Associated Content and AOL's Seed have also come under criticism for producing low quality content that is just geared towards SEO, and for paying freelancers very little to produce this. But articles from such companies are used by major news providers such as Reuters, and city papers such as the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Most news organisations now practice at least some form of SEO, and as the FT article points out "SEO is a practice that greatly enhances the usefulness of search by bringing valuable information to the fore." If you have good content, it makes sense to draw it to the attention of those who are looking for that information. And equally if there is information that people are searching for that isn't readily available, it makes sense to provide it.

So how to allow legitimate SEO while preventing manipulation? Many news organisations have become frustrated because they believe that their valuable content does not appear high enough. Google News founder Krishna Bharat said in an interview earlier this year that ranking partly depends on the usage of the site, looking at users' click patterns, as well as the freshness of the content, the origin of the content, locality and other factors. The algorithm also looks for citations in the story in an attempt to identify the original content creator, he said. Despite this, many are still angry and the Associated Press, for example, has suggested that it will create a type of search landing pages that would prioritise original content.

Source: Financial Times