A content farm is a website/blog which publishes a large number of articles, of short length and low quality. The articles on a content farm are written for the search engines rather than human beings. They are made for attracting a lot of traffic. Usually one article is rewritten using different words. That means you can find several articles on such article farms which are not very different from each other. The content on these sites are short but stuffed with popular keywords.
Google hates such websites. It releases Panda updates from time to time for punishing them. EzineArticles, ehow, HubPages, wiseGeek, etc are some of such sites. Many of the content farms are so large that they are valued in several hundred millions dollar. These websites publish more than 1 million articles per month. A large number of content writers are employed who are generally underpaid, getting less than 5 dollars per article. Production of content is done in factory-line style.
Content farms are polluting the web. They are spoiling search engine results, wasting time of the user and causing monetary loss to real and serious content creators. Demand Media has become richer than New York Times, because it is one of the largest content farm corporations. Such sites have a lot of advertisement and in between the ads they put some nonsense content. The title of the articles are very promising which prompts you to open them. When you see the content you feel cheated. Also, there is a lot of gramatical mistakes. The name of creator is not given.
Content farms can improve their public image, search engine reputation and can become more useful for real users if they remove duplicate and low quality content. They should contain long, original and useful articles, written for human beings rather than googlebots.
