Ok, I'm sure many of you when doing Google searches have run across "content farms" or just useless junk pages as hits but this is a new one for me. Someone posted this on Tivocommunity and asked what was up w/the language in this example. Bicycle Wheel | New York Avenue Bicycle Thief Caught, Then Released Someone replied: Weird! I'd never heard of such doctored blogs before.
Those are sites that rank high on Google's pages. They are auto generated by bots or programs to be semi-coherent. It seems to farm other sites for content and splices it randomly into a seemingly valid website. Close inspection of the text and content will reveal major flaws which show that it is auto-generated. It can sometimes be good enough to fool humans initially, and also Google's search algorithms.
I've never run into one of those. What is their purpose? Are they just trying to generate ad revenue by getting a lot of hits? Or is there a more nefarious intent?
It's all about [ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization"]Search engine optimization - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia[/ame]. Lots of bogus pages = lots of links to the page(s) = higher ranking on Google = profit!
They are used to increase the ranking of another site. One of Google's ranking criteria counts how many times a site is linked by other sites. By artificially creating back links, a site can improve its rank score. In the old days before Google, I used to create pages like this by hand. They would repeat the target words as often as possible, but still appear to make sense. Each of these "reflector" pages contained a link the the real web page being optimized. Tom
