Content farms are sites that routinely employ large pools of freelance writers who create high volumes of copy for the Internet. Typically this content is all about quantity rather than quality, is specifically written with an emphasis on keyword placement, is designed to raise search engine ranking and is primarily used for cheap SEO purposes.

Even though Google insists they are making a more concerted effort to lower the value of these content farm articles in their search results, website owners and search engine optimization specialists remain savvy about the fact that when combined, these content farm articles generate plenty of inbound linking, a significant amount of search traffic and ultimately gain search engine trust.

However these content farms are being targeted by plagiarists, spammers, unscrupulous website owners and less than reputable Internet marketers who make it a regular practice to lift content off of them and knowingly use the copy to unfairly direct traffic to their sites.

In contrast to RSS scraping, which has little or no impact on bloggers or content creators, content farm plagiarism can damage a sites reputation as well as have a negative effect on how well it performs with search engines.

Although content farms are trying to clean up their image by implementing anti-plagiarism strategies including editors and software programs to ensure that work is original, there is a problem with plagiarism not usually being recognized until after it is already posted on the Web.

Google also has announced that it is aggressively renewing its efforts to crack down on duplicated content and the search engine promised they would be continually updating its algorithms to target spammers and plagiarists as well as content farms that churn out low-quality albeit original content for cheap SEO.

According to Google, there has been a slight uptick in spam as a result of its recent updated algorithm to increase freshness and improve its spidering but the search engine assures users of their dedication to regulate spam, plagiarists and other sites that they don’t want in their index.

Even though spamming and plagiarism are not likely to be eliminated any time soon, it is vital that website owners and search engine optimization specialists protect their online copy by regularly checking to see if their content is misused.