Are Big Tech Blogs Just Turning In To Content Farms?

Blogging July 23, 2011 6 Comments

I started reading Mashable back in 2007 when it was a tiny little blog with great content about an emerging sector. I’ve watched it grow over time in to a giant that gets something like 50 million page views a month and turn in to a fully fledged business but they have lost all my respect over the last couple of years getting to a point today where I don’t read the site any more and have to call it out for purely being a content farm. There is still some decent content on there at times but the level at which they are chasing traffic and SEO rankings of late is stooping to an all time low which culminated in them clearly targeting traffic around the biggest news events this weekend (I don’t want to mention the name but you know what i am talking about and can see screen shots below). Tons of social media and technology blogs are doing this of late but the fact that social media is influencing a news story is no longer a story in itself. The fact that people are tweeting or sharing video is no longer news worthy and it’s time to look at why these blogs are doing this…

How Low Can You Go?

There have been some horrible events over the last couple of days that have captured the world’s imagination and got people talking online. These sorts of events happen on a weekly basis (last week it was the NOTW scandal) and every single time the big blogs all just put a social media spin on to it to capture traffic.

2 Of the main stories on the homepage relate to the incident

Not only are these stories easy for people to click the social sharing buttons on because of their nature but more importantly it is how they rank in search results that matters and the traffic that is bringing in. The first search term I thought of was “social media Norway” and you can see that the results below bring up 2 results for the Mashable posts. There are 100s of other similar search terms being targeted and it means more traffic which means more people clicking on ads and more money.

The big blogs are just after the search results

I actually have been thinking about writing this post for some time and it was a tweet that I saw this morning that reminded me about it and it was interesting to see other people thinking the same thing. To be honest it doesn’t matter what people like me or other people giving out online think because these sites have so much traction and SEO juice already that anything they publish goes straight to the top of the rankings. With things like +1 buttons and social sharing starting to influence search results more by the day this trend of writing stories in this manner will only accelerate.

Not Physically Possible To Keep Up

I use an RSS reader to find stories for the blog here and to keep up with news tech and social media news. It works great because I’m very busy and this delivers all the news to me meaning I don’t miss anything. I stupidly made a folder with just 2 of the big tech blogs in it and as you can see there are currently over 1000 posts in there to read. This happens any time I am too busy and don’t have time to open Google reader for a couple of days. The big blogs are producing over 50 posts a day in a race to get more and more traffic. Many are just optimized for SEO and all about getting traffic. Some might argue that it is just because these are big media sites like newspapers now but I disagree because there is only so much good quality content you can write on any one niche subject. I’d much rather see 10 amazing posts per day than 50 low quality traffic chasing posts but then that wouldn’t be as good for SEO and revenues.

What Is The Solution

I’m not laying the blame all at Mashable’s door because there are plenty of others doing this and I completely understand that they are a commercial business. They are in my sector however and it’s just a shame to see a business abandon all sense of sticking to what got them to the top in the first place just to chase easy money. Luckily there are some other blogs that keep their focus (I suggest Gigaom and Read Write Web and The Next Web) and don’t completely sell out. You do have a choice online but when you see people chasing traffic using social media as the angle on things like the horrible news events of this past weekend it really does leave a bad taste in your mouth. Google was quick to clamp down on content farms with their latest panda update but are there certain blogs out there that are now effectively content farms as well?

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