There has been a lot of news lately about how spam-filled Google’s search results pages have become over the last few years. One of the oft blamed culprits are the so-called content mills. A content mill is essentially a website that cranks out high volumes of webpages in order to always have something ranking highly for any search a user might perform. They are also masters at search engine optimization, or SEO.
If you believe in the Google myth that content is king and that high-quality content will eventually become highly ranked, this should be confusing.
- How can it be that a website cranking out thousands of webpages a day gets high-quality backlinks from authoritative website linked to all of that new content?
- How can anyone generate that much quality content so quickly?
The answers to both questions are, they don’t.
How To Really Rank High In Google Search Results
Most of the content published by content mills has no links pointing to it whatsoever from external websites. However, every page links to multiple other pages within the same website. Based on size alone that ensures that a website like eHow has a 1,000 incoming links to each of its articles. These links are produced automatically by the system regardless of quality, but each one counts as a link to the Google spiders who gobble them up like ravenous rats.
Part of Google’s mythology is that it distinguishes incoming links and that good links are more valuable than bad links. However, live search results prove that whatever downgrading or upgrading Google hands out based upon the quality of any webpage’s incoming links is easily overwhelmed by sheer volume.
Imagine that Google makes an incoming link from the same domain count for only 1/10th of what an external link would count for. That means it only takes ten same-site incoming links to score the same as one incoming link from off-site. Each content mill webpage has hundreds or thousands of same-site income links thanks to its volume of published pages. Couple these low-value links with the content mills’ other trick and you have a recipe to rank high in Google search results for anything.
Of course, the content mills don’t put all their eggs in one basket. Most of them run several websites all with thousands of webpages to use to boost linking whatever content they want.
Google’s Algorithm Overvalues Title Tags
Google claims that there are hundreds of factors that go into each ranking. In practice, there are two or three factors that make up the vast majority of a webpage’s search ranking position and the rest are small factors that rarely influence anything but the thinnest of searches.
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