I’m not so sure “content farms” are as bad as you make them out to be if they serve relevant content. While, as you point out, SEOs do know that one thing Google loves is “content,” Google also loves “relevance.” If the content served is relevant, I see nothing wrong with getting an results from a content farm.

Becoming increasingly relevant is key to optimizing for search engines. For SEOs, this means optimizing for more specific phrases and niches as well as creating content relevant and ENGAGING enough that it is quoted and linked throughout social media.

With the convergence of social media platforms and search, it will take more than just content to be relevant. However, we should not be so naive so as to ignore that commercial interests and sometimes (formal or informal) agreements are in place between content providers and search engines which may bias the results we see.

Thanks for the write-up! Time to wake up. As you said, and MacManus too (“Google Needs to Wake Up and Smell the Coffee”), we can only hope Google finds a way to deal with this. But wait—this makes me even more afraid! Can it really be that there is only one player in the whole wide world, namely Google, who would be able to counter such fundamental problems? This doesn’t bode well, in the long run, even if this crisis can be averted.

People aren’t fool and slowly are understanding that the places where they should find the information needed must change, due this elements that you are describing as well as others, like crawlers copying and reusing content.