eHow is an online how-to guide with more than 1 million articles and 170,000 videos offering step-by-step instructions on how to do things.
It’s much criticized as a “content mill” or “content farm“. Low quality crap written to get a high Google ranking, pushing Google ads deceptively.
Hows that working out for them?
My gymnastics site is the best on the web on the topic of “gymnastics coach” and “gymnastics coaching”.
eHow got the #1 rank for a Google search = “Gymnastics Coach”.
(I reset the Browser so there was nothing in the cache or history.)
The content on that eHow page is crap written by someone who doesn’t coach gymnastics.
Why doesn’t Google rank content farms lower?
… Maybe they like all that Google ad revenue.
Google has launched one counter attack. I doubt that’s going to work.
They lashed back at critics in a Jan. 21st post:
… January brought a spate of stories about Google’s search quality. Reading through some of these recent articles, you might ask whether our search quality has gotten worse. …
I’ll believe Google has fixed the problem when eHow is not on the first 100 pages of results.
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In a Bing search, eHow was #1, as well. (And Bing results are consistently worse for me on any specialized search term.)
The new Duck Duck Go browser filters out all eHow results. My site was #1 there.
related – TechCrunch – Search Still Sucks
Wikipedia has blacklisted all eHow articles.
… as for me, I’ve downloaded the free Chrome browser extension Personal Blocklist and BLOCKED all eHow sites from my personal search results. If enough people do that, that content farm will die.
