One of the main digs against Google is that it has been very slow in reacting to content farms that ad little to zero to the search results. Sure Google has chased down some little guys over the past few years but they have continually shied away from bombing the really big content farms. But Rich Skrenta, Blekko’s CEO has confirmed the ban. He told searchengineland.com, Blekko has decided to ban the “top 20 spam sites from blekko’s index entirely, based on our users click /spam on results.” This includes ehow.com, one of Demand Media’s top revenue generating web sites.
Skrenta explained this came up after listening to Danny on This Week In Google. Rich hacked together a reverse slashtag named -/contentfarms that allowed searches to remove these sites from their searchers. Today, Blekko decided to drop the sites completely from their index, making the slashtag irrelevant.
The top 20 sites Blekko removed from their index include ehow.com, experts-exchange.com, naymz.com, activehotels.com, robtex.com, encyclopedia.com, fixya.com, chacha.com, 123people.com, download3k.com, petitionspot.com, thefreedictionary.com, networkedblogs.com, buzzillions.com, shopwiki.com, wowxos.com, answerbag.com, allexperts.com, freewebs.com, and copygator.com.
Gutsy move by Blekko and it will be interesting to see if Google follows suit with some major moves. But let’s remember that Google makes a tons of cash from many of these sites because they show Adsense.
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