Shorticals

Content strategies of pages with no content

We have all seen those link farm sites that rank really well in the search engines but provide very little content. I was searching for a phrase today to find its origins and one of the first pages I got in the results had the phrase but very little else in content. I spent a few minutes calculating the areas used on the page for Navigation/page structure, advertising (including self promotional links which are not navigation), white space (space used as a design element and space not used) and the content (including title but not social media links - they are navigation).

The results from the page were astonishing:
Navigation (blue) = 20.49%
Whitespace = 34.22%
Adverts (red) = 41.10%
Content (green) = 4.19%

The advertising uses 10 times more space than the content!

As a content strategy this is brilliant as its costs next to nothing to put together thousands of these pages and the return is high. These pages are built automatically from databases of content and you can see that a small amount of content can be stretched a long way, surrounded by and supporting paying links and advertising.

From a users perspective this content strategy is worse than useless and if you have a site that looks like this but are not aiming at advertising revenue then you will have problems. It gives no further information on the phrase I was looking for and only exists to drive revenue. Search engines do penalise farm pages like this and are getting better but the farms will game the search engines in return. The search engines have to do more as these leeches are killing the usefulness of them.