When Social Media Leads to Social Experiments: FarmVille In Reality

Chances are good that at some point you have dabbled with the Internet game sensation, FarmVille. I mean come on, who wouldn’t want a chance to run their own farm, upgrade and own property, even if it’s virtual. FarmVille, one of the most played Facebook games to date, has caught the attention of some, let’s call them, extremely open minded farmers. Although this experiment is daring and the success of the project could fail, it is still a very innovative approach to any task.

My Farm Experiment is located on the Wimpole Estate, an actual farm located in the UK. Owned by the National Trust, a British charity, they are opening the doors to somewhere around 10,000 people to help the farm manager Richard Morris run the farm. Now, this may seem better than the game FarmVille, and it very well might be, but it comes at a cost. £30, which is about $49 is all it takes to become a virtual farmer.

The Google Farmer Update Affects Search Engine Results Page

We have all been the victim of it, searching something in Google and the first 3 results are either a page only filled with ads, or an article with a kindergarten reading level. It’s a shame that in the past, companies and writers have been outranked, not because their content wasn’t superior, but merely due to lack of website size compared to these “farms.” The algorithm update implemented by Google, dubbed the “Farmer Update,” has finally put an end to being out-ranked by garbage.

Now there may be a lot of confusion around what a content farm is. To explain it as simple as possible, I will take an excerpt from Bill Parlaman over at Radical Marketing Solutions,

“A content farm is a website that generates tons of content to meet high volumes of search requests.  Because these sites are so huge they tend to appear very high in the search engines.  Therefore these sites get a ton of traffic and make a killing through ad revenues. The problem is much of the content published is not very good. In the SEO world this is called “thin content”.”