A Techcrunch article plus a Beyond the Search Box live event both confirm that Blekko is now blocking certain “content farms” including Demand Media’s eHow. Here is a list of sites Blekko deams content farms that they have banned:
- ehow.com
- encyclopedia.com
- allexperts.com
- chacha.com
- experts-exchange.com
- naymz.com
- activehotels.com
- robtex.com
- fixya.com
- 123people.com
- download3k.com
- petitionspot.com
- thefreedictionary.com
- networkedblogs.com
- buzzillions.com
- shopwiki.com
- wowxos.com
- answerbag.com
- freewebs.com
- copygator.com
Clearly Blekko is missing some of the big content farms, but an interesting thing I’ve noticed is that searches for “How to ___” on Blekko suffer because of it. Site-wide bans don’t seem to be the answer as there are some decent results from some of those sites that now leave Blekko stuffed with smaller site garbage content or no content.
Here’s an example, “How to make a teeter totter”:
Google results:
Blekko:
Try your own specific how to searches and see what you find on the two different engines.
UGC SEO 
I completely agree with you. Blekko is getting its 15 minutes of fame by attacking the sites that have the most relevant content to many evergreen long-tail queries. Makes for great press but a terrible search site. As a guess, how many of the “journalists” covering these stories do you think took the time to do any kind of research, such as running a few queries through Blekko and Google like you did?
Gil – I bet very few journalists tested Blekko out for the types of content that long-tail sites serve a great need. As you are well aware of, people search for things that very few people have answered on the web. By banning large content sites, especially UGC sites, Blekko is serving nothing. Here’s an example long-tail search I did a couple days ago:
“how to convert canon 7d h264 clips to prores for fcp editing”
Blekko’s answer: http://blekko.com/ws/how+to+convert+canon+7d+h264+clips+to+prores+for+fcp+editing
“No blekko results found” (then they show bing results because they had nothing to show)
Google’s answer is much better:
http://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=how+to+convert+canon+7d+h264+clips+to+prores+for+fcp+editing
Banning websites such as Robtex is just stupid, I visit robtex on a regular basis whenever I’m performing DNS analysis as its a decent resource with great, readable output.
Experts-Exchange is another example, they might be a little deceiving in the way they go about hiding the answers, but the answers are still there and i’ve often found myself using their answers when programming – its seems to me the same as banning the WSJ/WMW for adding a payment barrier to their site.
I for instance use thefreedictionary.com a lot. I don’t know why they should be considered an “evil” content farm if all they’re doing is putting together on one page results from different dictionaries, wikipedia and translation in other languages.
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