AOL just convinced itself to pay $315 for the HuffPost, which produces limited original content, outside of the ranting deranged posts of its readers who comment on the articles HuffPost assembles and reposts from other sites and sources.

Content farms are a true travesty on the internet, hurting high quality content providers and the end user.

The New York Times just penned a great article on this: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/11/business/media/11search.html?hpw.

The bottom line though is it will be tough for Google to crack down on these abusers who provide low value content. They do a great job at capturing traffic, which ultimately brings in traffic that in turn clicks on Google ads… So Google is making a ton of money off of these farms and therefore, it it lowered the rankings of the sites, it could lose money. The hope is that this will not happen because the better sites will get clicked, and generate revenue for Google; and more people will have a better experience, leading to more clicks. Recent data suggests that Google is losing this battle versus Bing. Bing is getting more people to click on a result than Google. I wouldn’t be surprised if Google updates its algorithm to slowly lower the rankings of sites that produce mostly crap content.