I learned about “content farms” from NPR.
“Content farms pay people almost no money to turn out very mediocre content that can serve up very cheap ads.” This generates hits for advertisers, when search engines find matches with low value or little real information – just filler pulled together in minutes.
Recently, Google made changes to try to filter these sites out.
The here is the full (short) transcript: Google Tweaks Algorithm To Spot ‘Content Farms’