[rbritton]

What do you mean by content farm?

I'd argue the opposite about using managed hosting -- a self-hosted WordPress site is more likely to outlast one on managed WordPress hosting for the sole reason of cost. Managed hosting is significantly more expensive, and justifying that ongoing cost may cause the owner of the site to discontinue it sooner than they would otherwise.

[mynegation]

Content farm means that someone takes over the Wordpress installation via a vulnerability that the owner of the installation did not patch. Then they put their own material to extract the google juice for their links until Google catches up and penalizes the domain.

[rbritton]

Got it. I was leaning that way with my interpretation but wasn't completely positive.

The biggest risk in all of the WordPress ecosystem are third-party plugins. Minimizing the use of those and installing something like Wordfence (free or paid) would go a long way towards mitigating that risk. It wouldn't be non-zero, but it'd be acceptably low.

[diroussel]

They mean it gets hacked, and the attacker uses the website to install pages with many links to other websites for SEO of the target websites.