Google Biz Dev Beats the Google Engineers Again
Since Panda has happened I (and others) have highlighted how brands have ranked doorway pages, ranked scraped 3rd party content, padded out crap "content farm" content to suck in search traffic, took their market leading position & used it to deliver inferior experiences, bought out bankrupt competitors & redirected the PageRank, engaged in off-topic affiliate extension (Barnes & Noble, Overstock, Overstock AND Barnes & Noble), etc etc etc
At the same time, independent webmasters face greater uncertainty than ever (legal, personal property rights, and from alleged "quality" algorithms like Panda & editorial crackdowns from Google engineers).
If you are not operating at scale, you are an inefficiency which must be expunged from the marketplace.
I have maintained that Panda was a joke & a diversion to re-frame the quality debate as Google dialed up on inserting their own vertical results in the search results, allowing them to monetize the "organic" search results.
Such a view may have been seen as cynical, but it is something that more people are realizing as true. Read this great article from Tom Foremski on ZDNet.
Google's percent of downstream traffic to YouTube has more than doubled since Panda.
You know how John Stewart or George Carlin have to present reality as a joke to express it? Well watch the above video & then read this article:
“Every single leading company is waiting for user-generated content or is licensing content” in order to reach advertisers, Rosenblatt said. “YouTube was tired of waiting. They told us that they needed a home and garden channel, a pets channel and a health/Livestrong channel. They are paying us up front, plus a rev share. This is the beginning of them funding professional content creators.”
I have mentioned Demand Media's video "efforts" before.
But my opinion doesn't matter.
As a monopoly, only Google's does.
And they decided to subsidize Demand Media while torching your site.
Comments
...in the short term is to upload your content to Youtube & ride Google's self-promotional spam to riches.
But that may not work!
Before you go rush off to create Youtube videos, please note that Google may not want to pay you for your own content. I tried turning ads on for some of our videos in the past & was denied, with them claiming that the content was inappropriate to run ads against. Yet today Google still runs ads against them & pays me nothing.
I am nothing but a digital video sharecropper.
I work for prestige & the satisfaction in knowing I help make Google a lot of money. Everything else is irrelevant!
The indie webmaster has to eventually snap out of whatever koolaide is being consumed to say: Panda knocked my traffic down 75%, Demand Media is growing, and Google is now paying them for content that I'm actually recognized as a topic expert for?
Rhetorical question. The papers of record are in lockstep with Google (or visa versa) and as far as they're concerned, Panda and the blatant brand bias that comes with it, have rectified a long-standing flaw in Google's algorithm.
Not long ago, I worked for a major publisher who (along with a consortium of others) whined about how they're 'authority' was being usurped by random hacks and flacks in blogville who were adept at the dark arts of something called SE and O. Google heard their pleas and thus began the demise. You no longer hear complaints in the mainstream, as Panda has brought them the traffic that they'd insisted they were entitled to all along.
So sad.
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