2010: The Year Information Pollution Takes Off
Google's relevancy algorithms have largely been driven by taking the "authority" shortcut. Have lots of other domains linking to your site? It must be good. Here is a golden ticket...your site ranks for everything.
That curbed some types of spam (by increasing the sunk cost needed to rank a new site), but it has taken brands only a few years to adjust to that hole in the algorithm. Witness the rise of answer spam, scraper re-purposing spam, social media recycling tools, freelance articles for a nickel spam, machine spun articles that are textually unique, etc etc etc
Increasingly, the biggest role of brand in search publishing is to legitimize stuff which might otherwise seem illegitimate and give them enough scale that it hopefully kicks off enough AdSense revenue that it matters to Google.
Demand Media recently highlighted their business model in Wired magazine:
To appreciate the impact Demand is poised to have on the Web, imagine a classroom where one kid raises his hand after every question and screams out the answer. He may not be smart or even right, but he makes it difficult to hear anybody else.
The article (unlike most eHow articles) is well worth a read, but a quick summary...
- buy up some aged well linked to sites (that were perhaps linked to when it was easier to get links with watered down content and before the web graph was as corrupted by $ as it is today)
- create algorithms to mine their analytics data and Google's tools to estimate the earnings potential of any piece of content
- pay freelancers crumbs to write write write based on whatever the algorithm spits out
- run the content through a tool like Copyscape to verify it is unique
- pay a reviewer ~ $1 to verify the article is (nearly) legible
- keep refining and optimizing the above components based on feedback from earlier tests
- create sister websites that are heavily cross-linked which host a second page about the highest earning topics
And in opening up their playbook to Wired, Demand Media likely created dozens of additional competitors who will aim to monetize the longtail of search via freelance articles of varying quality. Aol, headed by former Google executive Tim Armstrong, has been talking up a revolutionary media model to the media, which reads exactly like the Demand Media playbook:
The predictions, it says, are based on a wide swath of data AOL collects, from the Web searches people make on its site to the sites visited by subscribers to its Internet services.
The system is designed to track breaking news and trends and identify the best times to write about seasonal events, such as Halloween or Monday Night Football.
Based on these recommendations, the company's editorial staff, which totals about 500, will assign articles to a network of free-lancers across the country via a new Web site called Seed.com. AOL says it now works with about 3,000 free-lancers, but it is hoping to sharply increase that number through the Web site, which is open to anyone looking to submit a story. To cut costs ahead of its spinoff, AOL recently said it was cutting about a third of its total staff, or 2,500 employees.
If authors are going to get paid for performance on a freelance basis to churn out junk then they may as well spend a few months learning internet marketing, blogging, and Wordpress...if publishing is algorithm driven you don't really need to work for someone else to make a few Dollars per article. It is VERY easy to beat that, so long as you are willing to wait 3 to 6 months for your payout.
And the process of scaling automated low quality content generation is only going to make existing media channels reliant on search feel more pain. Dollars become dimes. Dimes become pennies. As traditional media companies go bankrupt companies like Demand Media and AOL will buy up the brands and fill the sites with more good content.
This not only will further harm traditional media models, but it will also pollute up the search results so much that...
- it makes it hard to find quality information via search
- private membership sites and paid niche content will become more popular
- Google will either be forced to change their relevancy algorithms or make an example of a big company in the search (g)arbitrage game, or else searchers are going to have an awful experience over the next half-decade or so
I wish there was an Exchange Traded Fund which allowed me to place a bet on information pollution...until Google stops it, the profit potential will be too great for opportunistic "publishers" to ignore. It is a rare sure bet. And it is entirely up to Google to decide how big they want to let the bubble get before they deflate it.
Here is what the content revolution Tim Armstrong speaks of looks like:
Imagine 8 of the top 10 search results for every longtail query looking like THAT. And yet, it is about to become reality.
Those who know the least yell loudest. And Google is colluding with the likes of Demand Media and Aol to ENSURE every idiot has a megaphone. Ignorance is powerful.
Comments
Amen! It took me forever to get on board with blogging, mostly because if I was going to do it, I wanted to publish great content. However I've conceded to the idea that frequently pushing out marginal information appears more important to Google than pushing out a high-quality post once in awhile.(I'm not saying my stuff is crap, however beyond the Internet I think I would have to hold my writing to a much higher standard.)
So if I want to compete at the next level, I have to do what my competition is doing and "blog, blog, blog it all, blog it if it's big or small...". :)
You don't have to do exactly what the competitors are doing (and probably shouldn't). If anything I would say this only increases the importance of developing other distribution channels and creating a higher lifetime customer value (rather than encouraging you to water down the water).
What great timing for Demand Media since News Corp and other old media companies will soon be opting themselves out of Google (just kidding, I'll believe it when I see it.)
On the flip side, Demand Media better do a really good job of masking their ownership of these properties. If I recall correctly, there is not a very good track record for companies who brag publicly about gaming Google.
In most cases Demand Media ***can't*** mask their ownership, as they are paid through AdSense. Yes they can do many DBAs and such...but they will probably only do that after Google kills one of their main websites.
But Google will probably be clever with how they kill them off...rather than giving them the ax all at once they will likely adjust the rankings such that as they add more content it does not generate any additional search traffic and then the overall traffic will slowly decline.
The issue of Demand Media's "content factory" was discussed at length here:
http://www.webmasterworld.com/google_adsense/4016279.htm
As eHow.com are targetting the long tail and most of their articles have no competition I don't think it would benefit the searcher (or Google) if their articles were removed from the index.
I don't think Yahoo has a problem with it either as they were reported to be in talks to aquire Demand Media only last year:
http://news.cnet.com/8301-10784_3-9986403-7.html
While they may target the longtail they rank for a lot of stuff. In the last 2 years Compete.com has shown eHow's unique US visitors to have increased ~ 6-fold to about 25,000,000 monthly uniques. That is just 1 property and that is something like 11% of the country using their site *every month*
And they do rank for some highly valuable keywords. SEM Rush shows keywords like buy stocks and home improvement loans.
Plus most successful sites are not driven by just a few head keywords...tail keywords are where a lot of the incremental profit is because in aggregate the traffic is so targeted + cheap + reliable...or at least it was.
All of this has me a little bit worried about the future of SEO ;-(.
On the one hand much of the organic listings might be getting pushed below the fold for short-tail/normal queries, and you said that screamed working the long-tail to you.
And on the other hand, the long-tail might become polluted like crazy and hard to compete in (b/c of their domain/link authority), also.
Do you still see room for (profitable) SEO in the future or would you expect the ROI on SEO to decrease dramatically because of all this?
(I'm wondering if this happens..maybe the decreasing quality of the SERPs might be yet another boost for WOM/social media on the web..to cut through the clutter - or of course the SEs might adapt to the situation)
The point of most social media is not to cut through the clutter, but to create another layer of it ;)
There will always be room for creative + passionate individuals to create great sites, but the heavily bulked up media empires (like many newspaper companies) are only going to feel more and more pain until they are killed off.
Thanks for the reply Aaron,
you referred to creative + passionate individuals running their own sites...but how do you think these kind of changes will affect SEO consulting / in-house SEO (if you dont mind me asking)?
Do you expect it to have a pretty negative impact (b/c the ROI on SEO might decrease) or could it possibly even be beneficial for truly good consulting/in-house SEOs, as it raises the barrier to entry to being an SEO (you mentioned it raised the bar for doing SEO which worked two ways)?
Sorry for such long questions (that youd probably prefer to answer in your forum), but those last 2 blog posts by you really raised some questions in my head ;-)
PS: Btw, the southpark video seems to be displayed in German on my PC right here (in Germany). German title & southpark.de before I press play (unfortunaltey, I have some issues with my PC, right now so cant tell if the audio is German, too lol)
There will be heavy consolidation in the SEO market in the next 5 years. That will in part make the SEO market more of a market for lemons. A few at the top will do really well, but if you have talent and are not HEAVILY branded as a to SEO then the profit potential will be greater in publishing your own sites than being an SEO consultant*
*unless perhaps one is a career salesman who can sell ice to eskimos. :D
hmm interesting thing to think about...Im wondering if the same will happen in Germany during the next 5 years (it being a secondary market) and/or for people who can do SEO in foreign languages...but then again I assume if it's gonna happen in the US during the next 5 years, it makes sense to keep that in mind even if itll take a bit longer for it to happen in Germany
you did a post a while back on love.com or something similar too. when the big boys start pushing it onto the internets, things are gonna get messy, me thinks.
-kpaul
Love.com was AOL putting another fishing net in the ocean...a shame that one didn't catch any fish though. That one was a wee bit too spammy for Google.
The mistake of Love.com was that it started out ~100% automated and scraped. They should have done like Mahalo did...start with a bit of hand curated scraping, hype it to build public relations, and then after it has been around for a while try to automate as much of the scraping/recycling as possible.
And we wonder why kids can't read and write properly. If good quality content is pushed to the side and replaced with "junk" it becomes a sad state of affairs. The end user will be viewing crap written by uneducated writers...many whose first language is not even English.
Love your line "to ENSURE every idiot has a megaphone".
It's all who you know in the end. With these developments quality content will be harder to find, and I would imagine that the good content will only be seen if it's promoted by those well connected socialites that seem to get tons of buzz.
If I write a great article and I'm not in the inner circle, it will fall by the wayside, but if someone well connected "nominates" my article by promoting it from their site, it will do well. It would be nice if the deciding factor were quality over popularity.
Spot on cgragg. The additional noise increases the opportunity cost to rise above the noise BUT once you gain enough authority and build a solid reputation then it is that much harder for new competitors to try to compete against you.
As a content publisher who has used SEO to build a niche content brand from scratch over the last 2 years, I have put up with Wikipedia re interpretting my content and now have to watch while Ehow does the same. Written by drones who clearly know nothing about the subject , they often comepletely misunderstand it, leading to inaccurate or misleading "facts" not just poor quality content. And if those "facts" are at the top of Google? Well, they must be true, mustn't they.
While one of my sites ranks well for the first and second tier KW and recieves a ton of traffic from it, the long tail (in this case, KW not in the top 10 referrals) still accounts for 90% of all search traffic. The world of Ehow and others have crunched the numbers I did 2 years ago and are now starting after my niche - as an SEO, you know your keyphrases when you see 'em.
This brings home quite how big the long tail is and why the continued rise of junk content is inevitable.
My response is to develop better even quality content away from the search channel, and effecively use my free stuff in the same way (to net search traffic) but with a better quality niche brand.
When the site started and I had no traffic, every piece of content erred on the side of SEO and was based on KW research, rather than pleasing the discerning reader. Now I have built a following, I try to keep an element of SEO but bear in mind that real people are now judging this content. The result is, unsurprisingly, the heavily SEOd content sends most of the SE traffic while the really good stuff is only appreciated by regular readers and and visitors that click through from any links the article garnered.
It's almost like you have to have two totally different streams of content to compete with the rehashed junk in SERPs. But didn't Google say they don't want that?
The Algo can be complex are you like, but a system based on automation leaves the door wide open for junk, bots and scrapers and poor quality offerings.
Anyone for hand edited directories? Imma gonno start me one :-)
Rob
All I was saying is that more often than not eHow articles are about such obscure topics that they have next to no competition.
If you agree with this then it is arguably better for Google to rank a relevant but mediocre article over a less relevant but higher quality one.
Simply put the tail is too long for search engines to be that choosy.
But the problems are many...
The goal of the search engine is not just to try to offer results...but to create the type of ecosystem that produces the results they want to index. If junk floods the index that can be good for short-term profits, but it will end up lowering the significance of Google in many markets that offer search results polluted with the nonsense.
Totally agree 100%. And even if they do understand the content well enough to copy it then as the field changes there is absolutely no economic incentive to upgrade the content. They will just produce more new content that ranks next to the old stuff...and likely use some of their old incorrect information as a source for the new stuff. Each day the world warps a bit more. ;)
I totally disagree with the need for 2 separate sites/systems. You just need to massage the 2 goals together.
Many plug-ins and CMS tools allow you to create a separate page title vs the title that is different from the on-page heading (and even large organizations like the BBC are now taking this approach to publishing).
You only need to make the content once, but put one title in your feed + on-page heading, and use a second optimized title that is just for the page title & search robots.
Although I don't currently use the different headline title/meta title/url concept too much at the moment, it's certainly something I have considered and would revisit content once it had been through the "first read" and making adjustments. Update rather than a new URL.
I feel the more pressing problem is that of content choice. While research might tell me that I should concentrate precious creative time creating content on "Slightly Spammy Commercial Keyword 1", actually readers would probably find such a post annoying if not insulting and be turned off.
Google sets the agenda if you want new readers and ad dollars.
Meanwhile, bloggers who don't play the SE game sob into their stats, downhearted at the fact that their "quality" site is read by three old men and a dog.
@ Wezley - I too prefer to strive to create top tier content every time, even if that means not publishing so regularly. Keep to your standard. I never unsubscribed from a feed because it didn't post regularly enough but I have unsubscribed from plenty that kept me busy hitting the "Mark as Read" button.
Not 100% true for all businesses. They are a distribution channel (and a major one) but you can be successful without them in many information businesses.
Think of all the hyped up email list spammer infomarketer types who build around huge launches and all that...they have weak product, a bad performance record, and yet they are able to use the same tricks over and over again to suck money out of the wallets of newbies.
And there are other ways to build distribution as well...the key is building relationships 1 at a time. Time consuming and expensive? Absolutely. But low risk and high satisfaction if you pick the right markets & the right market segments.
How many webmasters are giving away their best ideas for niche articles by allowing other companies to mine their search data, and failing to analyse it themselves? I'm talking about "search our site" functions.
I do that here...but am not too concerned with it though for a couple big reasons:
If we ran a traditional retail website there is a 0% chance I would use Google Commerce Search.
Q. How do we increase revenue from Adsense?
A. By making the ads appear more relevant than the "content"
I'm not saying this is what google is doing BUT ----
it occurs to me that if you speed up your storing, processing and retrieval, (caffeine), plus begin invading the privacy of the individual beyond anything ever imagined possible before, (wave/chrome/gmail/etc) to enable you to tailor which ads vs which crap to show to whom and when, would it be possible to increase clicks to paid results exponentially?
It's easy to forget that search engines do NOT exist to deliver relevancy. They exist to generate revenue. So, if we can accept that concept as a reality, then does that not make the best search engine simply the best ad delivery platform?
If we accept that - then how could we possibly expect anything other than weak content sitting next to strong ads?
Like it or not, relevancy, (like quality), is subjective and as long as all the key indicators are pointing up, who is going to speak up in defense of quality?
But perhaps even a better question would be, who would listen or even give a crap what you were defending?
Just sayin ---
Peach y'all
massa
online business optimization
While you have your cynic's cap on, also check out this video where Google's US ad sales team managing director Jim Lecinski claims that consumers are expecting advertisers to act like publishers:
What is somewhat absurd about that statement is that we often associate linkbait with being shocking and attention pulling, and one of the best headline and format ideas for linkbait is to look at the SHOCK and AWE stuff on the cover of print magazines.
Google needs to be careful with telling brands to become the publisher though...if the brands have any luck with it then why would they need to spend on Google ads?
The massa lives! Good to see again.
I've written and deleted that blog post a dozen times... Google is not your daddy's search engine. Google is Google.. take it at face value, and move along.
We live in an age of propaganda like no prior... from celebrity pundits to elected officials, including Director level appointees at just about every important agency and public facing company. Think the best virologists have a shot at leading the vaccination programs at the CDC? How about the best performing-under-pressure project managers running the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA)? Or the best estimators doing the planning for budget spending? Or, my current favorite, the most efficient administrators planning operations for the VA healthcare system?
"Search engines do not deliver relevancy"... they only did that when multiple search engines competed with each other on relevancy. Those days are gone.
Do junk content really work? I don’t think so. Not at least in the long run.
May be not all of EHow content is junk. Traffic comes through the good ones – people bookmark + social bookmarks + links (to good articles affecting SEO) --- results in more traffic and the story goes on…
But outsourcing article writing to freelancers - this is a bad idea.
You know what, when greed overtakes … it kills.
Good quality SEO will remain, whatever people/companies do.
Has the basics of SEO changed? Quality content + back links?
It is economically nearly impossible to have all articles be high quality and have the publication remain profitable if ad supported at scale.
For some sites the % garbage content is 2% or 5% ... for others it is closer to 95%. You don't have to read too much eHow to figure out where their business model is. And yes having mostly junk content can work. The links pointing into decent articles flow juice through the whole site and pull up the rankings of the weaker articles on the site...as I called it at the beginning of the article...that is the "authority" search relevancy shortcut at work.
I think the real question is, can data mining plus good content trump data mining paired with rushed junk? Just because eHow is piling things high doesn't mean that the same approach to article selection can't work with high quality content.
The same approach is not as easy though with high quality content...because high quality content requires distribution for the model to work.
And in some/most competitive markets the perception of quality not only comes down to the quality of the content, but also the strength and relevance of the brand, and the social connections associated with that site/brand.
You have to be willing to invest a few years into reputation and distribution and content building without making anything back. It is like pushing a snowball up a mountain at the beginning.
For a long time many (perhaps most?) of the smartest SEOs have planned out site structures against keyword volumes and estimates of keyword value. Sure in time models for working performance back into the growth process will improve...but that is also something many SEOs have been doing.
Generic brands (how to sites and such) can cover a lot of ground...but when you get into more expert topic the niches are also limited in profit potential. If I wrote as much on credit as I do about SEO I would have far more cash in the bank. And if I made all my content on this subject free and ad supported I would be doing far worse than I am now ;)
HOW????
I can’t figure this out!!!
Aaron, we are talking about making more than a hundred thousand dollars per month.
HOW?
Well, as 1 example, CreditCardGuide.com sold for something like $34 million ... and the person who owned it certainly did not invest as much time + money into it as I have spent on this site.
What’s more important SEO-wise to the ranking of a site – a relevant / exact match .com domain name, or the ‘authority’ generated by a bunch of links?
Let’s assume for a moment that two sites have equivalent quality content and equivalent on-site SEO for the topic of how to “replace light fixture”. Who would rank better:
- Site A, with the [exact match] domain name ReplaceLightFixture.com, with very little authority status via inbound links, or
- Site B from eHow, with the URL http://www.ehow.com/how_117588_replace-light-fixture.html and lots of authority status via link juice?
I ask this because I don’t think the spamification of the internet is going to come only from the eHow and Associated Content-types of sites (thousands of articles on 1 hub), but also from small websites that focus on only 1 long tail topic (such as the possible ReplaceLightFixture.com).
Wait until people in 3rd world countries realize that they can make $1 a day off a domain/site like that with sub-par content and a couple links…….multiply that by 30 more $1/day sites of sub-par content, and they’re making a good living in 3rd world country terms……multiply that by millions of people, and you’ve got a lot of spam hitting the internet, 1 article/domain at a time.
For whatever it’s worth:
- I was appalled that eHow has an article entitled how to ‘replace light fixture’, AND another article about how to ‘change light fixtures’! There are probably lots more like that……
- The domain name ReplaceLightFixture.com is available for registering as of the time of this writing, and receives 210 [exact] searches per month, and an estimated $1.13 CPC, per Google. :)
It depends on a keyword by keyword basis of course.
And if a market is small then it might not be worth serving with a unique domain name on it...even with an exact match you need some links + content + design.
To try to get your share of $200 a month (if you use adwords it would be maybe 10% of that, even with a top ranking) is not very compelling...particularly when you consider that if you put up hundreds or thousands of those sites Google would eventually burn them to the ground.
Wow it took me like an hour to read through all of this. I told my wife I really need dragon naturally speaking for christmas. I have been talking about it for awhile but my fingers are getting tires and I would rather pump out contenet with my voice then may hands LOL.
I need to get a copy of that as well. Just ordered it :)
There are MANY other places to get relevant clicks to your client's websites (or your website) other than Google. When I review the Google Analytics accounts for the various websites that I run, I find that anywhere from 20% to 40% of website visitors come from Google, and that a majority of the visitors come from other sources.
Of course, if you are spending $2,000/month on a properly run Google Adwords campaign then those numbers would hopefully be significantly different.
Then there is the question of what you want your website vistors to do when they visit your website - is it clear? Does the website convert visitors into customers?
Local SEO will certainly be a hot topic in 2010.
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