How Demand Media Used PR Spin to Have Google Kill Their Competitors

Hearing this is what makes my blood boil as a small startup. Small and new brands are walking on eggshells trying to balance self-promotion without pissing off Google. Meanwhile larger brands regularly practice black- or gray-hat SEO and survive because Google can't as easily remove a larger brand from their results. But if you're small, Google can and will kill you in an instant without recourse. The ramifications of this are bad for the internet -- it means higher barriers to entry for startups.

Amen

Can you imagine a world where your attention was sold off based on how long you stayed on a page rather then how often you switched pages? If google wants to fix their search results, they should focus on fixing adsense. The technology to more accurately measure a viewer's exposure to an ad are there, it just needs a trustworthy player to bring it to market. Someone trusted by both users and advertisers.

Google made click/impression-based advertising appealing to both groups and it made them what they are now. It's time to get away from it.

I think ultimately, sites and pages ought to be ranked based on quality, and not on whether they are a content farm, or even spam and google should be as neutral as possibly in its determination of the algorithm, focusing instead on only ensuring the quality is what prevails, and of course relevance.

What possibly has happened is that google has been forced to act in a rush, under pressure, possibly stress, and so the final product is probably a knee jerk reaction which does not address the underlying problem.

You can not make 100 percent of people 100 percent happy 100 percent of the time. Moreover, if you are such a powerful force as google you ought not to respond to pressure groups, such as a vocal minority, and act in reaction to their specific demands, that only causes problems.

But maybe the question of search has now become so difficult that indeed it has turned into a political self interested game. Youtube is hardly a site I would want to appear in most of searches which are not about videos.

I can't (and won't) comment on the specifics of this change. In fact, my knowledge of them is pretty much what everyone else's is.

What I will say is that in the last few months there have been several stories about the quality of Google search results in the last few months (eg scraper sites rating higher than the original).

The problem I see with such criticism as leveled with those episodes (and this one too) is that there is the implicit premise that Google's search results and algorithm are static. This most recent change should be evidence of that.

So while Google's search is algorithmic the people who are in charge of it are not. To put it another way: if you try and game Google's system, it will possibly work for a time but at some point, when the problem is viewed as being of sufficient severity to warrant attention, that algorithm will change.

Search, as I see it, is an arms race. SEO, particularly black hat SEO, is on the other side of that. But this isn't as simple as SEO. The world changes over time too. New business models form. New memes come into existence (eg the idea of social search).

So let's assume for a second the OP's argument is sound and that Google has merely killed off Demand Media's competition. If true, there are now a lot less content farms on highly ranked pages than there used to be. Sounds like a win to me. Is it a perfect solution? No. But is it better? Absolutely.

Google's mission is to deliver quality content to it's users. The more people use our properties, the more money we make. We are very focused on the user experience. Gaming our system is, at best, a short term proposition as there are an awful lot of bright and talented people here constantly striving to defeat such attempts.

When I saw the Sistrix data I was surprised to see Wisegeek take a big hit, because I usually get some utility out of most of their content (even though it is now plastered with google ads), whereas eHow is almost always useless.

Sure, it's a "content farm" but if the advice is good and succinct, it sure beats trying to navigate through a particular State's LLC requirements.

Clearly there's a line that has been crossed by republishing existing content - but wouldn't old content be fair game?

I don't plan on doing this BTW - it seems to me the hosting costs would outweigh the incoming ad dollars.

Good stuff.

After seeing the headlines of Google decimating companies when it finds they used evil black-hat SEO tactics, I wonder whether one could use evil black-hat SEO on a competitor, artificially increasing the sites rankings for a few months, and have the wrath of a Google ban-hammer upon your competitor o_O

Very evil. I wonder if there are companies doing this currently :P

Thoughts?

Sorry if this has been discussed here previously. If so, links please :D