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headphones.techcrunch.com
headphones.techcrunch.com
Today, US Today has eHow powered sections for examples and they rank extremely high.
For broad terms or real long-tail stuff?
> see http://headphones.techcrunch.com/l/904/Razer-Electra
> close tab and never visit that website ever again
"Grado PS1000 The Grado PS1000 headphones cost $1695, which is the most of all Headphones Additionally, the Grado PS1000 have a sensitivity of 98 dB, which is 6 dB lower than the average for all Headphones. "
If users don't mind and actually click through, is it really fair to describe it as "bullshit"?
In contrast, if you want to avoid Taboola/Outbrain, all you need to do is stop asking content sites that use them to send you data (i.e., don't browse Taboola/Outbrain sites).
Odd that AOL chose to partner with FindTheBest, considering that AOL already has a business partnership to gdgt through Engadget.
Here's more context about Findthebest with someone from there trying to claim that they have a large editorial team that hand edits the lists http://www.seobook.com/scalable-seo
[1] extra irony: they nofollow all the CNET links to avoid making the links valuable to their competitor
Basically they use FindTheBest, which takes info from various sources (not just cnet). I guess AOL either owns FindTheBest or they have an agreement with them.
If that is bad, then what do you think of google? Their search engine is a machine-generated series of scraped website snippets, laced with adverts that track practically every site you visit.
Also, what do you think of linkedin (which I see you have an account on?) I can't even view your full profile because linkedin want to screw me for some money to even view anyone's profile now. Also they offer to tell you who has viewed your profile if you pay them money. That seems a lot more shitty than what AOL/Techcrunch is doing in my opinion.
I think all large companies are evil in some way.
You are fundamentally misunderstanding spam when you relate it to what Google and LinkedIn do. What Google does is sift through this shit trying to find the right answer to whatever question. What LinkedIn does has no relevance at all.
By my count the company fronting the content has something like ~100 million machine-generated pages polluting the internet as of 6 months ago, being hosted and re-hosted under dozens of different domains. At what point does it become spam in your opinion?
From my experience, running client sites, Google is blindly trusting anything from big brands, screwing the small business sites. It's almost like content quality doesn't matter at all, especially after all the animal updates (Panda, Penguin etc.) Small sites are desperate as they have lost as much as 90% of traffic for no apparent reason.
It must be profitable for Google too, their earnings have skyrocketed since then, even as they hit a plateau in market share. Occam's razor and all.
Edit: The competing theories as to why Google does it are that Google wants to shake small business into advertising, considering that brands already do. Once you lose traffic you can advertise or close doors. Another one is that so-so search results are better to increase ad clicks. Considering that Google has a monopoly and still a strong brand, the second theory cannot be ruled out.
One plus though, businesses still have the option of engaging their local community which may have a stronger effect than just search ads. I feel some people are far too concerned with getting onto the top of Google rather than improving the scaffolding to their sites and driving organic traffic back.
Now I believe it is true, would not have believed it a few years ago. This Larry Page era is full of surprises, and lets remember that all his pet projects (Android, Google+, X etc) are tolerated by investors because earnings are being increased by 20%+ a year. So Google has to do all it can to increase CPC and number of clicks. The ads on pages have been maximized and then some so they need to resort to tricks and penalties for sites. IMO, this is done at senior level Google execs and then Search execs find the excuse to match search algorithms with what's most profitable for Google. So the lowly search engineer is "changing the world" as the execs count the ad clicks, CPC--and their stock options.
Who wrote this: "The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users...But less blatant bias are likely to be tolerated by the market. For example, a search engine could add a small factor to search results from "friendly" companies, and subtract a factor from results from competitors. This type of bias is very difficult to detect but could still have a significant effect on the market. Furthermore, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results. For example, we noticed a major search engine would not return a large airline's homepage when the airline's name was given as a query. It so happened that the airline had placed an expensive ad, linked to the query that was its name. A better search engine would not have required this ad, and possibly resulted in the loss of the revenue from the airline to the search engine. In general, it could be argued from the consumer point of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want. " ? Larry Page and Sergey Brin back in academia.
>> One plus though, businesses still have the option of engaging their local community which may have a stronger effect than just search ads
The problem is that a lot of people use search to find companies, services and products. Getting frozen out of that is a major handicap. We should support alternative SEs so we have a healthy competition.
The Page and Brin quote is interesting. I searched for it and got the original paper (back when it was called "Backrub"). The relevant quote is in Appendix A: http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html#a
I agree that we should support alternative SEs. The first step might be decoupling "Google" from "Internet" in the mindset for a lot of web users. I don't know if that's even doable at this point before tackling the "Facebook/Twitter = Internet" problem first.
This guy named Glen runs an incredible SEO blog, and he's got case studies of brand new sites/page [1]. He explains how single page sites and YouTube videos are beating out big established sites. His SEO work and breakdowns on his blog are outstanding, and there is great information on there. The marketing departments of every startup should be on this guys mailing list. I have 0 affiliation with him.
I've never seen anyone bring his name up on HN, and it's about time someone does. He has been saying all year: 2013 has been awful from Google's standpoint. People are gaming the system harder than ever, and maybe theres some smart people on HN who could use bits and pieces of what Glen does/preaches.
Since Google is always changing the algo, Startups tend to avoid considering using SEO as a way to get immediate results.. But there is still some time left in 2013, and instead of all the information marketing spammers benefitting, I believe it should be HN (legit businesses & startups)!
While I think Google has done a really poor job of helping smaller sites who've been unfairly hit by these changes, I don't think there is anything underhand going on. I just think Google decided to tune their algorithms to minimise the number of bad results they show.
They appear to be happy with results that favour big brands that they trust, while excluding most of the worst content farms, even though the cost of that is potentially failing to deliver high quality results from smaller sites. I'm sure they have user satisfaction statistics that justify this trade-off they're making. No malevolence or greed is required from Google in this scenario.
In the short term, this is probably good for Google's users, but in the long term, it's creating a two tier web, where new entrants will find it more difficult than they should to compete with established brands.
p.s. There seems to be a similar tradeoff made in terms of newer pages being favoured over older, more relevant pages. It makes sense in some cases (news for example), but in my view, the newness signal is too strong at the moment, and it's hurting the quality of their search results.