6 ms·

All these Calacanis / SEO Book cat fights are getting annoying.

• plinkplonk 17y ago
  "All these Calacanis / SEO Book cat fights are getting annoying" the catfights landing on HN (and getting voted up) is doubly annoying!
• vaksel 17y ago
  I disagree. Double standards need to be exposed. If you do any of these things that Mahalo is doing, you'd get delisted from Google in no time.
• byrneseyeview 17y ago
  They're also important. If Mahalo, Demand Media, etc. all continue to do what they're doing, then they'll have built a publisher-paid paywall around most of the content online. That is bad news for anyone who tries to get long-tail organic search traffic. It's good news for sites with great brand names, but terrible news for anyone else.
  • bhp 17y ago
    The concept is important, but the personal attacks (link bait) is what I'm referring to, and is unnecessary.
    • detst 17y ago
      Perhaps unnecessary but they certainly draw more attention and increase the likelihood that something will be done.
  • bobbyi 17y ago
    They are important, but this one didn't really add any new information beyond the ones we've already seen.
  • zaidf 17y ago
    I thought Demand Media was all about original content?
    • byrneseyeview 17y ago
      They are about "original content" in the Google sense. It's not quality content, just well-SEO'd stuff that is 1) good enough for Google to think it's grammatically-correct English, but 2) bad enough that contextual ads on the article will still get clicks.
      • patio11 17y ago
        Guys, draw a big circle around point #2 here and remember it: Demand Media understands the user psychology of CPC ads better than any Valley startup you've ever heard of. They want their content to suck because if it satisfies the users' needs then the users will not click the ads. If, on the other hand, it introduces the topic and leaves the user feeling "Where do I go next?", then the only options from a Demand Media page are either a) other worthless articles or b) CPC ads. And people choose door #2 quite frequently. This kind of frustrates me to the extent that I compete with Demand Media (limited, but real), because there is absolutely no circumstance under which a Demand Media article is a better result for the user than a page on my site if we're in competition, but Demand Media has the economics of it nailed such that they can produce content for some genres at scales I can't possibly keep up without duplicating their core strategy (automated keyword selection -> cheap freelancer -> post without substantial quality control), pushing my related content out of the SERPs and then charging me for the clicks I would otherwise be getting for free.
        • enjo 17y ago
          Do you rank better for pages you do compete on head-to-head?
        • byrneseyeview 17y ago
          I got Point #2 from your blog, by the way. So thanks!
  • qeorge 17y ago
    Its not fair to lump Demand in with Mahalo. Demand's business model is filling in holes with their own original content, not scraping (or "aggregating") other people's content. AFAIK, Google views their relationship as symbiotic, not parasitic.
    • byrneseyeview 17y ago
      Demand Media does not produce high quality content. They product content that is good enough to rank (i.e. it's written in English) and unique. But they have a strong incentive to have bad content! If your article on "how to make pancakes" tells someone how to make pancakes, they close their tab and make pancakes; if it's 300 words of "original content" that makes no sense, you'll end up clicking through to another site (that has to pay for the privilege). When you think of how many struggling freelancers use those long-tail guides to build their business ("How to shoot a commercial for a gym," or "How to write brochure copy for life insurance,"), you can see the magnitude of this problem. People who could trade their time for traffic now have to trade their money for traffic. When they're just getting started, money is harder to come by than time. The result: fewer people creating this kind of content, more of them joining organizations that pay for the traffic instead.
      • greyman 17y ago
        But, doesn't Demand only occupy one slot in search engines result pages for a certain keyword search? Even if Demand would create billions of articles, one for each conceivable search term, other nine spots in first 10 search results are still available for others, aren't they? All in all, I still think this is primary a Google problem, not Demand's. They can publish anything they want, it's their right protected under free speech. It's Google which should be concerned about quality of their pages.
        • byrneseyeview 17y ago
          The #1 search result gets about 40% of all organic clicks. And Demand Media has more than one property (eHow, Wikihow, Cracked, livestrong.com). So I wouldn't be surprised if there were some searches for which Demand Media got more than half of all traffic. You are correct about this being Google's problem. These guys exist to exploit an arbitrage opportunity: Google's search algorithm picks them, and the average searcher's which-engine-do-I-choose algorithm picks Google. In the long run, one of these things will stop being true.
• brown9-2 17y ago
  I wish someone would summarize this fight for those of us who haven't been following it blow-by-blow.