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This is really just a rehash of other posts from the last month (linked in article). This post basically complains about two things: the finer points of SEO an
by cletus 16y ago
This is really just a rehash of other posts from the last month (linked in article).
This post basically complains about two things: the finer points of SEO and content farms.
Content farms is an easy one. They're the Web equivalent of spam and I'm talking about the likes of Associated Ontent and Demand Media. They re a relatively new (last few years) phenomenon.
My personal view is that no one is better placed to deal with this new threat than Google. Email spam is basically a solved problem on Gmail. Thats not ss there aren't false positives and negatives but it's oohing like it used to be or could be. It'll take time but I believe that content farms are a transitory and doomed business model.
As for product searches, this encompasses many things. Anecdotally I recently searched for "<camera make and model> review" and found what I wanted no problem. Prices I found on pricegrabber (they have an iPad app).
SEO is a trickier beast. For one it's a constantly moving target. A combination of suboptimal source SEO and content farm SEO gaming allows the scrapers to survive. I can't say that keyword position matters all that much. Anecdotally Jeff claims it does but many factors are at pay so it's always best to be careful about making absolute claims.
Jeff claims not to want to be acquired. I'm reminded of a story I heard. Basically: if you wanted money (from angels) ask for advice. If you wanted advice, ask for money (IIRC this story came from either Mark Suster or Jason Calacanis, can't remember).
So, if you want to be acquired, say you don't?
Lastly, I'll reiterate my own opinion that social search isn't the answer in the general case (ie it will have specific use cases).
Content curation is a mixed bag. I believe there will (for at least a very long time) be a place for niche verticals. For example, dpreview is a vertical for cameras. General purpose models like Mahalo I think are doomed for much the same reason that Jeff and Joel have contended that general Q&A sites are doomed.
- mootothemax 16y agoEmail spams basically a solved problem on Gmail I don't want to move the discussion away from web spam, but I disagree with your statement. I have email for several domains hosted on Google (as well as a regular Gmail address) and they all suffer from legitimate emails regularly going into the spam folder. A quick search has shown that I'm not the only one suffering from this problem.
- cake 16y agoI had the confirmation of an order from an online store directly into the spams recently, I guess too many people dislike their newsletter or something. It took me a while to figure it out and wasn't sure if my order was properly registered, if I mistyped my email or if it was a problem on their side. Lesson learned, now I systematically scan and empty the spams.
- Silhouette 16y agoI concur. Spam is only a "solved" problem on services like Google Mail if you consider a high rate of false positive detections to be a solution. I suspect this is one reason that many of my friends now use Facebook as their default messaging system -- which is a pain for those of us who don't want to use Facebook, and even more so if we send our e-mails from a personal domain that tends to get arbitrarily flagged as junk by services like Google Mail and Hotmail the first time we write to each friend.
- eli 16y agoIf you think gmail has a high rate of false positives, I encourage you to try Hotmail or (especially) Yahoo.
- ximeng 16y agoYahoo works pretty well for me. Occasional false positives and negatives, but it's generally about right.
- eli 16y agoReally? Hmm, maybe it's because it's a very old address, but my Yahoo spam filtering is terrible. For example, I get a few very similar Canadian pharmacy junk messages every single day. Even though I usually mark them as spam, they continue to appear in my inbox. It never learns. Additionally about 1 in 4 order confirmation emails ends up in the Junk folder.
- 16y ago
- true_religion 16y agoWhenever I find an efreedom article linking back to Stackoverflow, its on the first page. The original stackoverflow article on the other hand is on page 3 or 5 or greater. I'm not sure what Stackoverflow is doing, but in this case efreedom is providing me a service by making this content easily found in a search engine. Sure its one more click, but in my mind the alternative is never being able to find the SO article at all. My workflow involves looking at multiple articles, so I can't simply put 'site: stackoverflow.com' into my search.
- cletus 16y agoCan you give me some concrete search terms that have this ranking discrepancy? I want to investigate and just haven't seen it yet myself.
- Hoff 16y agoSomething has changed here. Aging or a ranking tweak or Phase Of The Moon, something. A search from a couple of days ago is now returning SO above EF, where that wasn't the case a few days ago. Ah, here's one from the search history with EF above SO: retaincount instruments There are several eFreedom hits from the first page, and SO has one hit on page 2 and one hit on page 3. I have screenshots of the first three pages.
- Matt_Cutts 16y agoThanks for giving a concrete example. I'd gotten a couple examples when talking to Jeff Atwood earlier and passed that on to the appropriate team, but more concrete examples always help when we're trying to rank the sites in the best order.
- Matt_Cutts 16y agoBy the way, if people want to mention more examples of other sites outranking Stack Overflow by replying here, I'll try to circle back to check for them, then use them to poke the relevant team to make sure we're doing everything we can.
- dhimes 16y agoI find far product searches to be far more efficient on Amazon. In fact, I think Amazon is the real threat to Google. I'll try to browse Google (but it's harder to do now for the reasons mentioned), but when I am ready to buy, I always check Amazon. OT: did you type your commment on an ipad?
- cletus 16y agoAmazon is an example of a niche vertical. A pretty big one mind you but nonetheless they specialize in the products they sell. I can't seem to remember Amazon coming up on product searches I've done. I have to wonder: - Is this because I went straight to Amazon? - Am I misremembering? - Is there something wrong with Amazon's SEO? - Is Amazon restricting the their content being indexed (I can't imagine this is true)? - Is Google actually failing here? OT: Yeah my typo rate on my iPad is pretty terrible. I'm too used to touch typing on a keyboard. Still, I find myself reading the Wen on my iPad instead of a laptop/desktop these days so I need to put up with the typos (and get better with any luck), not comment or move to a computer to comment (not going to happen).
- jonknee 16y agoThey show up for in SERPs all the time. http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=the+confession http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8... http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=+Asus+A52F-XE2 http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&q=+Asus+... http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=Toy+Story+3+dvd http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8... Etc etc. I see them all the time in Google, despite also searching Amazon directly quite a bit.
- dhimes 16y agoI tend to go straight to Amazon when I'm price shopping now. If it's an "Amazon product" (books, electronics, etc) they usually have a pretty good price, and if they don't they give me the comparison. The big difference is: With Google, I'll research and occasionally get my wallet after finding something. With Amazon, get my wallet before I sit down. As someone who pays for advertising this is a distinction I pay attention to, especially if it generalizes to more people than just me: people going to Amazon are ready to buy and not just doing research. If Amazon can make that stick I think they pose a significant threat to Google. Why pay as much for research clicks when you can get clicks that are closer to a sale?
- jwhite 16y agoApologies for nitpicking, but your post was quite hard to read due to typos. Most of the time my brain auto-translates typos without me realizing it, but the ones in your post really interrupted my reading flow. YMMV. The content was interesting, thank you. Good point about niche sites like dpreview.
- cdavid 16y agoEmail spam has no monetary value for google, whereas web spam may (I don't know whether they benefit from ads revenue from link farm and co, but that seems at least plausible). I wonder if the search quality issue is not also linked to a vast increase of the size of internet - searchs are the same throughout the years (couple of keywords), for more and more websites. Maybe vertical search helps there just because they reduce the amount of data to look for ? As noticed by some other people, I have used google all my internet life (since 2000 or so), and google has never ever be useful to look for things like hotel, off the shelve software information, etc... I did notice a decrease of quality in technical searchs like API, etc... (where google has always been effective up to now), I wonder if something changed the last few months.
- ZachPruckowski 16y ago"<camera make and model> review" Which is fine if you already have narrowed down your camera options to a top-5 or so, but the issue is getting to that stage.
- joe_the_user 16y agoThis is really just a rehash of other posts from the last month (linked in article). This post basically complains about two things: the finer points of SEO and content farms. Yes indeed, on the money. Further, the attitude of these various whiners is pathetic. The war on spam-in-a-general-sense is not never going to be won or lost. The war for attention simply, inherently, has too many dimensions to be winnable or losable. As long as there's benefit for merely getting people attention, there will be people who successfully put out low-content, attention-getting information in one form or another. Human beings themselves are often often satisfied with less-than-stellar-content, how then could a given algorithm be expected to filter for stellar content? Google and other filtering-entity's ability to provide us with stuff we're satisfied with will fluctuate. They won't ever be done. The "good" providers won't ever be fully satisfied and the "bad" provider won't ever completely go away. Any "new Google" will be "the same as the old Google". Let's move on.