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How Demand Media Used PR Spin to Have Google Kill Their Competitors
- VladRussian 16y agowhat is the deal with this noise about content farms? A few years ago Wikipedia was a content farm for me - being very "on-topic" it polluted the search results and the few times i clicked on it i was very disappointed by the content. Fast forward to today - majority of my on-topic search ends with me happily reading Wikipedia. Either i became more stupid or Wikipedia content became much more better. I believe it is the latter :)
- Joakal 16y agoIsn't regurgitating content from elsewhere and slapping ads on it, is a content farm? Wikipedia can be a notable exception in that they've never served commercial ads (They had donation ads). By the way, it seems that content farms are synonymous with blogspam. Examples: https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=eHow+was+originally+founded+in+1998+%26+had+%2436+million+in+venture+capital+behind+it+%22Content+farms+are+proving+to+be+a+political+issue+in+search.%22+%22They+are+beginning+to+replace%22&btnG=Search https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=eHow+was+ori...
- VladRussian 16y ago>Isn't regurgitating content from elsewhere how about Wikipedia's "no original research" policy? DemandMedia supposedly pays their authors for writing the pieces - which supposedly means original content. Don't get me wrong. I'm not equaling current Wikipedia and their overall great goal with DemandMedia. I'm just wondering - if the content farm hunt happened several years ago how would Wikipedia survived it. >and slapping ads on it well, i'm for one would like it if search engines rated lower any web pages with ads - more ads (like page real estate taken) - more scores taken out. It is like with Congressmen - more money in donations from Shell - less my trust that the Congressmen will support any anti-global warming efforts.
- gwern 16y ago> how about Wikipedia's "no original research" policy? DemandMedia supposedly pays their authors for writing the pieces - which supposedly means original content. I think you're equivocating over 'original' here. On Wikipedia, it means that everything you write is either directly sourced to another work or basic connective prose and obvious trivial inferences; it's a matter of citations and verification. With DemandMedia it simply means that the prose hasn't appeared elsewhere.
- nanijoe 16y ago>Isn't regurgitating content from elsewhere and slapping ads on it, is a content farm? Would that not then make Google the number 1 content farm in the world?
- byrneseyeview 16y agoSurely that's not the complaint, here. Holding quality constant, ads will make a site better--for a low-quality site, they'll provide links to people who can actually solve whatever problem the site purports to solve, while for high-quality sites they help pay the bills.
- kmfrk 16y agoMaybe Google are about to do a push for Knol. Nyuck nyuck nyuck.
- makmanalp 16y agoWikipedia improves over time (or at least attempts to). Because people put time and effort into it. Also, it keeps references and at attempts to be accurate. The aim is to create a wealth of information. Content farms are mostly the opposite. The aim is to make ad money. Making money isn't a sin but who are we kidding, one of these two generates quality content and the other one doesn't.
- michaelpinto 16y agoWhat kills me is that wikipedia scrapped content out of countless sites on places like geocities which are no longer around — so wikipedia gains the benefits from having the oldest page on said topic.
- justincormack 16y agoIf you seriously believe that show the evidence. You have the geocities archive and the wikipedia dumps. I think you will not find thats where wikipedia was sourced from. For a start most of it was written much more recently than that.
- paolomaffei 16y agoDoes anybody else feel like shorting Demand Media?
- rumpelstiltskin 16y agoJason "will do anything for ink" Calacanis recently gave an about face speech claiming people need to step away from the content farm business model, and in doing so admitted that roughly everything he said about Mahalo over the past couple years was a complete lie. Surprise, surprise. The interesting bit is that the start up community - which used to fawn over his huckster PR driven ploys - no longer buys them. Jason claimed to have "pivoted" his business model again, but once again we see more garbage content. His credibility has been spent. And so have his rankings! Sistrix shows that not only is he ranking for fewer keywords, but that the graph has skewed downward to worse average positions. Amen
- bbsabelli 16y agohttp://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+play+guitar http://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+play+guitar Looks like more of the same to me...
- Andrew_Quentin 16y agoThat is a fairly damning analysis of the farm update. 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.
- yuhong 16y agoCan you say oops?
- beagle3 16y ago> sites and pages ought to be ranked based on quality, Unfortunately, that's very subjective - e.g. I consider almost all programming material on MSDN to be of very low quality, yet I expect results there when I search. Furthermore, assuming an absolute content metric, having several sites with the same "quality" should give the original a high score, and the others essentially zero (unless the original cannot take the load). Algorithmically, you can figure out who the original is by noticing where updates appear first. But that's not a measure of "content quality" - it's a measure of "content farminess".
- athst 16y agoGoogle really should answer to the question why all of these other sites got knocked down but not Demand Media - aren't they the worst offender of all? I'm not sure I agree with the theory that it was their PR that did it. Putting on my tinfoil hat here, but did their recent IPO have anything to do with it? A lot of money is on the line now. 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.
- chadgeidel 16y agoHonest question: Can someone tell me what's wrong with a business model of putting public domain content on the web (like their "Creole cookbook" example)? 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.
- _delirium 16y agoIf it's presented as an archival project (like Project Gutenberg), it seems like it's performing a public service. It's when people are less clear about it that it seems spammy: you're republishing a 1903 cookbook, but not being very clear about the fact that that's what you're doing. Even worse, and not really performing a public service, is when it's republishing old content that someone else has already digitized, like the dozens of sites republishing Project Gutenberg books with no real value-add.
- justincormack 16y agoIf you are obsessed by creole cooking and have some old books as part of your web content, sure. I cant see them making up more than a small proportion of a great creole cooking site though, you need new content, commentary and so on too. Cook all the recipes in the old books and add pictures and descriptions...
- cletus 16y agoDisclaimer: I work for Google. I do not work in search quality (or on search at all). Below are strictly my personal views. 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.
- vaksel 16y agoit took Google how many years to slap down content farms? And they let the biggest offender off the hook...I guess it's just a coincidence that eHow is the biggest content farm and generates quite a bit of money for Google.
- whatusername 16y agotechnically wikipedia is probably the biggest "content farm".
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- nostromo 16y ago> Demand Media further benefited from flagrant spammy guideline violations, like 301 redirecting expired domains into deep eHow pages. People I know who have done similar have seen their sites torched in Google. But eHow is different! 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.
- moultano 16y ago>Google can't as easily remove a larger brand from their results. Google was willing to ban BMW for hidden text. http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=8252259&page=1 http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=8252259&page=1 Also, the author does not substantiate the claim that ehow benefitted from this tactic. "Self-promotion" means getting customers to like your site, not tricking search engines into thinking they already do.
- deleted 16y ago[deleted]
- chaz 16y agoGoogle also buried many of JC Penney's results for linkfarming earlier this month. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/business/13search.html http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/business/13search.html
- nostromo 16y agoWell, since you work at Google, I'll keep walking on egg shells... Please don't kill me all powerful Google! :-P In all seriousness, I liked the Google of 5 years ago that temporarily banned BMW better than the Google of today. I wish that the rules were applied for big and small brands in exactly the same way -- but it doesn't seem they are. When BMW was blacklisted I was impressed -- but this stiff punishment hasn't seemed to happen for JCPenny or Demand Media in the same way it has been applied to smaller businesses. Another example: these are clearly paid links: http://techcrunch.com/2008/10/17/thank-you-techcrunch-sponsors-5/ http://techcrunch.com/2008/10/17/thank-you-techcrunch-sponso... - if small time bloggers try shit like this they get shut down, but this is TechCrunch, so it slides. I think this shows how there seem to be two sets of rules, one for the established and one for the startup.
- po 16y agoEveryone likes to vilify the content farms and scrapers (and they deserve it) but the real villain behind all of this is CPC/CPM based advertising. 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.
- chaz 16y agoWhat's the technology that measures the value of an exposure to an ad?
- ohashi 16y agoWhat magical solution do you have in mind that's better than PPC? I mean it's an open bidding market where advertisers pay for specific results. It's pretty damn fantastic for calculating exactly how much each customer cost and I only pay for a result (click).
- rapicastillo 16y agoIf anyone in Google is interested, you guys might want to check out Jure Leskovec's works on blog influence. I think it has the capability to solve the junk-farming issue.
- someperson 16y agoNot exactly related directly to article, but interesting thought... 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
- chocococo 16y agoI have no doubt it happens all the time. It's common practice for "grey hat" SEOs to test on a competitor site first, before using it on their own site.
- tristanperry 16y agoYep, this is an oft-used argument for why Google might not aim to penalise sites for having spammy backlinks pointing to it. I think that the recent high profile cases have been a tad more obvious since a bit of research can find that it was indeed that company (or their SEO company..) who built the links. I'd imagine that in general, Google would aim to simply discount spammy backlinks for the reasons you mention. Especially since tools like xRumer can build 100,000s of backlinks per day, and various other ones (ScrapeBox etc) can build 10,000s per day...
- jscore 16y agoI must be alone here, but some of the articles in eHow were helpful (ie, how to form an LLC in some states). It was very basic, but it was on the money. 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.
- devtesla 16y agoEven a broken clock is right twice a day. eHow's business model doesn't see any difference between worthwhile content and inane babel. Some people do put good stuff on that site, but I don't know why they bother.
- nhangen 16y agoI've never found an ehow article of any value whatsoever.
- klenwell 16y agoI find it interesting that I've upvoted almost every comment in this thread, pro-Google and con. I guess Google search means that much to me. And I would love to see Demand Media punished.
- zaidf 16y agoI just can't imagine how this can end well for Demand Media when they are an update away from losing a vast majority of their traffic.
- racecar789 16y agoSpent the whole day learning about Oracle functions, queried Google over 100 times, and didn't come across a single BigResource result! Google definitely made an improvement.
- pyre 16y agoOracle searches for me usually turn on either articles by Don Burleson or the Puget Sound Oracle Users Group site.
- nicpottier 16y agoI have to say, I really loved reading this article. It spent just the right amount of time on each topic, had good links to back things up, and generally gave what seemed like a great overview for someone who isn't well versed in the field. Good stuff.
- aaronwall 16y agoThanks. I try hard :)