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But as soon as you search for a specific model, the spam gets out of control. Try to find a review on a particular model, or whether it's comparatively good, a

by robk 17y ago

But as soon as you search for a specific model, the spam gets out of control. Try to find a review on a particular model, or whether it's comparatively good, and you'll get very little material but tons of price shopper sites and other spammy reviews sites.

ugh 17y ago
Hm, I don’t know anything about specific dishwasher models but I tried current digital cameras. I got Amazon, Wikipedia, various reputable review sites and one or two reputable price comparison sites. No spam. When it comes to dishwashers the cause of the problem may be very simple: there are no reviews online (or anywhere). At least not when it comes to the dozens of same old and bland models dishwasher companies tend to spew out. (And since I don’t know anything about dishwashers this statement was most certainly a gross oversimplification for which I apologize to all the busy dishwasher engineers out there.)
tptacek 17y ago
"Long-tail" SEO is definitely a weakness in Google quality control. It is remarkably easy to get yourself into the first search result page by autogenerating specific pages for specific models, a trick I learned recently from patio11, and for which I surely owe him a drink (my mom, a teacher, already has enough bingo cards).
- patio11 17y ago
  The 45 second explanation of this: Fat head SEO is dominated by the link graph, which is (by design) difficult to influence in a scalable algorithmic fashion. Long tail SEO is dominated by on-page factors, domain authority, and information architecture [+]. If you have a reasonably trusted domain name and a way of generating hundreds or thousands of pages of more than minimal value, you'll tend to rank for those subjects by default. This doesn't have to harm the user experience, incidentally. I am fairly upfront about what I'm doing: there are about 700 pages on my website which cost me about $3 each to write, and they are all designed to rank highly for a single search term or small basket of search terms. Probably 95% of them deserve the #1 ranking on Google because they are the best content for that search term on the Internet. (Better than 80% of them are the only content for that search term on the Internet.) Similarly, the context the discussion I had with Thomas was also about creating user value out of a resource he already possessed but wasn't surfacing in a manner optimal to either searchers or his business interests. [+] Edited to add information architecture, which I forgot to mention because I haven't worked on improving it in a while. Effective content siloing and interlinking is a major factor in why my site works as well as it does.

by robk 17y ago

ugh 17y ago

Hm, I don’t know anything about specific dishwasher models but I tried current digital cameras. I got Amazon, Wikipedia, various reputable review sites and one or two reputable price comparison sites. No spam. When it comes to dishwashers the cause of the problem may be very simple: there are no reviews online (or anywhere). At least not when it comes to the dozens of same old and bland models dishwasher companies tend to spew out. (And since I don’t know anything about dishwashers this statement was most certainly a gross oversimplification for which I apologize to all the busy dishwasher engineers out there.)

tptacek 17y ago

"Long-tail" SEO is definitely a weakness in Google quality control. It is remarkably easy to get yourself into the first search result page by autogenerating specific pages for specific models, a trick I learned recently from patio11, and for which I surely owe him a drink (my mom, a teacher, already has enough bingo cards).

patio11 17y ago
The 45 second explanation of this: Fat head SEO is dominated by the link graph, which is (by design) difficult to influence in a scalable algorithmic fashion. Long tail SEO is dominated by on-page factors, domain authority, and information architecture [+]. If you have a reasonably trusted domain name and a way of generating hundreds or thousands of pages of more than minimal value, you'll tend to rank for those subjects by default. This doesn't have to harm the user experience, incidentally. I am fairly upfront about what I'm doing: there are about 700 pages on my website which cost me about $3 each to write, and they are all designed to rank highly for a single search term or small basket of search terms. Probably 95% of them deserve the #1 ranking on Google because they are the best content for that search term on the Internet. (Better than 80% of them are the only content for that search term on the Internet.) Similarly, the context the discussion I had with Thomas was also about creating user value out of a resource he already possessed but wasn't surfacing in a manner optimal to either searchers or his business interests. [+] Edited to add information architecture, which I forgot to mention because I haven't worked on improving it in a while. Effective content siloing and interlinking is a major factor in why my site works as well as it does.