How Demand Media Used PR Spin to Have Google Kill Their Competitors

http://www.seobook.com/google-kills-ehows-competitors

by tortilla • 15 years ago

102 65 15 years ago

VladRussian2• 15 years ago

what 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• 15 years ago

Isn'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+ori...

VladRussian2• 15 years 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.

nanijoe• 15 years 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• 15 years ago

Surely 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• 15 years ago

Maybe Google are about to do a push for Knol.

Nyuck nyuck nyuck.

makmanalp• 15 years ago

Wikipedia 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• 15 years ago

What 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.

justincormack2• 15 years ago

If 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• 15 years ago

Does anybody else feel like shorting Demand Media?

ohashi2• 15 years ago

I thought about it... but their stock went up.

vtisix• 15 years ago

HN is a leading indicator.

rumpelstiltskin• 15 years ago

Jason "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• 15 years ago

http://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+play+guitar

Looks like more of the same to me...

Andrew_Quentin2• 15 years ago

That 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• 15 years ago

Can you say oops?

beagle3• 15 years 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".

athst2• 15 years ago

Google 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.

aaronwall3• 15 years ago

I was not saying that eHow's public relations saved them, but rather it is what caused the backlash against content farms.

athst2• 15 years ago

Whoops - sorry I misunderstood the nuance

chadgeidel• 15 years ago

Honest 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• 15 years ago

If 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.

justincormack2• 15 years ago

If 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• 15 years ago

Disclaimer: 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• 15 years ago

it 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• 15 years ago

technically wikipedia is probably the biggest "content farm".

Andrew_Quentin2• 15 years ago

"Search, as I see it, is an arms race."

Search is not an arms race. If someone provides content of a better quality than others they ought to prevail. So if gaming the system is by producing better quality content, then fair enough.

If, however, gaming the system relies, as it does currently, on simplistic rules, such as keyword density, keyord in H1, and bold, and italic, and within the first few sentences, and all these other rules, then yes it does become an arms race and it proves really that those awfully talented people and bright aren't really much of either.

Rather than getting into an arms race which is damaging for everyone, google would do better to sit back, and ask a simple question, how can intrinsic quality be determined? Links are one way. Another way may be the language level which google has recently announced about websites. On that point, if google is able to determine the level of language a site uses, that is high level, medium or low, then surely google is able to determine the quality of the site?

Maybe, google is just too stuck in one paradigm and cant bring itself back and actually focus on the question that matters, how do you determine quality, rather than make some small tweaks which took the seo industry a grand one day to determine.

ZoFreX2• 15 years ago

"Language level" is not a good metric. This comes up from time to time, with one site or another analysing your "writing level", frequently by re-purposing Flesch–Kincaid readability tests[1]. These tests tell you how hard it is to read something, and the assumption then is that my writing is better than yours because mine is "11th grade" and yours is "8th grade". Of course, having higher entry requirements does not mean my writing is in any way better, and may actually mean the converse - if you had written, for example, an accurate account of quantum physics that was accessible to 8th graders, that would be an impressive writing accomplishment indeed! An example of a site that would be unfairly penalised by measuring language level would be the simple English Wikipedia[2].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flesch%E2%80%93Kincaid_readabil...

[2] http://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

nostromo2• 15 years 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.

moultano6• 15 years 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 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.

chaz2• 15 years ago

Google also buried many of JC Penney's results for linkfarming earlier this month.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/business/13search.html

nostromo2• 15 years ago

Well, 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-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.

bjplink• 15 years ago

It's much easier for Google to ban BMW when they don't run AdSense than it is to shutdown Demand Media and directly impact Google's bottom line.

patio11• 15 years ago

Google was willing to ban BMW for hidden text

That lasted, what was it, 48 hours? I have no interest in picking a fight, but for the benefit of other HNers because this really matters for their businesses: there is definitely a point in brand value where the rules change. A one-man operation who pulled a BMW would get terminated without a second thought and would find it very, very difficult to get their old rankings back. Google can't do that to BMW because if BMW can't rank for auto-related queries in Germany then Google looks stupid.

(Public sanction like the BMW thing is more a messaging tactic than anything else. I mean, case in point, we're talking about a single identifiable incident prominent enough to be mentioned in the mass media in a foreign country multiple years ago. Ditto the incident where Google Japan got wrist-slapped for buying reviews. What's the French phrase "to encourage the others"?)

jdp23• 15 years ago

When we discussed this before the algorithm change, people -- including me -- pointed out that the Demand Media relationship earned Google $50M a year, and this was likely to influence their engineering at some level. moultano argued that due to Google's self-organization, it wouldn't work out that way. Lo and behold the change rewards demand media and small startups' blood boil. Just sayin' ...

trevelyan• 15 years ago

Hold on... sorry if this is off-topic but I have two older domains that redirect into parts of my new site where the exact same functionality is offered. The redirect is a 301 redirect. I thought this was the right way to do things. Am I being penalized by Google for this? Should I just operate those pages directly on the old domains?

moultano6• 15 years ago

No, that's the right way to do things. The practice he's talking about is buying someone's old domain in an attempt to use its existing backlinks for SEO.

po• 15 years ago

Everyone 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.

chaz2• 15 years ago

What's the technology that measures the value of an exposure to an ad?

ohashi2• 15 years ago

What 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• 15 years ago

If 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• 15 years ago

Not 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• 15 years ago

I 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• 15 years ago

Yep, 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• 15 years ago

I 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• 15 years ago

Even 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• 15 years ago

I've never found an ehow article of any value whatsoever.

klenwell• 15 years ago

I 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• 15 years ago

I 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• 15 years ago

Spent 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• 15 years ago

Oracle searches for me usually turn on either articles by Don Burleson or the Puget Sound Oracle Users Group site.

nicpottier• 15 years ago

I 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.

aaronwall3• 15 years ago

Thanks. I try hard :)

How Demand Media Used PR Spin to Have Google Kill Their Competitors

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