Did Google kill the long tail?

http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2012/01/did-google-kill-the-longtail/

by wslh • 14 years ago

36 23 14 years ago

ritholtz.com

CrazedGeek• 14 years ago

Original source: http://www.seobook.com/learn-seo/infographics/longtail-fail....

asd3443353454• 14 years ago

jpg source: http://image.bayimg.com/hampdaadc.jpg

redthrowaway3• 14 years ago

The takeaway from this seems to be that Google no longer rewards attempts to game its SERPs. I can't help but think of this as a good thing.

chrisguitarguy• 14 years ago

The issue here is that it's still really easy to game SERPs, it just takes more money to do so and a willingness to step in gray hat territory. Search plus your world has the potential to make it very hard if not impossible to game SERPs, however.

The takeaway from the infographic should really be that Aaron Wall (of seobook.com) runs a business that teaches (white hat?) SEO to small business owners. It's in his best interest to make SEO seem incredibly complex, difficult, and full of dangers. Which is relatively true: effective SEO is hard to do. Wall, like any good SEO, keeps up with algorithm changes. He's a smart guy, and he's most likely figured out how to overcome all of the challenges in that infographic (for $X.XX he'll show you!). It's linkbait. And great inbound marketing.

Also, Aaron Wall is a very outspoken critic of Google. There's a post every week or two on his blog about Google's ethics (or lack thereof). It's really fascinating stuff, well worth a read [1].

1. http://www.seobook.com/blog

asd3443353454• 14 years ago

Being knowledgable in internet marketing, the first thing I spotted was that the context of this article is to be an advertisement at hackernews et al.

I am tired of "marketers" posting content here, and I suggest that we should downvote the post and upload the image at an imagehost.

alexjgough• 14 years ago

No, dear, if your business relied on people spelling words incorrectly you were already doomed.

Google is a winner takes all deathmatch, except it creates many more winners by letting different products or services win in every individual search term. This is the long tail of stuff you couldn't even find out about before the internet landed in our laps. The long tail isn't even fully populated. You can't buy a book about unicorns riding skateboards, but I'm sure that once you can, you'll be able to find it easily through google, or bing, or amazon, or apple, or well, the whole wonderful internet.

You see, the "long tail" isn't about stuffing dreadful SEO optimised semi-products cloned from content mills, it's the outlet for creators of awesome products that no one ever knew they wanted, until the internet let each and every community of peculiar but particular consumers coalesce. Stop calling it the "long tail" but call it "commerce", call it "shopping", call it "stuff you never knew you wanted or could get" but don't confuse it with "stuff people can't spell".

jrockway• 14 years ago

Let me guess, Google is also evil for buying the domains "gooogle.com" and "gppgle.com". How will sellers of gppgles be able to compete with that evil monopoly!?

resnamen2• 14 years ago

This infographic is like watching a politician spin their selfish agenda into a "think of the children!" plea. Pretty funny actually.

marshray• 14 years ago

How so?

(Not knowing much about web marketing and SEO, I feel like I'm missing a lot of the context to understand this topic.)

redthrowaway3• 14 years ago

They're complaining about a shady, user-harming tactic no longer working thanks to Google's malevolence. It would be analogous to the Drunk Drivers' Forum complaining about roadside checks penalizing those who had trained themselves to drive in a straight line while drunk.

grovulent• 14 years ago

So - I had a mate that built an application that made it trivial to deploy a niche ebay site with tens of thousands of pages. He had an insane number of them - and briefly got his revenue upwards around two hundred k per year (tho panda kicked in before a year of that income level was achieved). Google raped his servers indexing all his pages and sent him an enormous amount of traffic.

This was the long tail. Folks trying to get to a place that have the niche item they are looking for - having to wade through an endless see of affiliate sites to get there.

Now ignoring for the moment Aaron Wall's thesis that this is all part of Google shitting on the little guy - here's an undeniable fact:

The proliferation and sophistication of affiliate spammers made it impossible for Google to continue taking chances on 'unknowns' that hadn't previously done the work of establishing themselves. Hence the reliance on brand strength that Google was forced to turn to.

This is unfortunate. It was wonderful to see so many deserving people getting ahead and building new brands on account of the relative freedom Google granted to the long tail previously. But making it so cheap and easy to get ahead in this way attracted a zillion folks that just wanted to suck as much juice from the system.

Does that mean Aaron Wall and others are wrong about Google intentions? (i.e. to keep users within their own garden) Probably not... But I think the onus on folks like Aaron Wall to provide a positive account of what else Google could have done. Otherwise, I remain convinced that Google was heading into Yahoo and Myspace land if they hadn't made the changes they have.

abhaga• 14 years ago

I was surprised by the fact that Google no longer passes along the search query for logged in users. Checked my analytics account and it is now about 7.5% of all organic search traffic and climbing up.

Anyone know the rationale behind this one? How does this help in fighting the spam? Or how does it improve search experience?

jay_kyburz• 14 years ago

Actually, I would think Googles new social search stuff will help promote small brands. If your friends are talking about a product it will be pushed to the top of your search results.

Could be great for a little games company like mine. I make very niche games and have no hope of being ranked for a term like "strategy game". I hope that if people are talking us in their circles we might get a few more hits.

joelrunyon• 14 years ago

80/20. They get more searches for the short tail(and more advertisers therefore), so they're trying to push more people that direction.

Makes good business sense, although it might be annoying for some SEOs

Did Google kill the long tail?

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