Demand Media, for instance, was created with this business model. Figure out what people are searching for, create somewhat unique content in bulk that matches the title tags and other keywords in the search terms, place Google ads all over this content and  voila … Demand Media’s eHow.com articles rank on the first page of Google search result for hundreds of thousand of searches. By the way, Demand Media is reportedly going to generate $200 million in revenue this year and may be worth a billion dollars in large part because of these Google Adwords clicks.

It is a fascinating business model; A content assembly line creates content specifically for Google searches and Google then pays millions for Google ads clicked on that content. Unfortunately, it does raise questions about whether Google has a conflict of interest in being both the main supplier of traffic and revenue for these bulk article sites while also earning substantial revenue for itself? After all, if these articles didn’t result high in Google searches this mass content production model wouldn’t work.

I have followed the SEO industry for years and our WebProNews reporters have interviewed countless Google product managers on the subject of ranking well in Google.  Google’s mantra has been for publishers to make quality content for their users and not for its search engine. Google’s position is that quality content will rise to the top of its SERPS. 

However, Google seems to be sending content creators a mixed message. Demand Media is creating as many as 5,000 articles and videos each day for the purposes of ranking in Google. If Google’s message is for publishers to create content for their readers, not just to rank in Google, then why is Demand Media’s content ranking so well in Google? 

The answer could be that for thousands of long tail searches, Demand Media’s content is quality enough. The vast majority of Google searches on any given day include a search term that will get less than a hundred searches a day. What content farms such as Demand Media do is provide articles and videos that are optimized for these rarely searched terms. The content is often mediocre, but it is unique and it has a title tag and other keywords that match these targeted searches. 

The problem as I see it is that while Google is highly ranking the content of these mass production publishers it also has a financial incentive to do so. Almost all content farms use Google Adwords for their revenue. So while Google on the one hand encourages publishers to make content for their readers and not just for search ranking, it is in partnership with sites that do just that. 

This should make publishers wonder about their business models. Should they spend thousands paying reporters and editors to create quality content for their users or should they simply create a content farm that pays little for bulk quantities of articles and videos but gets lots of Google love?  

I guess if you can make content for the purpose of ranking in searches … but make it targeted, unique and not horrible, then you might find that Google well reward you quite well.

Is this the future of online publishing?

There is a post over at Search Engine Land by Danny Sullivan entitled "Conversation With An Idiot Link Broker". To cut a long story short, some guy tries to broker a link deal with Danny, seemingly not knowing who Danny is, and Danny plays him along. Danny reports him to the Google spam team.

For the sake of furthering discussion, I’ll play devils advocate

Regardless of anyone’s views on link buying, it is wrong to mislead people. Danny clearly felt this guy was being misleading, and gave him a number of chances to clarify his position. But is buying and selling links really as "risky" a behavior as is being made out?

It might be considered a risky behavior if you spend a lot of time obsessing about Google, as SEOs tend to do. However, links are the glue that binds the web. Link buying and selling started long before Google existed. It will always happen.

It’s called advertising.

But it would be disingenuous not to see what Danny is really talking about here. He’s talking about buying links for the sole purpose of gaining link juice. I can understand why Google takes a dim view of this practice. . Paid links compromises Google’s business model.

Fair enough. If I worked for Google, I’d take the same stance.

For Danny Sullivan, given the level of exposure of his site in the search world, the risks presented by link trading would be significant. Regardless of Danny’s personal opinion on such practices, such a deal would clearly be a non-starter. The link seller is a fool for, above all else, failing to identify his customer.

However, for most sites, the reality is that the risk of link buying and selling is probably negligible.

Google taking out the occasional site amidst a storm of publicity doesn’t mean much when there are tens of thousands of sites that clearly do not receive the exact same treatment. If one site in two got hammered, it would be a different story, but it is likely the figures run into one site in thousands. It then becomes a matter of weighing one’s chances of being detected and punished by Google against the potential rewards on offer.

For example, there are credible, Fortune 500 companies engaged in buying and selling links. The risk of big names being taken out for any longer than a day or two is near zero. If you run the sort of big name site searchers expect to see in the results, Google probably aren’t going to leave you out on a technicality. This would compromise their business model, because Google must deliver relevant results.

Is it up to the link seller to outline all the potential risks involved? Apart from the comical farce of a link seller failing to identify Danny Sullivan, how big a moral crime has the guy really committed? Do Google outline all the risks associated with using their products and services? Or is Danny cunningly implying that Google’s algorithm cannot determine which links are paid, and in fact relies on people filing reports?

A moral tone runs through such discussions, and I’m not sure it is entirely consistent.

Google are a business and their pronouncements must be considered in this context. They will act in their own interest, and those interest may or may not align with your own. Are we at risk of ceding the assumption of moral superiority to Google when they may not deserve it? Google, like you, are trying to earn a crust, and any organization may not be entirely transparent and morally consistent in all they do. Who do you call out, and who gets a free pass?

Google certainly holds the power, and if being in the SERPs matters a lot to you, then you should stay within Google’s guidelines. It’s also fair to say that, these days, even this approach offers no guarantees.

Tread wisely

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Here is an image of the ‘Old Layout’:

If you would look closely at the above image, you’ll find that the display URL for the advertisement is in coherence with the description. Also, there are four advertisements in the console.

Now take a look at the ‘Improved Layout’:

In this image you’ll notice the display URL has been moved underneath the description and also the console now only contains three advertisements.

There are several interesting posts at Search Engine Roundtable Forums. Here a few excerpts from that thread:

“Overnite, it looks like Yahoo has done another major change to their sponsored ads. On some of the keywords that I follow that normally show 4 ads above the organic results, it’s now only three – very consistently! Also, the ads look simultaneously more compact (closer together), and yet bigger (the URLs are now on a line by themselves). Looks like Yahoo may be finally able to more efficiently monetize, and can now afford to show fewer ads. Can others verify?”

“I see it now, blogging it up. Thanks!”

This new change is a classic example of Yahoo! following Google’s every move. Now, the way I see it, if this isn’t being a copycat, then I don’t know what is.

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This show of enthusiasm from the webmasters and site owners, led Google to put up an another post by the name of ‘Take advantage of Universal Search part 2‘. Here, the Google trend analysts have provided more recommendations to satisfy the webmasters’ appetite for answers.

Some of these recommendation are as follows:

Local search- Help nearby searchers find your business: The site owners are primarily interested in localised searches for their businesses. So, these are a few tips from Google on this topic:

a. Add your business to the Google Local Business Center.

b. The business should always be listed under the correct category.

c. The business name and contact details should be visible on the entrepreneur’s website, and should be accessible to the search engines.

d. Add additional information about the business, so as to let the visitors decide, whether the business suits their needs or not.

Video Search- Enhance the video results: Google’s ‘Video Sitemaps protocols‘ lets the site owners specify a preferred thumbnail image for video, when they appear in the SERP.

Personalised Search Basics:

a. Ranking changes affect the personalization of search results.

b. Topic specific websites are recommended, as they would stand out in personalised searches. For e.g., instead of making a website about automobiles, create a dedicated site to one particular model.

c. Use Geographic Targeting and Local Business Center, to let Google identify, as to which area the website would be most relevant to.

d. Pay extra attention to detail about the content of the website. Both internal and external.

Image Search- Increase the visibility: Make sure those images that maybe considered explicit or objectionable should not be used within the website, as the Safe Search option in the Google Search Engine will filter them out. In case, the Safe Search is filtering the images that seem fit to be viewed in general, then the site owner can use the ‘Contact Form‘. Select ‘Report a problem->Inappropriate or irrelevant search result’ and let Google know your concern.

These tips and recommendations are designed specifically for webmasters who want their page ranks and other factors about their websites to rise to the top.

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Google snippets are those short pieces of text that appear under each item in a Google Search Engine Report Page (SERP). They too have a strict limit of 155 characters and spaces, just a little more than a Twitter tweat. Google snippets are produced by computers. Perhaps it’s time for Google to re-examine its snippets reasoning, because it is questionable how successful it is.

If you believed the Google documentation, you might believe that Web page Descriptions would be a key summary of the content of Web pages in their keyword search results:

We frequently prefer to display meta descriptions of pages (when available) because it gives users a clear idea of the URL’s content. This directs them to good results faster and reduces the click-and-backtrack behavior that frustrates visitors and inflates web traffic metrics.

They even go so far as to encourage you to Improve snippets with a meta description makeover:

The quality of your snippet — the short text preview we display for each web result — can have a direct impact on the chances of your site being clicked (i.e. the amount of traffic Google sends your way). We use a number of strategies for selecting snippets, and you can control one of them by writing an informative meta description for each URL.

In practice it doesn’t turn out exactly like that. You need to choose very carefully the exact words of your Descriptions if they are to be used at all, as you can see in (You Must) SEO Those Descriptions For More Google Visitors.

A post by William Slawski suggests why this is happening. It relates to Google’s fixation on inlinks to a Web page. So they may well Use Anchor Text to Determine the Relevance of a Web Page. In such a case, perhaps they wish to justify their reasoning by including it in the Snippet they construct to show the item is Relevant. Bill’s advice if this is affecting your Google appearances runs as follows:

If you run a web site, you may have visitors coming to your pages based upon the content anchor text in links pointing to your pages instead of the text upon your pages themselves. If the term is one that you want to be found for, you may want to consider adding some text to the page, if possible, using that query term, to provide a more persuasive snippet for the search results.

Perhaps if you put that persuasive language in the Description, it has a better chance of surviving that snippet creation process.

Standing well back, you might even question how customer-centric Google snippets are. Are they really the best way for searchers to find what they’re looking for? Perhaps they are motivated by a wish to prove that some apparently obscure item should logically appear in the SERP. Why else would you add in text taken from other related Web pages? The resulting snippets often seem much more attractive to computers than to the human readers they are intended for.

So do Google snippets work for you? Would you like to see Google change how it helps you to find what you’re looking for? Perhaps your comments here could trigger some rethinking.

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"a search on dmoz (the Open Directory’s nickname) does not return the home page in the search results.

Similarly, searches for open directory or open directory project also don’t list the site at the usual dmoz.org address. Yes, the screenshot shows a page at search.dmoz.org — but normally, the home page would be listed at www.dmoz.org or just dmoz.org

(as you can see at Yahoo, Microsoft and Ask, for example)."

The best part is that ‘a search for www.dmoz.org‘ does not even show results of the Dmoz home page. To add more insult, the home page does is not even included in Google’s cache.

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Just a little kidding, there.

Nielsen is famous for his preference for simplicity and leaving well-enough alone, arguing that it serves the end-user better. So asking him about how much a Web interface will or should change, seems a bit, well, counterproductive. Forecasting requires a little optimism, even wild idealism at times, neither of which seem to be Nielsen’s strong suit.

Regardless, he has a lot to say on the matter, and I think he may be right about much of it, especially since Gord’s questions centered on what happens within the next three years. Nielsen think reinventing the SERP is like reinventing the wheel.

 A Behavioral Shift

In the past decade, SERPs have switched from "an information retrieval oriented relevance ranking" to "a popularity relevance ranking," with a strong dependency on the number of links a source gets.

"I think there is a tendency now for a lot of not very useful results to be dredged up that happen to be very popular, like Wikipedia and various blogs," he said and, in my imagination, wiped his eye with his middle finger.

"…. So I think that with counting links and all of that, there may be a change and we may go into a more behavioral judgment as to which sites actually solve people’s problems, and they will tend to be more highly ranked."

Personal Problems

Many have said that personalization will solve relevancy problems in the future, with each individual user dictating what kind of results he or she wants to a learning machine. Nielsen doesn’t think that will happen within this decade, or even the next.

"All this stuff..all this talk about personalization, that is incredibly hard to do. Partly because it’s not just personalization, based on a user model, which is hard enough already. You have to guess that this person prefers this style of content and so on.  But furthermore, you have to guess as to what this person’s “in this minute” interest is and that is almost impossible to do. I’m not too optimistic on the ability to do that.

And as for relying on people to tweak an engine to their preferences to make them better, Nielsen harkens back to sliders and other modifiers of search engine past that required too much work on the user side.

"So people are inherently lazy and don’t want to exert themselves. Picking from a set of choices is one of the least effortful interaction styles, which is why this point and click interaction in general seems to work very well."

Agreed. People are lazy, selfish little monkeys.  (The above is taken a little out of context, so be sure, if you’re interested, in reading all of Nielsen’s statement about evolutionary development and the role of laziness in it.)

Navigating the Obstacle Course

One of the favorite difference people like to cite for Google’s success is its clean, simple interface. Text advertisements are a testament to this as well, as the problem of "banner blindness" was largely eradicated in the SERPs.

Hotchkiss mentions Marissa Mayer’s rather spooky avoidance of the question about whether banner ads would be reinstituted at Google. But we’ll be optimistic and assume that won’t happen.  

But we wonder, if images and videos and news and clutter start showing up on Google’s clean interface, will another instance of banner blindness occur. Only if they’re deemed irrelevant, says Nielsen.

"Images turn out to be repelling if people start feeling like they are irrelevant. It’s a similar effect to banner blindness. If there’s any type of design element that people start perceiving as being irrelevant to their needs, then they will start to avoid that design element."

Google said, “Currently, we investigate every spam report from a registered user. Spam reports to the unauthenticated form are assessed in terms of impact, and a large fraction of those are reviewed as well.”

A comment on WebmasterWorld thread states, "Google had repeatedly said that they looked all bad search results reports
And they just said it again.”

Another one says, “I have been thinking this for quite some time as I have reported a site hidding text etc for months and it has risen in the serps and not dropped. I also feel all this sudden losing key terms is the act of this so called panel and not the algo so now I fear we are at the mercy of rouge panelist who may know nothing about a site structure but just like what the stupid thing looks like.”

Do check out the thread to know more about the critical comments Google received for its post, An update on spam reporting.

Comments

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A handful of bloggers were asking "did you see that?" referring to a sudden, and brief, fluctuation in keyword positioning in the Google search results. SEObook’s Aaron Wall begins the discussion:

[A] number of keywords I watch I have seen large authority sites get demoted in favor of smaller niche players with spammy keyword rich backlink profiles. I am seeing things like spammy new(ish) lead generation sites outranking fortune 500s and long standing industry association sites.

Commentators in the peanut gallery say they saw it too as positions slipped from the top to as far as ten pages down and then returned to normal, as if it were just a Google hiccup. Many suspect it was a "data refresh" rather than a full update.

Michael of GoogleOrganic.com submits:

[I]f it was an update there would be serious movements on these keywords for me by now. With that said a data refresh would seem possible.

I have noticed over a long period of time that while a data refresh is very important, it usually goes through a "cycling" period with minimal shifting, but seems to "bounce back" to a more normal flux within a week.

But commentator "Cygnus," thinks it’s more specific:

I see a few things that can probably be summed up as one change…the sandbox/trustbox was modified to be less restrictive on age and theme. I’m betting it’ll tighten up again, but hopefully just on the theme.

To me, this was their way of tackling the ever-growing .edu spam. A lot of that is gone from some of the SERPs I watch.

Well, whatever it was, it’s over and everybody can get back to their Anna Nicole Circus coverage.

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You want a directory listing for the authority link and the improved Yahoo ranking, but your home page link will then show in search results with your directory listing title and not the page title you spent so much time crafting. Your site gets more visibility, but potentially suffers from lower click through. Even if you don’t have a listing in their directory Yahoo may now be grabbing page titles from another source that could potentially be damaging to your brand.

John Kline of SearchBliss called my attention to this through a thread he started at the Webmaster-Talk forums. John noticed an odd result with Yahoo’s SERPs when he searched for his site by name. If you search Yahoo for searchbliss you’ll notice the link shows ‘powered by SearchBliss’ instead of his page title.

SearchBliss doesn’t have a Yahoo directory listing so the title result isn’t coming from there. The site’s DMOZ listing is simply the site name so that’s not it either.

The culprit seems to be the free tools SearchBliss uses as linkbait. John lets other sites grab the form code to allow you to make use of his tools on your site. Each of these tools comes with an image link back to the SearchBliss site with ‘powered by SearchBliss’ as the alt attribute text. Search engines will generally fall back on alt text as anchor text for an image link. Yahoo seems to be using this anchor text as the link title because it’s the most common anchor text pointing back to the home page of the site.

I checked a few other sites at Yahoo with searches for the company name and all are showing something other than the actual page title. The sites I looked at were my own, some client sites, and a handful of other sites I know not to be in the Yahoo directory. In all cases something other than the page title is showing in the Yahoo results.

The Danger Of Using Anchor Text For Link Text In Search Results

For most sites this is not a big deal, no more so than the situation of being included in the directory. The majority saw their company name as the link in the results, but the SearchBliss case shows how this might not always be the case and it also shows how using anchor text as SERP titles can be dangerous for a site.

You’re probably familiar with the keyword phrase ‘miserable failure.’ A lot of bloggers not liking George W. Bush used that phrase as anchor text to point to his bio at the WhiteHouse.gov site. Consequently it if you search ‘miserable failure’ at major search engines guess what page shows up #1. The search is an example of the power of anchor text in rank, but let’s take it a step further.

Imagine that the term ‘miserable failure’ was the most used anchor text pointing to the page. If Yahoo is basing SERP titles on the most common anchor text, not only would the George W. Bush page rank #1 in Yahoo, but the link would be Miserable Failure.

So you’ve recently entered a new market that’s not overly competitive. Most of your competition has only a few links back to their domain. You decide to send links their way with the anchor text ‘domain sucks’ or ‘domain ripped me off’ or something else that sheds a negative light on their brand. I can think of a lot worse things to say, but hey it’s a family blog.

Admittedly most of the extreme anchor text would be quickly spotted. How about simply rewriting their page title in a more subtle way to reduce click throughs on their link? Many site owners would never notice. You would conceivably be giving your competition some links and perhaps improving their search results for certain keywords, but if you link to them from some bad neighborhood sites you probably won’t be improving their TrustRank scores with the links.

It’s possible Yahoo has some guards against this happening, but a hunch tells me they don’t. Yahoo using the information from their own directory in SERPs is something webmasters have been complaining about for years, but giving the control over the text displayed in search results to the competition is unacceptable.

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Steven Bradley is a web designer and search engine optimization
specialist. Known to many in the webmaster/seo community by the username
vangogh, he is the author of TheVanBlog, which focuses on how to build
and optimize websites and market them online.