Such a big post I thought it’s best to split it up into two – so check out Why I Love Panda: Part Two just here. If you haven’t checked out Pandalized.com yet, then take a look. Even if you’re not strictly an SEO it’s a great data set showing the big hits taken to content farms in the wake of Google’s Panda Algorithm updates. I find eHow.com’s graph particularly interesting. Three seemingly mega hits in succession, reducing it to pre-2010 levels.
Seeing this data, you can only really say that Google’s approach has been nothing short of brutal. Across the board falls come rapidly and almost instantly from updates. There’s clearly not been much of a warning. Some of these ‘businesses’ must be getting seriously worried about their future. But do I feel sorry for them? No I don’t. There are plenty of reasons why – so many and I had to pour out so much that I’ve had to split this over two posts! Here we go with the first three reasons of why I love Panda.
Gaming Algorithms and Reducing Content Cost
Demand Media have profited for quite some time by building a system that basically worked out many uncompetitive long tail search terms, and created content for a vast variety of long tail searches. Having a long tail strategy is fine, but I feel doing it on this scale devalues online content; particularly when an amateur is getting paid the pittance that Demand award. Consequently, journalism as an online paid profession is now at serious risk.
Check out TechCrunch’s recent article – Now Can We All Agree That The “High Quality Web Content Experiment Has Failed? The economics of professional online journalism in comparison to how print operates largely doesn’t work. Content is not sold, thus there is a huge chunk of revenue removed from the model. The only viable option for online journalism is currently where it’s used to sell products (ASOS.com, web editors of the world salute you).
Demand Media style models squeeze the possible profit margins on online content. Content farms inevitably drove the value of properly researched professional content down. I agree wholeheartedly that you can get very useful insight from a site like HubPages, but more often than not you have to go through quite a lot of tosh. I’m wondering, for instance, why any writer would like to become a daddy on HubPages rather than on their own publishing platform, unless they had the ulterior motive of self-promotion. I would assume the majority of people writing on this site are doing so to promote their own agendas and sites rather than for love of their topic. Hey, I’ll even admit it – I deliberately achieved a 75+ Hub score to link back to some sites and have the rel=”nofollow” removed. The content was ‘quality’ enough for this to happen.
Panda slams the models that game search engines – it celebrates authoratitive authorship built up over time.
Link Building via Content & Further Devaluation
I’ve previously worked for an SEO agency for more than a year where I was a ‘copywriter’, but the only real point in my copy being published was so that links to clients could be inserted into it. I certainly learned a lot about airport parking, credit cards and car insurance, but the knowledge that my writing was created to be linked and not seen was soul destroying. Writing that is used to game search engines and content as a commodity needs to go. Content should be used to build audience and engagement, not fill up the web with keyword heavy titled documents that answer huge amounts of search queries, linking to a client who may not deserve those links.
Panda sees content not as a commodity, but as something written by a human being.
Affiliate Problems
That SEO is affiliated with spam is nothing new. Indeed it’s often affiliates who are responsible for SEO spam. Affiliates – those people who don’t have any of their own products to sell. I’ve got no problem with affiliates; I am one myself on an extremely small scale. But it’s curious that you can expect to sell a product indirectly and rank you higher than your partner who does sell it directly. It’s their system, their business, which you’ll be using. They’re the ones who have taken the risk in setting up the system and invested in it. I’m weirded out by affiliates that rank higher than the original product. Yes, marketing is far more than just selling products; it’s about how you sell them, but people who create original products deserve to rank higher than those that piggyback them. Make something original, rank higher – that logic should mix with product as well as content. If you create a system that allows better comparison of products, then certainly you should be allowed to rank high as an affiliate, but someone who is taking a product and repackaging needs to be wiser.
Panda should help smack affiliates, and get the original stuff closer to the top.
Check out – Why I Love Panda: Part Two
