Google

I don’t hate Demand Media or Richard Rosenblatt. I do get a little annoyed when I am searching for stuff on Google and end up seeing results written by people who obviously knew nothing about what they were writing. Demand Media’s properties and affiliates are hardly alone in that regards.

That is not what this blog post is about.

What I find very concerning is that Richard Rosenblatt and others want to change the definition of content farm. This is a common technique used in manipulating public opinion (thanks Edward Bernays!)

So lets set the record straight: not only is Demand Media a content farm, the phrase “content farm” was created specifically to describe Demand Media’s business model.

In a recent interview at paidcontent.org, when asked if Google thinks Demand Media is a content farm Rosenblatt responded: “I think content farms have become such a general term that everyone is just throwing around. You know content farms could be automatic, non-human content that scrapes other people’s articles like ours, steals them, and publishes them. So, I mean, I don’t know what they define content farms as. We don’t see ourselves as one.”

With a few quick searches on google by date range, I took a look at what the top results on Google had to say about “content farm”:

152,000 2010 – #1 My Summer on the Content Farm (working for demand media) http://www.theawl.com/2010/11/my-summer-on-the-content-farm

70,200 2009 – #1 Content Farms: Why Media, Blogs & Google Should Be Worried “I’ve been writing a lot about so-called ‘content farms’ in recent months – companies like Demand Media and Answers.com which create thousands of pieces of content per day and are making a big impact on the Web.”

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/content_farms_impact.php

45,500 2008 – #1 “Farm Stands” — top rankings refer to agriculture and MS tech. We can assume the the phrase “content farm” not only originated in 2009 but it was specifically in reference to Demand Media.

Run the searches yourself. Until Google started to pretend that content farms were something they were not, everyone appeared to be in agreement that Demand Media was a content farm.

What Rosenblatt is describing above is not a content farm at all — it is a scraper site. Scrapers have been around in the blackhat seo world since the 90s. The wikipedia entry for “content farm” was created in July of 2010. As the Google search results show, this is a new term. What did that first Wikipedia entry say a content farm was? “In the context of the World Wide Web, the term content farm refers to a website that generates large amounts of textual ‘content’ by paying third-party contractors.” I agree.

Today what does Wikipedia say content farms are? “In the context of the World Wide Web, a content farm is a company that employs large numbers of often freelance writers to generate large amounts of textual content which is specifically designed to satisfy algorithms for maximal retrieval by automated search engines. Their main goal is to generate advertising revenue.”

Why is Google so intent on pretending that Demand Media is not a content farm? Why does Matt Cutts pretend that no one thinks that content farming is a problem? Why did a recent Google update bitchslap nearly every major content farm except Demand Media’s?

Demand’s relationship with Google raises a lot of questions. As a publicly traded company Demand may be legally obligated to disclose the nature of this unusually close relationship to its investors.

Google has been making internet publishers rip out their own hair since their first search algorithm update. Thats ok, publishers don’t own Google’s results. However, one would expect a little more respect going out to those responsible for multi-billion dollar profits, the advertisers.

Graywolf made a good post questioning the most recent update to Google’s placement algorithm. PPC Blogger has his own thoughts as well. Bottom line, Google’s official updates now sound more like a Nostradamus quatrain than anything remotely logical or straight forward. Is Google becoming more confusing and convoluted — both to publishers and advertisers?

I don’t pick apart Google’s updates, but I have a few ideas. Since financial fraud HYIP ads are still covering Google I am quite certain no one there is reading my blog (that might be a good thing.)

#1. Google’s book smarts have asphyxiated the street smarts. Sometimes companies benefit by not having the ability to only hire the top .01% of graduates.

#2. Google is trying to distract publishers and advertisers with zany tricks. Trying to keep the desire to crank up their profits while minimizing spam a secret is like hiding an elephant behind a stop sign.

#3. Little guys are being trampled. The days of part time campaign management are over. PPC search marketing is a full time job, as hard as SEO, and more risky financially.

#4. Accelerating revenues through algorithms instead of letting the market set its own prices will lead to investor shock during an economic down cycle when upward bid price trends reverse.

#5. The only clients who win are blackhats who spend the time to reverse engineer Google’s paid search ranking algorithm.

I should probably lay off of the negative Google posts, but it seems to be a hot topic now of days.

The amount of bad publicity Google gets appears to be steadily increasing. There was once a time where Google was viewed as the good guys. The whole “don’t be evil” thing really did represent Google’s early years. Once symbolic, post-IPO few care about it anymore.

I think there are two groups which may have the strongest impact on Google in the upcoming months:

1. Business owners who rely on Google’s traffic, free and paid. In the past, major algorithm changes angered many. These voices were relatively neutralised as other web site owners naturally recieved placements others lost. The Adwords quality score is as it has an across-the-board negative effect on the entire userbase.

2. Privacy advocates have been around for a long time. As long as Google provides a service in exchange for private information privacy advocates voices will be muted. Despite decades of e-mail most users still broadcast private messages across the web when free encryption is available to them. I think we will see the same happen with search — i.e. average users don’t care.

Wal-Mart suffers from a noisy opposition. Much like Google, Wal-Mart’s opposition originates from displaced business owners. The difference is Wal-Mart’s opposition has matured and spread to new evangelists who may actually have little to gain financially. This appears to also be in part from the low-income stereotype surrounding the discounter — something Google does not have to worry about.

The biggest risk is government intervention. Anti-Google views could ignite the passage of laws that require thousands of other businesses to comply as well. In proportion to size, the large companies absorb the compliance costs while the small guys are crushed by it.

Interesting article about ex-Google employees in the San Fransisco Gate. This particular part stuck out at me. May be its just a disgruntled former Google employee, may be there is something more:

“Whitted, who helped design several generations of Google’s servers, said the company was increasingly bogged down by its size. Conservatism was creeping in… ‘Instead of inspiration-based design, it became fear-based design,’ Whitted said.”

Its no secret, on the internet things change fast. Leaders come and go. A new leader may be on its way; and I don’t think it will come from Microsoft.

I was just alerted to some new Google features while reading Content Matters: Google Co-op and Google Trends. I’m taking a look at Google Trends and I am very impressed.
You can check out Google Co-op here. Google Trends is available here.

As an example I mapped trends for “Adsense” and “click fraud.” Google trends maps search volume all the way back to 2004. I am a little curious about the geographic data for results; for these two terms the top listed results are Kuala Lumpur and Dehli.

On example of practical use of this data would be finding out if your niche is in decline or building volume. This kind of data could also help predict seasonal traffic patterns (good example, duck hunting.)

I am still taking a look at Google Co-op. Overall, I am quite impressed by Google Trends.

Here are a few other interesting charts I’ve found, in case you are drawing a black on keywords to look at:
real estate bubble
gas
illegal immigration
new movies: mission impossible 3, an american haunting, united 93, silent hill, scary movie 4
luxury cars: rolls royce, bentley, bmw, mercedes, lexus

Think Adsense is an unsustainable business model? As Lee from the Forum Fix points out, Adsense raked in about $10 million dollars a day of revenue at Google last quarter. Perhaps a publisher making $10,000 a day off of Adsense actually is pretty reasonable.

Every so often I sit back and take a look at a situation in perspective. I don’t consider myself a Google worshiper, but the fact is their system of contextual advertising is having a dramatic impact on the internet. Adsense connects buyers with sellers in an incredibly efficient way, and allows web site owners to focus on building great sites rather than focus on finding individual advertisers.

Is the “system” perfect? No; but what is?

Take a look at this search on Google: “350z nissan” Right now this search is displaying a special Google Base search section. Interesting to note, this doesn’t appear for either “350z” or “nissan 350z” Let the speculation begin. Click here for a screenshot.

Google just launched their new Google Finance service. One of the unique features that differentiates it from Yahoo! Finance is the “blog posts” aggregation. The first symbol look-up I did, GOLD, listed this under their blog posts. Splog or not? You decide.

Blog spam aside, it is nice to see Google giving equal oppurtunity time to blogs. I am very curious to see what effect this could have on financial markets. On the other hand, it may open these bloggers to scrutiny (from the SEC) they would rather avoid.

Don’t want to work today? Check this out. You’ve seen Google Moon, now here is Google Mars. For fun, search “face”

There are more than a few publishers who have taken an aggressive stance against ad blockers. If you are one of those people, you are not going to like this story. Google is stripping out ads and republishing pages to be viewable on mobile phones.

Straight from the horse’s mouth (Google’s official blog)

If you search for [Super Monkey Ball DS release date] in an ordinary web browser on your PC, your first result is this complex, graphics-rich page. Search that same phrase on Google with your mobile phone, though, and your top result is this lightweight, phone-friendly version of the same page. That’s because now whenever you click on a Google search result through your mobile web browser, Google automatically translates the page’s layout to make it as easy as possible to read on a small screen. We also break long-winded web pages into smaller pieces and do our best to show you the portion that’s relevant to your query, first. 

Translation of “easy as possible to read on a small screen” = “we remove the ads”

Will this fly? One of the corner stones to Perfect 10′s carefully crafted lawsuit over Google Images was that they were selling thumbnail-sized photos as mobile content, thus eliminating the fair use argument.