Yes, it's an unethical, poisonous, money-grabbing pattern that should be banned but aren't there enough folks on HN that are actually making money off of something like this? Talk about the many scraping, passive-income, etc. threads.
Used to work until 2009 or so. Even NYT had shopping.com/ Mysimon /Pricegrabber style sections with borrowed content. The idea is that since NYT is trusted everything there ranks high, and it did. Now it does again since the pendulum has gone so far on the "big brands can do no wrong" side. It's all Google induced and Google cannot find the power to penalize big brands, other than a half-assed 2 week or so demotion.
Today, US Today has eHow powered sections for examples and they rank extremely high.
I'm sorry but I really don't understand what the issue is. I can understand if the problem is that they are using the content from http://head-phones.findthebest.com/ under http://headphones.techcrunch.com/ , not sure if this is ok or not. But about the actual content, is there a problem with a summary of the most important stats of a given list of products?
Wow, what a lovely product description for headphones...
"Grado PS1000
The Grado PS1000 headphones cost $1695, which is the most of all Headphones Additionally, the Grado PS1000 have a sensitivity of 98 dB, which is 6 dB lower than the average for all Headphones. "
That's usually either 1) a stupid Wordpress plugin that everyone uses since no publisher cares about UX or 2) Disqus, which opts into displaying ads with comments, for fortunately is easy to opt out of.
No he's talking about Taboola or Outbrain. Taboola shows up everywhere now. It's those little images at the bottom of pages like on VentureBeat that have nothing the fuck to do with anything and are just noisy bullshit that make the internet worse. There's usually some kind of cleavage or weird picture to get you to notice and click. It's bullshit and no self-respecting sites would never add such a thing.
As demonstrated by the fact that many data driven sites use Taboola/Outbrain (including one I used to work for), users either don't care about them or care about them so little that it is offset by the increased revenue. In fact, as demonstrated by the fact that Taboola/Outbrain get paid when users click, users appear to actually like some of their content.
If users don't mind and actually click through, is it really fair to describe it as "bullshit"?
The problem with spam email is that it operates with a push model - i.e., spam email is forced upon you and you have to do work to avoid it.
In contrast, if you want to avoid Taboola/Outbrain, all you need to do is stop asking content sites that use them to send you data (i.e., don't browse Taboola/Outbrain sites).
Well I definitely don't go to those sites directly. It's usually via links from sites like Hacker News. Adblock blocks Taboola, but I don't use Adblock. I'm not asking you to solve a personal problem for me. I'm saying Taboola is shit. It offers very little value, and there are just enough of us around to click on things of little value to keep reducing the quality of crap on the internet. There's nothing to be done about than to bitch.
Yeah, those sorts of services have been around for several years. I was approached by one a long time ago, but it just seemed too spammy for me. They aren't as bad as the ads that underline keywords in content, but I wouldn't use them.
I think that Google are aware of this. As above, small and large businesses used to do this sort of thing. The animal updates then killed off small businesses who done this, but there was no real negative impact on the bigger guys/the brands. I'm sure it sounds cynical, but I don't think this was a coincidence.
Here's more context about Findthebest with someone from there trying to claim that they have a large editorial team that hand edits the lists http://www.seobook.com/scalable-seo
The thousands of (syndicated) machine-generated pages with scraped product reviews from CNET [1] stuffed with affiliate links, ending with tastefully concealed links to every "[manufacturer] headphones" [2], with no actual relevance or relationship [3] with anything TechCrunch reports on x 5 "guides". It's pretty conventional spam.
[1] extra irony: they nofollow all the CNET links to avoid making the links valuable to their competitor
Basically they use FindTheBest, which takes info from various sources (not just cnet). I guess AOL either owns FindTheBest or they have an agreement with them.
If that is bad, then what do you think of google? Their search engine is a machine-generated series of scraped website snippets, laced with adverts that track practically every site you visit.
Also, what do you think of linkedin (which I see you have an account on?) I can't even view your full profile because linkedin want to screw me for some money to even view anyone's profile now. Also they offer to tell you who has viewed your profile if you pay them money. That seems a lot more shitty than what AOL/Techcrunch is doing in my opinion.
The pages are of no value to the end user and are designed purely to usurp traffic from search engines and shit that traffic out through affiliate links. Instead of getting reviews that matter when you search you get spam tainting the results and getting in your way.
You are fundamentally misunderstanding spam when you relate it to what Google and LinkedIn do. What Google does is sift through this shit trying to find the right answer to whatever question. What LinkedIn does has no relevance at all.
I never said that linkedin or google were spamming. All I was saying is that they are slightly evil and annoying. I'm also not sure I agree with your assessment of the techcrunch reviews.
By my count the company fronting the content has something like ~100 million machine-generated pages polluting the internet as of 6 months ago, being hosted and re-hosted under dozens of different domains. At what point does it become spam in your opinion?
Why they do it? Because it works (until it hits HN front page).
From my experience, running client sites, Google is blindly trusting anything from big brands, screwing the small business sites. It's almost like content quality doesn't matter at all, especially after all the animal updates (Panda, Penguin etc.) Small sites are desperate as they have lost as much as 90% of traffic for no apparent reason.
It must be profitable for Google too, their earnings have skyrocketed since then, even as they hit a plateau in market share. Occam's razor and all.
Edit: The competing theories as to why Google does it are that Google wants to shake small business into advertising, considering that brands already do. Once you lose traffic you can advertise or close doors. Another one is that so-so search results are better to increase ad clicks. Considering that Google has a monopoly and still a strong brand, the second theory cannot be ruled out.
I've seen SMB sites get "getting screwed" by Google, because they had hired an SEO guy who got them backlinks that ended up getting taken away. Or they still have bad on-page SEO.. Most of the time it was a one time hire kind of thing, and they just expected the traffic to always stay the same with no effort.
This guy named Glen runs an incredible SEO blog, and he's got case studies of brand new sites/page [1]. He explains how single page sites and YouTube videos are beating out big established sites. His SEO work and breakdowns on his blog are outstanding, and there is great information on there. The marketing departments of every startup should be on this guys mailing list. I have 0 affiliation with him.
I've never seen anyone bring his name up on HN, and it's about time someone does. He has been saying all year: 2013 has been awful from Google's standpoint. People are gaming the system harder than ever, and maybe theres some smart people on HN who could use bits and pieces of what Glen does/preaches.
Since Google is always changing the algo, Startups tend to avoid considering using SEO as a way to get immediate results.. But there is still some time left in 2013, and instead of all the information marketing spammers benefitting, I believe it should be HN (legit businesses & startups)!
This whole analysis is bad and sensationalistic.
His observation is based on 1 search term. In order to make right conclusion someone should analyze at least tens of thousands (or even hundred of thousands) search terms.
He also analyzed 1st page results only. He didnt even try to see what sets apart 1st page results from 2nd/3rd/4th.
He points to single factor, totally disregarding other factors and their relative importance as part of whole algorithm.
No problem.
IMO he specifically needs to get more attention around here.. It's tremendous information for anyone looking to grow using SEO, and who want the most relevant information possible. I don't know a better SEO resource.
In my experience, the animal updates and other recent changes definitely favour the big brands. My main car reviews site (established 1997) was hammered by Panda, and has never recovered, while the big brands I competed with have been left untouched, despite having content that is often lower quality.
While I think Google has done a really poor job of helping smaller sites who've been unfairly hit by these changes, I don't think there is anything underhand going on. I just think Google decided to tune their algorithms to minimise the number of bad results they show.
They appear to be happy with results that favour big brands that they trust, while excluding most of the worst content farms, even though the cost of that is potentially failing to deliver high quality results from smaller sites. I'm sure they have user satisfaction statistics that justify this trade-off they're making. No malevolence or greed is required from Google in this scenario.
In the short term, this is probably good for Google's users, but in the long term, it's creating a two tier web, where new entrants will find it more difficult than they should to compete with established brands.
p.s. There seems to be a similar tradeoff made in terms of newer pages being favoured over older, more relevant pages. It makes sense in some cases (news for example), but in my view, the newness signal is too strong at the moment, and it's hurting the quality of their search results.
If the shakedown theory is true, and I'm not sure that it is, that's an order of magnitude beyond the evil threshold.
One plus though, businesses still have the option of engaging their local community which may have a stronger effect than just search ads. I feel some people are far too concerned with getting onto the top of Google rather than improving the scaffolding to their sites and driving organic traffic back.
If the shakedown theory is true, and I'm not sure that it is, that's an order of magnitude beyond the evil threshold.
Now I believe it is true, would not have believed it a few years ago. This Larry Page era is full of surprises, and lets remember that all his pet projects (Android, Google+, X etc) are tolerated by investors because earnings are being increased by 20%+ a year. So Google has to do all it can to increase CPC and number of clicks. The ads on pages have been maximized and then some so they need to resort to tricks and penalties for sites. IMO, this is done at senior level Google execs and then Search execs find the excuse to match search algorithms with what's most profitable for Google. So the lowly search engineer is "changing the world" as the execs count the ad clicks, CPC--and their stock options.
Who wrote this: "The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users...But less blatant bias are likely to be tolerated by the market. For example, a search engine could add a small factor to search results from "friendly" companies, and subtract a factor from results from competitors. This type of bias is very difficult to detect but could still have a significant effect on the market. Furthermore, advertising income often provides an incentive to provide poor quality search results. For example, we noticed a major search engine would not return a large airline's homepage when the airline's name was given as a query. It so happened that the airline had placed an expensive ad, linked to the query that was its name. A better search engine would not have required this ad, and possibly resulted in the loss of the revenue from the airline to the search engine. In general, it could be argued from the consumer point of view that the better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want. " ? Larry Page and Sergey Brin back in academia.
>> One plus though, businesses still have the option of engaging their local community which may have a stronger effect than just search ads
The problem is that a lot of people use search to find companies, services and products. Getting frozen out of that is a major handicap. We should support alternative SEs so we have a healthy competition.
The Page and Brin quote is interesting. I searched for it and got the original paper (back when it was called "Backrub"). The relevant quote is in Appendix A: http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html#a
I agree that we should support alternative SEs. The first step might be decoupling "Google" from "Internet" in the mindset for a lot of web users. I don't know if that's even doable at this point before tackling the "Facebook/Twitter = Internet" problem first.
