Salon's article today about how they used to spew out high volume, low quality fluff highlights how bad news blogs really are:
- http://open.salon.com/blog/kerry_lauerman/2012/02/03/hit_record and
- http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3562861
Many of the news sites/blogs we see on HN follow some or all of these shitty tactics:
- high volume of cheap content produced by summarizing someone else's news with original sources discretely tucked away so you don't accidentally view the story where it originated
- minimal outbound links but usually plenty of internal ones, especially their precious tag/topic/follow pages ... Mashable's SEO-reinforcing fluff pieces on Apple have made them a page-1 Google result for "Apple", ridiculous. In Business Insider's case they're obviously aware this is an SEO loophole because they disguise them as plain text [1], though others are happy to rack up that extra pageview when you foolishly assume a company or product goes to ... the company or product's page [2]
- tagged with all kinds of useless crap for search engines [3], in The Verge's case they even mislabel them as "related items" so you'll click through at least once or twice till you learn they're just useless SEO pages
- driving up pageviews by breaking up content and photos between pages [4], or in Engadget's bold style by doing a "live blog" with an auto-refresh option that refreshes the entire page
- traffic goldrushes ... when we're really lucky HN's front page will have 5 or 6 rewrites of the same story as each popular blog notices a trending topic and scrambles to produce their 2 paragraph summary and claim their share of the pageviews
- link bait and pandering is normal ... it's hard to believe TorrentFreak built a business out of telling digg users how much The Man sucks for wanting to stop piracy, but what's harder to believe is 6 years later those users have grown up and come to HN where ... they still want to be regularly told The Man sucks for wanting to stop piracy. And then there's the link bait, not just in the form of ridiculous titles and content tailored for this or another site's audience, but also scabby websites commissioning infographics about ponies to market their forex trading site still pull traffic long after they were revealed as a cheap SEO trick [5]
- they're so crazy about trackers, lojacking links, sharing widgets etc that they make the internet feel like dialup all over again... if you use Ghostery you'll be familiar with the giant purple column of blocked services when you hit a tech blog, if you don't you should check it out
- the AOL Way [6] ... when it leaked AOLers scrambled to say it didn't apply to them, it's only for the rest of AOL effectively saying the company-wide policy on link-baited content farming applied to ... the company, but nobody at the company. Except the people who eventually quit [7], because back then it was shameful to be (outed) as a journalist-turned-content-farmer, although not so shameful if everybody knew it but nobody said anything
They're pretty much a de facto standard at this point even though they're crap for the viewer, they're not even that great for the original source [8] their articles come from.
Some sites almost exclusively dedicate themselves to this garbage, some only stoop that low part of the time. All of them do it because this value-less crud has just as good a chance of winning HN, Reddit, Digg, etc as real content but at a fraction of the cost.
Why do we allow it to work?
[1] Usually companies and sometimes valuable keywords on Business Insider are linked via <a class="hidden_link" href="..." rel="noreferrer">...</a> so they appear as plain text, there's about a dozen in this: http://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-admits-it-no-longer-rules-your-workplace-2012-2
[2] http://mashable.com/2012/02/06/samsung-galaxy-note-stylus-backlash/ ... everything is a link to Mashable
[3] http://www.theverge.com/2012/2/6/2774657/nokia-white-lumia-800-release-date tagged with: UK, EUROPE, WHITE, ITALY, POLAND, RUSSIA, GERMANY, CHOICE, SWITZERLAND, RELEASE DATE, COLOR, FINLAND, ANNOUNCED, WINDOWS PHONE, LAUNCH, LUMIA, SKU, VARIANT, LUMIA 800, NOKIA, CELLPHONES for a total of 21 tags on a 6 sentence story
[4] http://news.cnet.com/8301-17938_105-57372103-1/nikon-woos-the-pros-with-long-awaited-d800/ ... you might do a gallery like that as a fallback for the 0.x% of people with no JavaScript, but they choose a poorer experience
[5] http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/d7e24/my_job_was_to_game_digg_using_infographics_voting/
[6] http://www.businessinsider.com/the-aol-way
[7] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engadget#Mass_exodus, somewhat ironic considering The Verve is pretty much Engadget 2.0 .... and this year that'll become official when AOL re-buys them
[8] http://www.tenpoundhammer.com/2012/01/aggregation-gone-too-far-calling-out.html
But I'm with you on the rest of the points!