

Google and blogs: “Shit.” - dce
http://www.marco.org/2015/02/16/google-and-blogs-shit

======
getdavidhiggins
Why are we writing to please Google?

Depending on your reach within social media networks (Twitter, Gplus, etc), it
can be sufficient enough to just migrate entirely. Scoble's blog, for example
is defunct now, and all his content has migrated to social media. See:

[http://scobleizer.com/?p=8494](http://scobleizer.com/?p=8494)

It is not especially required that we write to please Google. All writing
should be done without a bias towards search engine crawlers. "Write like
Google won't index this" is a good rule of thumb.

The goalposts are always shifting. Pretty much the only 'hack' you need in
terms of web traffic is to stay ahead of the curve.

IMHO, Marco should never have to worry about traffic. He might say different,
but Marco Arment is pretty much synonymous with what blogging is about. It's
the newcomers who all need a leg up on how to get traffic. I recommend
watching Rand Fishkin's whiteboard Friday. Some real gold in there.

[http://moz.com/blog/category/whiteboard-
friday](http://moz.com/blog/category/whiteboard-friday)

The old way of doing SEO, of 'set and forget' obviously is dead. You really
have to work hard for traffic. Listicles are only useful if you have no shame.
Buzzfeed are pretty much loathed by the 'independent publisher / indyblogger'
crowd, but then Buzzfeed are making truckloads of cash, so they will never
care as much as we do. They have no shame.

~~~
jarcane
I can't make AdSense revenues from a Twitter account.

In fact, if Twitter or Facebook suspect I'm a professional concern rather than
simply an ordinary Joe, they may expect me to pay them money to promote my
content, or even to make it visible.

I already have dealt with exactly that on my 'regular Joe' FB account in the
past, because I had pages for my book label attached. Thankfully they seem to
have realized that there was zero traffic to them and stopped, but I still
sometimes worry about how much of my stuff is actually being 'curated' out of
my friends' feeds.

------
LukeHoersten
The trend seems to be "blog + feed" all-in-one platforms like Medium.com now.
The old blogging model was the feed readers were separate from the platforms.
I'm not sure if that's better or worse but that seems to be all that's left.

~~~
eli
Honestly, I think people just never really liked using feed readers. I saw in
my own data that RSS usage seemed to top out in the late 2000s.

I'm not really sure why it never expanded beyond the "early adopter" crowd.
Maybe the readers were too hard to use or the benefits weren't explained
clearly. Part of me kinda hopes it's because publishers started caring a lot
more about the design of their sites and people actually preferred the
experience of reading on the original site instead of a "stripped down"
version in an RSS reader.

~~~
stevesearer
This is the reason I prefer that my readers subscribe to my opt-in weekly
email newsletter rather than using Google Reader/RSS. They get a quick little
digest of the top content from the previous week and click through if it looks
interesting.

RSS is still available though, but the email channel is clearly the winner in
terms of people using and interacting with it.

~~~
eli
Yup, it's hard to beat email for engagement. Maybe really well executed push
notifications.

------
ChuckMcM
Marco makes a solid point. The challenge for Google of course is that their
CPC has been eroding for years now. That means the only way to make their
number is to increase the available ad slots on the page, which pushes organic
folks off the page. You can of course spend AdWords dollars and stay on the
page, but then your RPM is offset by your ad spend and you're margins just get
smaller anyway.

Bloggers who use AdSense get stuck even worse, they aren't getting organic
link love and they are seeing the CPC decline as a flat out revenue decline.

The trend to apps is to get away from that of course. Your app will always
show your content. Sites like Reddit and HN become more relevant traffic
generators. And "portal" type sites like Medium will provide variability with
their 'stable' of writers.

I totally agree with him that to "fix" this one has to go at it to build the
thing they want. I'm guessing that is a combination of advertising and
subscription revenue but we'll see.

~~~
bootload
_" CPC, RPM"_

acronym alert?

~~~
ydant
Pretty standard for anyone who follows anything about advertising:

\- CPC = Cost Per Click

\- RPM = Revenue Per Mille (revenue per thousand impressions)

Both the C and R are sometimes used interchangeably - e.g. "RPC" and "CPM"
mean roughly the same thing. It really just depends on which entity and which
way the money's flowing if you think of the players in an advertising game:

[advertiser] -> [advertising platforms - e.g. Google] -> [publisher / traffic
source]

One player's cost is another player's revenue.

~~~
bootload
thx @ydant, never heard this before. Very nice way to describe the process.

------
omarrr
> we need to start pushing back against the trend, __modernizing blogs __, and
> building what we want to come next

this

------
merrua
Google made it really hard to search for blogs or blog articles too. Which is
annoying when you just want to check for articles on something by people
rather than organisations.

------
Yhippa
What does the blog title mean?

~~~
bishnu
Marco famously tweeted "Shit." when Apple introduced an Instapaper clone into
iOS/Safari. He kinda re-uses it whenever a big company does something to
squash smaller ones/individuals.

It's tongue-in-cheek.

~~~
BobMarz
Not that famously it seems. He frets about traffic decline and wants to be
more widely read, yet his headlines have inside jokes?

------
dingaling
What annoys me regarding Google and blogs is that content which is written on
its own Blogger / Blogspot-hosted blogs is indexed and presented in the search
results within minutes.

Everyone else has to wait until the Googlebot ambles along some time later in
the week.

------
mp3file
The sky is falling down!

~~~
eveningcoffee
It appears that it is already down and is crushing bloggers into underground
or into arms of few (one) big players.

