

Google's Cat & Mouse SEO Game: Google's Collateral Damage - pier0
http://www.seobook.com/googles-cat-mouse-seo-game

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zone411
What I'd like to see somebody from Google explain to me is why Google
considers Wikipedia as an example of a high-quality site (Cutts says so in
[http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/03/the-panda-that-
hates-...](http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/03/the-panda-that-hates-
farms/all/1)), when Wikipedia users copied and regurgitated content from a
website I own at least 4000 times (that's how many times it's been referenced
on different Wikipedia pages, it has likely been copied thousands of more
times without being referenced). Wikipedia ranks #1 or #2 for almost all these
articles when my site is rarely among the top ten and it has also been hurt in
this latest update. How does this work?

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aaronwall
The big issue here is that if you don't get other people to link to your stuff
then Google has little way to distinguish quality vs non-quality, source vs
copy, lower quality rewrite, etc.

While many people find push marketing tasteless and annoying (and perhaps a
signal of poor product quality), the truth is that most successful sites have
relied on the person launching them already having some combination of status
+ influence + distribution + connections, or they used push marketing for a
while to build that following and awareness.

The easiest SEO answer to obscurity or lack of awareness (assuming the on-page
SEO & site structure are solid) is to think territorially & dominate a niche
where you can own the idea. This is a great article on that front.
<http://www.copyblogger.com/how-to-dominate-your-niche/>

~~~
zone411
Right, I understand technical reasons why Wikipedia outranks this site. Google
started by being terribly arrogant in thinking that they are smarter than SEOs
and their search engine would be so hard to game, that they made the Page Rank
values publicly visible. It went downhill for them quickly, necessitating
introduction of no-follow, which is why my site gets no benefit at all from
any of these Wikipedia links. Wikipedia also benefits from all other content
on their site (some of which is admittedly good enough, especially in topics
of interest to programmers).

~~~
aaronwall
Here is another great article for understanding the Google / Wikipedia
ecosystem <http://www.johnon.com/399/google-las-vegas.html>

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ChuckMcM
I really like the info-graphic, but then again I'm kind of a visual thinker.
Perhaps a more entertaining way to diagram it would be "The Land of SEO" which
is really just the outline of Eurasia and you could map Ghengis Khans great
battles to seminal moments in SEO strategy changes. Brad Templeton's email on
ARPAnet about sending a joke a week to a billion people who had to pay a penny
if they thought it was funny would make him a multi-millionaire was fairly
prophetic. With ad clicks or 'page views' standing in for sending fractions of
a cent.

It will be interesting to see how this evolves over time. One of the things I
don't like about the idea of 'tv unplugged' aka the Hulu Model, aka the
Netflix model, is the idea that ads you don't like could follow you from
channel to channel without you being able to switch. This evolution of
Google's strategy between revenue, value, and antagonizing advertisers has
great depth and complexity to it which will take time to play out.

Next up, the great 'unflowering' where all of the useful information gets
locked up behind paywalls and the 'free' information you can get on the
internet is about as useful as the 'free' information you can get from those
papers that are free at the coffee shop.

~~~
aaronwall
I think there will always be some amount of great content accessible because
brand & popularity are required to be able to charge, and there will always be
someone who is either really hungry and willing to put the extra work in, or
they are just doing what they love & delighted to share it.

Pieces may go behind paywall (like our site or iTulip) but they both still
share lotes & sites like KhanAcademy offer tons of great accessible content.

The big issue though is that in most markets people have to get a bit shook
down before they find what they need. I remember thinking that search and ads
were going to be huge when I bought Inktomi & DoubleClick stock during the
last stock bubble. I of course got my head served on a platter on that, but it
was cool to get into search a few years later & be right that time. The Google
IPO gains made up for the losses on the earlier bets, but everything comes
down to timing & then just sticking with something you believe in.

The first site you find in any category won't likely be the best one, just the
one which is the most heavily marketed. But the same was true before their was
a web.

The hard part with paid content is that the more common it becomes the harder
it is for Google or other ad networks to take a big slice of the value chain.
For that reason I see the move to paid online content being a slow one
(outside of niche b2b sort of environments).

~~~
ChuckMcM
Valid points, I won't bore HN with my theories about what makes the
information economy tick but suffice it to say that the value chain will
evolve as efficiencies in the market are developed.

"The Google IPO gains made up for the losses on the earlier bets, but
everything comes down to timing & then just sticking with something you
believe in."

Yes, but Google's performance in the last 5 years hasn't been stellar (from a
stock perspective, instead what might have been dividends is being banked by
the company, which is another rant) The tricky bit is understanding why Google
and not Altavista or Yahoo? Not because they didn't have traction and
penetration, but I believe because they didn't understand the economics of
what they were selling.

Imagine that Zog the caveman starts getting trade goods for pies made out of
mud. He's thrilled and others get into the mud pie business, but one guy
realizes that the pies that people want are round and hard and so he also gets
into the mud pie business but only makes his pies out of hard fired clay. He
becomes the dominant mud pie seller and runs the other guys out of business.
Could they have prevented it? Sure they could but they needed a better
understanding of how and why customers valued their mud pies.

Google got there sooner and it gave them a tremendous advantage, but at the
same time, to completely abuse the metaphor, they realized they had an
elephant's tail and knew when to step aside when the crap came out. But they
still struggle with elephantness, or at least they did 12 months ago :-)

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fourspace
Am I the only one that finds it hilarious that they used an infographic to
describe the pitfalls of handling SEO spam?

~~~
aaronwall
The point wasn't just that Google has to handle spam, but also that they are
stuck dealing with it even as they create/fund much of it ... and that their
"solutions" for round 1 leave unforeseen exploit in round 2 or 3.

To out it as an equation...

increased weight on domain authority + rel nofollow + premium adsense feeds =
Content farm problem

Their latest update left a couple other big exploits open as well.

As far as faulting using an infographic as a format goes, people are more
receptive to them than textual articles.

Sure some people do exploitative crap about total junk & have spammy
storyboards put together by total strangers for $20, but the above was a
storyboard that came from someone who has watched how search has evolved over
the past ~ decade, with literally 20,000+ hours of experience in the SEO game.

I could write a 9000+ word article like <http://www.seobook.com/relevancy/>
but generally the market is more receptive toward infographics. As a marketer
it is generally easier to go with human nature than to try to fight it. That
is marketing 101 ;)

And since people do exploit infographics for links, sure it can seem cutting
edge to label anything in an infographic as 'spam' (or some such), but if you
could find me another online document that has described everything on that
page with better clarity & in a way that is easier to consumer faster I would
be quite surprised.

~~~
fourspace
Right, you're talking about the pitfalls of handling SEO spam, e.g.
unwittingly creating more spam vectors through your attempts to stop previous
ones.

My point about infographics is although they may indeed deliver a message
effectively, they are infamous for being used as link bait to game SEO.

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PaulHoule
I love Aaron Wall's blog, but can't you guys quit being suckers for
infographics?

~~~
aaronwall
How else would you suggest visually laying out the patterns? Would you like it
in a flash file instead? :D

~~~
aaronbrethorst
Prose might be a good alternative. Your infographic is laid out like a
flowchart, but seems to be anything but. I found it extremely hard to follow,
and would've preferred 500 words instead.

~~~
aaronwall
The tricky part was that many of the things were happening in parallel...so it
is somewhat hard to connect it all together. I sorta tried to push it as best
I could into a cohesive organization with themes like "link spam, adsense,
content mills & domain authority" but search is pretty complex and I am sure
we could have done a bit better...one problem with anything like this is
determining how deep or nuanced to go with it. The more information you put on
it the harder it is to keep it organized.

