

Did Google kill the long tail? - wslh
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2012/01/did-google-kill-the-longtail/

======
alexjgough
No, dear, if your business relied on people spelling words incorrectly you
were already doomed.

Google is a winner takes all deathmatch, except it creates many more winners
by letting different products or services win in every individual search term.
This is the long tail of stuff you couldn't even find out about before the
internet landed in our laps. The long tail isn't even fully populated. You
can't buy a book about unicorns riding skateboards, but I'm sure that once you
can, you'll be able to find it easily through google, or bing, or amazon, or
apple, or well, the whole wonderful internet.

You see, the "long tail" isn't about stuffing dreadful SEO optimised semi-
products cloned from content mills, it's the outlet for creators of awesome
products that no one ever knew they wanted, until the internet let each and
every community of peculiar but particular consumers coalesce. Stop calling it
the "long tail" but call it "commerce", call it "shopping", call it "stuff you
never knew you wanted or could get" but don't confuse it with "stuff people
can't spell".

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grovulent
So - I had a mate that built an application that made it trivial to deploy a
niche ebay site with tens of thousands of pages. He had an insane number of
them - and briefly got his revenue upwards around two hundred k per year (tho
panda kicked in before a year of that income level was achieved). Google raped
his servers indexing all his pages and sent him an enormous amount of traffic.

This was the long tail. Folks trying to get to a place that have the niche
item they are looking for - having to wade through an endless see of affiliate
sites to get there.

Now ignoring for the moment Aaron Wall's thesis that this is all part of
Google shitting on the little guy - here's an undeniable fact:

The proliferation and sophistication of affiliate spammers made it impossible
for Google to continue taking chances on 'unknowns' that hadn't previously
done the work of establishing themselves. Hence the reliance on brand strength
that Google was forced to turn to.

This is unfortunate. It was wonderful to see so many deserving people getting
ahead and building new brands on account of the relative freedom Google
granted to the long tail previously. But making it so cheap and easy to get
ahead in this way attracted a zillion folks that just wanted to suck as much
juice from the system.

Does that mean Aaron Wall and others are wrong about Google intentions? (i.e.
to keep users within their own garden) Probably not... But I think the onus on
folks like Aaron Wall to provide a positive account of what else Google could
have done. Otherwise, I remain convinced that Google was heading into Yahoo
and Myspace land if they hadn't made the changes they have.

------
redthrowaway
The takeaway from this seems to be that Google no longer rewards attempts to
game its SERPs. I can't help but think of this as a good thing.

~~~
chrisguitarguy
The issue here is that it's still really easy to game SERPs, it just takes
more money to do so and a willingness to step in gray hat territory. Search
plus your world has the potential to make it very hard if not impossible to
game SERPs, however.

The takeaway from the infographic should really be that Aaron Wall (of
seobook.com) runs a business that teaches (white hat?) SEO to small business
owners. It's in his best interest to make SEO seem incredibly complex,
difficult, and full of dangers. Which is relatively true: effective SEO is
hard to do. Wall, like any good SEO, keeps up with algorithm changes. He's a
smart guy, and he's most likely figured out how to overcome all of the
challenges in that infographic (for $X.XX he'll show you!). It's linkbait. And
great inbound marketing.

Also, Aaron Wall is a very outspoken critic of Google. There's a post every
week or two on his blog about Google's ethics (or lack thereof). It's really
fascinating stuff, well worth a read [1].

1\. <http://www.seobook.com/blog>

~~~
asd344335345
Being knowledgable in internet marketing, the first thing I spotted was that
the context of this article is to be an advertisement at hackernews et al.

I am tired of "marketers" posting content here, and I suggest that we should
downvote the post and upload the image at an imagehost.

~~~
bad_user
So you're tired of "marketers", yet you think the image has some value, so you
want to rip it off the origin website to remove the attribution?

I'm guessing you're also vehemently against copyright laws.

Also, with a new account you're talking about _advertisement at hackernews_
and being _tired of marketers posting content here_?

I'm just fascinated by how 80% of all complaints about the degrading quality
of HN come from new users.

~~~
redthrowaway
Their username looks like random keyboard mashing, so it's likely a regular
who doesn't want the comment associated with their usual profile.

~~~
bad_user
Or maybe a username that got (hell) banned.

And while I get the need for anonymity, people really need to grow some balls
and stand-up by their beliefs.

~~~
batista
After you, bad_user.

~~~
bad_user
My personal website, which gives away my name, my email and links to my
detailed LinkedIn account (amongst others), is given in my profile and that
link is there for quite some time. I'm not posting under anonymity.

------
resnamen
This infographic is like watching a politician spin their selfish agenda into
a "think of the children!" plea. Pretty funny actually.

~~~
marshray
How so?

(Not knowing much about web marketing and SEO, I feel like I'm missing a lot
of the context to understand this topic.)

~~~
redthrowaway
They're complaining about a shady, user-harming tactic no longer working
thanks to Google's malevolence. It would be analogous to the Drunk Drivers'
Forum complaining about roadside checks penalizing those who had trained
themselves to drive in a straight line while drunk.

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jrockway
Let me guess, Google is also evil for buying the domains "gooogle.com" and
"gppgle.com". How will sellers of gppgles be able to compete with that evil
monopoly!?

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abhaga
I was surprised by the fact that Google no longer passes along the search
query for logged in users. Checked my analytics account and it is now about
7.5% of all organic search traffic and climbing up.

Anyone know the rationale behind this one? How does this help in fighting the
spam? Or how does it improve search experience?

------
CrazedGeek
Original source: [http://www.seobook.com/learn-seo/infographics/longtail-
fail....](http://www.seobook.com/learn-seo/infographics/longtail-fail.php)

~~~
asd344335345
jpg source: <http://image.bayimg.com/hampdaadc.jpg>

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jay_kyburz
Actually, I would think Googles new social search stuff will help promote
small brands. If your friends are talking about a product it will be pushed to
the top of your search results.

Could be great for a little games company like mine. I make very niche games
and have no hope of being ranked for a term like "strategy game". I hope that
if people are talking us in their circles we might get a few more hits.

------
joelrunyon
80/20. They get more searches for the short tail(and more advertisers
therefore), so they're trying to push more people that direction.

Makes good business sense, although it might be annoying for some SEOs

