
How Demand Media Used PR Spin to Have Google Kill Their Competitors - tortilla
http://www.seobook.com/google-kills-ehows-competitors
======
nostromo
> Demand Media further benefited from flagrant spammy guideline violations,
> like 301 redirecting expired domains into deep eHow pages. People I know who
> have done similar have seen their sites torched in Google. But eHow is
> different!

Hearing this is what makes my blood boil as a small startup. Small and new
brands are walking on eggshells trying to balance self-promotion without
pissing off Google. Meanwhile larger brands regularly practice black- or gray-
hat SEO and survive because Google can't as easily remove a larger brand from
their results. But if you're small, Google can and will kill you in an instant
without recourse. The ramifications of this are bad for the internet -- it
means higher barriers to entry for startups.

~~~
moultano
> _Google can't as easily remove a larger brand from their results._

Google was willing to ban BMW for hidden text.
[http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=8252259&page=1](http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/story?id=8252259&page=1)
Also, the author does not substantiate the claim that ehow benefitted from
this tactic.

"Self-promotion" means getting _customers_ to like your site, not tricking
search engines into thinking they already do.

~~~
patio11
_Google was willing to ban BMW for hidden text_

That lasted, what was it, 48 hours? I have no interest in picking a fight, but
for the benefit of other HNers because this really matters for their
businesses: there is definitely a point in brand value where the rules change.
A one-man operation who pulled a BMW would get terminated without a second
thought and would find it very, very difficult to get their old rankings back.
Google can't do that to BMW because if BMW can't rank for auto-related queries
in Germany then Google looks stupid.

(Public sanction like the BMW thing is more a messaging tactic than anything
else. I mean, case in point, we're talking about a single identifiable
incident prominent enough to be mentioned in the mass media in a foreign
country multiple years ago. Ditto the incident where Google Japan got wrist-
slapped for buying reviews. What's the French phrase "to encourage the
others"?)

~~~
moultano
I believe the policy for things like hidden text is to revert as soon as the
problem is fixed. (Google attempts to email the webmaster about the problem
with whatever email address is available, and also puts a notification in the
webmaster console.)

------
rumpelstiltskin
_Jason "will do anything for ink" Calacanis recently gave an about face speech
claiming people need to step away from the content farm business model, and in
doing so admitted that roughly everything he said about Mahalo over the past
couple years was a complete lie. Surprise, surprise. The interesting bit is
that the start up community - which used to fawn over his huckster PR driven
ploys - no longer buys them. Jason claimed to have "pivoted" his business
model again, but once again we see more garbage content. His credibility has
been spent. And so have his rankings! Sistrix shows that not only is he
ranking for fewer keywords, but that the graph has skewed downward to worse
average positions._

Amen

~~~
bbsabelli
<http://www.google.com/search?q=how+to+play+guitar>

Looks like more of the same to me...

------
po
Everyone likes to vilify the content farms and scrapers (and they deserve it)
but the real villain behind all of this is CPC/CPM based advertising.

Can you imagine a world where your attention was sold off based on how long
you stayed on a page rather then how often you switched pages? If google wants
to fix their search results, they should focus on fixing adsense. The
technology to more accurately measure a viewer's exposure to an ad are there,
it just needs a trustworthy player to bring it to market. Someone trusted by
both users and advertisers.

Google made click/impression-based advertising appealing to both groups and it
made them what they are now. It's time to get away from it.

~~~
ohashi
What magical solution do you have in mind that's better than PPC? I mean it's
an open bidding market where advertisers pay for specific results. It's pretty
damn fantastic for calculating exactly how much each customer cost and I only
pay for a result (click).

------
Andrew_Quentin
That is a fairly damning analysis of the farm update.

I think ultimately, sites and pages ought to be ranked based on quality, and
not on whether they are a content farm, or even spam and google should be as
neutral as possibly in its determination of the algorithm, focusing instead on
only ensuring the quality is what prevails, and of course relevance.

What possibly has happened is that google has been forced to act in a rush,
under pressure, possibly stress, and so the final product is probably a knee
jerk reaction which does not address the underlying problem.

You can not make 100 percent of people 100 percent happy 100 percent of the
time. Moreover, if you are such a powerful force as google you ought not to
respond to pressure groups, such as a vocal minority, and act in reaction to
their specific demands, that only causes problems.

But maybe the question of search has now become so difficult that indeed it
has turned into a political self interested game. Youtube is hardly a site I
would want to appear in most of searches which are not about videos.

~~~
beagle3
> sites and pages ought to be ranked based on quality,

Unfortunately, that's very subjective - e.g. I consider almost all programming
material on MSDN to be of very low quality, yet I expect results there when I
search.

Furthermore, assuming an absolute content metric, having several sites with
the same "quality" should give the original a high score, and the others
essentially zero (unless the original cannot take the load). Algorithmically,
you can figure out who the original is by noticing where updates appear first.
But that's not a measure of "content quality" - it's a measure of "content
farminess".

------
cletus
Disclaimer: I work for Google. I _do not_ work in search quality (or on search
at all). Below are strictly my personal views.

I can't (and won't) comment on the specifics of this change. In fact, my
knowledge of them is pretty much what everyone else's is.

What I will say is that in the last few months there have been several stories
about the quality of Google search results in the last few months (eg scraper
sites rating higher than the original).

The problem I see with such criticism as leveled with those episodes (and this
one too) is that there is the implicit premise that Google's search results
and algorithm are static. This most recent change should be evidence of that.

So while Google's search is algorithmic the people who are in charge of it are
not. To put it another way: if you try and game Google's system, it will
possibly work _for a time_ but at some point, when the problem is viewed as
being of sufficient severity to warrant attention, that algorithm will change.

Search, as I see it, is an arms race. SEO, particularly black hat SEO, is on
the other side of that. But this isn't as simple as SEO. The world changes
over time too. New business models form. New memes come into existence (eg the
idea of social search).

So let's assume for a second the OP's argument is sound and that Google has
merely killed off Demand Media's competition. If true, there are now a lot
less content farms on highly ranked pages than there used to be. Sounds like a
win to me. Is it a perfect solution? No. But is it better? Absolutely.

Google's mission is to deliver quality content to it's users. The more people
use our properties, the more money we make. We are very focused on the user
experience. Gaming our system is, at best, a short term proposition as there
are an awful lot of bright and talented people here constantly striving to
defeat such attempts.

~~~
vaksel
it took Google how many years to slap down content farms? And they let the
biggest offender off the hook...I guess it's just a coincidence that eHow is
the biggest content farm and generates quite a bit of money for Google.

~~~
whatusername
technically wikipedia is probably the biggest "content farm".

------
athst
Google really should answer to the question why all of these other sites got
knocked down but not Demand Media - aren't they the worst offender of all? I'm
not sure I agree with the theory that it was their PR that did it. Putting on
my tinfoil hat here, but did their recent IPO have anything to do with it? A
lot of money is on the line now.

When I saw the Sistrix data I was surprised to see Wisegeek take a big hit,
because I usually get some utility out of most of their content (even though
it is now plastered with google ads), whereas eHow is almost always useless.

~~~
aaronwall
I was not saying that eHow's public relations saved them, but rather it is
what caused the backlash against content farms.

~~~
athst
Whoops - sorry I misunderstood the nuance

------
jscore
I must be alone here, but some of the articles in eHow were helpful (ie, how
to form an LLC in some states). It was very basic, but it was on the money.

Sure, it's a "content farm" but if the advice is good and succinct, it sure
beats trying to navigate through a particular State's LLC requirements.

~~~
devtesla
Even a broken clock is right twice a day. eHow's business model doesn't see
any difference between worthwhile content and inane babel. Some people do put
good stuff on that site, but I don't know why they bother.

------
chadgeidel
Honest question: Can someone tell me what's wrong with a business model of
putting public domain content on the web (like their "Creole cookbook"
example)?

Clearly there's a line that has been crossed by republishing existing content
- but wouldn't old content be fair game?

I don't plan on doing this BTW - it seems to me the hosting costs would
outweigh the incoming ad dollars.

~~~
_delirium
If it's presented as an archival project (like Project Gutenberg), it seems
like it's performing a public service. It's when people are less clear about
it that it seems spammy: you're republishing a 1903 cookbook, but not being
very clear about the fact that that's what you're doing.

Even worse, and _not_ really performing a public service, is when it's
republishing old content that someone else has already digitized, like the
dozens of sites republishing Project Gutenberg books with no real value-add.

------
racecar789
Spent the whole day learning about Oracle functions, queried Google over 100
times, and didn't come across a single BigResource result! Google definitely
made an improvement.

~~~
pyre
Oracle searches for me usually turn on either articles by Don Burleson or the
Puget Sound Oracle Users Group site.

------
paolomaffei
Does anybody else feel like shorting Demand Media?

~~~
ohashi
I thought about it... but their stock went up.

~~~
vtisix
HN is a leading indicator.

------
VladRussian
what is the deal with this noise about content farms? A few years ago
Wikipedia was a content farm for me - being very "on-topic" it polluted the
search results and the few times i clicked on it i was very disappointed by
the content. Fast forward to today - majority of my on-topic search ends with
me happily reading Wikipedia. Either i became more stupid or Wikipedia content
became much more better. I believe it is the latter :)

~~~
Joakal
Isn't regurgitating content from elsewhere and slapping ads on it, is a
content farm? Wikipedia can be a notable exception in that they've never
served commercial ads (They had donation ads).

By the way, it seems that content farms are synonymous with blogspam.
Examples:
[https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=eHow+was+ori...](https://encrypted.google.com/search?hl=en&q=eHow+was+originally+founded+in+1998+%26+had+%2436+million+in+venture+capital+behind+it+%22Content+farms+are+proving+to+be+a+political+issue+in+search.%22+%22They+are+beginning+to+replace%22&btnG=Search)

~~~
VladRussian
>Isn't regurgitating content from elsewhere

how about Wikipedia's "no original research" policy? DemandMedia supposedly
pays their authors for writing the pieces - which supposedly means original
content. Don't get me wrong. I'm not equaling current Wikipedia and their
overall great goal with DemandMedia. I'm just wondering - if the content farm
hunt happened several years ago how would Wikipedia survived it.

>and slapping ads on it

well, i'm for one would like it if search engines rated lower any web pages
with ads - more ads (like page real estate taken) - more scores taken out. It
is like with Congressmen - more money in donations from Shell - less my trust
that the Congressmen will support any anti-global warming efforts.

~~~
gwern
> how about Wikipedia's "no original research" policy? DemandMedia supposedly
> pays their authors for writing the pieces - which supposedly means original
> content.

I think you're equivocating over 'original' here. On Wikipedia, it means that
everything you write is either directly sourced to another work or basic
connective prose and obvious trivial inferences; it's a matter of citations
and verification. With DemandMedia it simply means that the prose hasn't
appeared elsewhere.

------
nicpottier
I have to say, I really loved reading this article. It spent just the right
amount of time on each topic, had good links to back things up, and generally
gave what seemed like a great overview for someone who isn't well versed in
the field.

Good stuff.

~~~
aaronwall
Thanks. I try hard :)

------
someperson
Not exactly related directly to article, but interesting thought...

After seeing the headlines of Google decimating companies when it finds they
used evil black-hat SEO tactics, I wonder whether one could use evil black-hat
SEO on a _competitor_ , artificially increasing the sites rankings for a few
months, and have the wrath of a Google ban-hammer upon your competitor o_O

Very evil. I wonder if there are companies doing this currently :P

Thoughts?

Sorry if this has been discussed here previously. If so, links please :D

~~~
chocococo
I have no doubt it happens all the time.

It's common practice for "grey hat" SEOs to test on a competitor site first,
before using it on their own site.

------
zaidf
I just can't imagine how this can end well for Demand Media when they are an
update away from losing a vast majority of their traffic.

------
klenwell
I find it interesting that I've upvoted almost every comment in this thread,
pro-Google and con. I guess Google search means that much to me. And I would
love to see Demand Media punished.

------
rapicastillo
If anyone in Google is interested, you guys might want to check out Jure
Leskovec's works on blog influence. I think it has the capability to solve the
junk-farming issue.

