

Ask HN:What can user generated sites do to protect their web reputations? - larryfreeman

I used to work at a start up called HubPages that was pretty badly impacted by Google's panda algorithm change.<p>From my perspective when I worked there, HubPages did everything right as far as removing bad spam, identifying duplicate content, and promoting its best quality articles.<p>We worked on tools to make content generation easier and had some of the strictest moderation policies for any user generated web site (a maximum of 2 external links to a single domain, minimum word count, and a "hopping" service that encouraged members to rank content).<p>Clearly, none of this was enough because HubPages was apparently severely hurting its reputation with the general public.<p>At Hacker News, any link to HubPages will immediately go dead.  When people talk about HubPages, I keep hearing people talk about the amount of low quality articles and low quality content that was appearing high up in the search results.<p>I'm only using HubPages as an example.  I would be very interested to hear what other user generated content sites are doing?<p>Does giving each user their own subdomain improve the situation?  Would this have made it easier to distinguish between the high quality and low quality content.  Blogger, for example, has some of the highest and lowest quality blogs imaginable.<p>Do sites such as scribd do anything special to protect their reputation from spammers and authors who post sloppy  or junky content?<p>I don't work at HubPages anymore.  I will probably jump back into the start up space in 2 years (I signed a contact with United Health Care for a 2-year stint).<p>I would be very interested to hear what people at Hacker News think.  How should a user generated content site protect its reputation and deal with the high levels of low quality content that are an inevitable part of the model.
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staunch
Yelp, Wikipedia, and StackOverflow are highly SEO-dependent, but if they were
removed from Google results I'd start visiting them directly. They're
genuinely great products with real brands.

I think that's the best test: how many people come to your site because they
saw your domain in the search results and recognized it as likely being a good
choice vs clicked the link randomly.

If you only have completely random drive-by SEO traffic you probably have a
shitty site and it will get bitchslapped every time Google improves its
system.

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nametoremember
I read a good point made by someone on HN. Hubpages might have had a lot of
crap, but it had some good stuff. But that is the exact same as Youtube - but
Youtube wasn't punished in the panda update.

For what it's worth, I rarely saw hubpage results in my searches anyway.

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larryfreeman
It is interesting to me that my question did not generate more discussion.
Does this mean that most people are not worrying about the issue of web
reputation?

I suspect that Google's panda algorithm change is only the beginning.

It seems to me that any site that uses user generated content or relies on
search traffic as part of its revenue strategy will need to think seriously
about the issue of protecting their web reputation.

Do others agree?

