
Compare headphones - benologist
http://headphones.techcrunch.com/
======
pstack
Oh, no. Now how will we discern the regular shitty content from the new
fusioned shitty content?

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marban
Yes, it's an unethical, poisonous, money-grabbing pattern that should be
banned but aren't there enough folks on HN that are actually making money off
of something like this? Talk about the many scraping, passive-income, etc.
threads.

~~~
bsullivan01
Used to work until 2009 or so. Even NYT had shopping.com/ Mysimon
/Pricegrabber style sections with borrowed content. The idea is that since NYT
is trusted everything there ranks high, and it did. Now it does again since
the pendulum has gone so far on the "big brands can do no wrong" side. It's
all Google induced and Google cannot find the power to penalize big brands,
other than a half-assed 2 week or so demotion.

Today, US Today has eHow powered sections for examples and they rank extremely
high.

~~~
marban
_...rank extremely high_

For broad terms or real long-tail stuff?

------
kbar13
> sort by user ratings

> see [http://headphones.techcrunch.com/l/904/Razer-
> Electra](http://headphones.techcrunch.com/l/904/Razer-Electra)

> close tab and never visit that website ever again

~~~
sp332
That's odd, since the bars below the 5-star rating claim no one has rated the
headphones yet.

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iaskwhy
I'm sorry but I really don't understand what the issue is. I can understand if
the problem is that they are using the content from [http://head-
phones.findthebest.com/](http://head-phones.findthebest.com/) under
[http://headphones.techcrunch.com/](http://headphones.techcrunch.com/) , not
sure if this is ok or not. But about the actual content, is there a problem
with a summary of the most important stats of a given list of products?

------
Aardwolf
Wow, what a lovely product description for headphones...

"Grado PS1000 The Grado PS1000 headphones cost $1695, which is the most of all
Headphones Additionally, the Grado PS1000 have a sensitivity of 98 dB, which
is 6 dB lower than the average for all Headphones. "

------
rhizome
Is this in addition to those silly "Elsewhere on the Web" "You may also be
interested in" garbage units every half-assed news site and blog runs?

~~~
minimaxir
That's usually either 1) a stupid Wordpress plugin that everyone uses since no
publisher cares about UX or 2) Disqus, which opts into displaying ads with
comments, for fortunately is easy to opt out of.

~~~
leokun
No he's talking about Taboola or Outbrain. Taboola shows up everywhere now.
It's those little images at the bottom of pages like on VentureBeat that have
nothing the fuck to do with anything and are just noisy bullshit that make the
internet worse. There's usually some kind of cleavage or weird picture to get
you to notice and click. It's bullshit and no self-respecting sites would
never add such a thing.

~~~
yummyfajitas
As demonstrated by the fact that many data driven sites use Taboola/Outbrain
(including one I used to work for), users either don't care about them or care
about them so little that it is offset by the increased revenue. In fact, as
demonstrated by the fact that Taboola/Outbrain get paid when users click,
users appear to actually like some of their content.

If users don't mind and actually click through, is it really fair to describe
it as "bullshit"?

~~~
leokun
I guess you could apply that same argument to spam emails. A very convincing
argument.

~~~
yummyfajitas
The problem with spam email is that it operates with a push model - i.e., spam
email is forced upon you and you have to do work to avoid it.

In contrast, if you want to avoid Taboola/Outbrain, all you need to do is stop
asking content sites that use them to send you data (i.e., don't browse
Taboola/Outbrain sites).

~~~
leokun
Well I definitely don't go to those sites directly. It's usually via links
from sites like Hacker News. Adblock blocks Taboola, but I don't use Adblock.
I'm not asking you to solve a personal problem for me. I'm saying Taboola is
shit. It offers very little value, and there are just enough of us around to
click on things of little value to keep reducing the quality of crap on the
internet. There's nothing to be done about than to bitch.

------
ErikAugust
Can we page Matt Cutts? Would like to hear his thoughts on something like
this...

~~~
tristanperry
I think that Google are aware of this. As above, small and large businesses
used to do this sort of thing. The animal updates then killed off small
businesses who done this, but there was no real negative impact on the bigger
guys/the brands. I'm sure it sounds cynical, but I don't think this was a
coincidence.

------
minimaxir
Related: FindTheBest's case study on TechCrunch:
[http://www.findthebest.com/partner-with-
us](http://www.findthebest.com/partner-with-us)

Odd that AOL chose to partner with FindTheBest, considering that AOL already
has a business partnership to gdgt through Engadget.

------
crumblan
I thought the purpose of TechCrunch was content farming and search engine
spamming for startups they have a vested interest in.

------
belowlightsblue
AOLs and content farms are nothing new:
[http://thenextweb.com/media/2011/02/02/you-may-not-like-
it-b...](http://thenextweb.com/media/2011/02/02/you-may-not-like-it-but-aols-
content-farm-is-the-future-of-online-media/)

Here's more context about Findthebest with someone from there trying to claim
that they have a large editorial team that hand edits the lists
[http://www.seobook.com/scalable-seo](http://www.seobook.com/scalable-seo)

------
cpncrunch
What the fuck are you talking about? It's a buying guide, like the title says.
I guess it's cool to put the knife in techcrunch on HN.

~~~
benologist
The thousands of (syndicated) machine-generated pages with scraped product
reviews from CNET [1] stuffed with affiliate links, ending with tastefully
concealed links to every "[manufacturer] headphones" [2], with no actual
relevance or relationship [3] with anything TechCrunch reports on x 5
"guides". It's pretty conventional spam.

[1] extra irony: they nofollow all the CNET links to avoid making the links
valuable to their competitor

[2] [http://i.imgur.com/hgVaH3k.png](http://i.imgur.com/hgVaH3k.png)

[3]
[http://techcrunch.com/tag/headphones/](http://techcrunch.com/tag/headphones/)

~~~
cpncrunch
And why exactly is that bad?

Basically they use FindTheBest, which takes info from various sources (not
just cnet). I guess AOL either owns FindTheBest or they have an agreement with
them.

If that is bad, then what do you think of google? Their search engine is a
machine-generated series of scraped website snippets, laced with adverts that
track practically every site you visit.

Also, what do you think of linkedin (which I see you have an account on?) I
can't even view your full profile because linkedin want to screw me for some
money to even view anyone's profile now. Also they offer to tell you who has
viewed your profile if you pay them money. That seems a lot more shitty than
what AOL/Techcrunch is doing in my opinion.

I think all large companies are evil in some way.

~~~
benologist
The pages are of no value to the end user and are designed purely to usurp
traffic from search engines and shit that traffic out through affiliate links.
Instead of getting reviews that matter when you search you get spam tainting
the results and getting in your way.

You are fundamentally misunderstanding spam when you relate it to what Google
and LinkedIn do. What Google does is sift through this shit trying to find the
right answer to whatever question. What LinkedIn does has no relevance at all.

~~~
cpncrunch
I never said that linkedin or google were spamming. All I was saying is that
they are slightly evil and annoying. I'm also not sure I agree with your
assessment of the techcrunch reviews.

~~~
benologist
[http://www.seobook.com/scalable-seo](http://www.seobook.com/scalable-seo)

By my count the company fronting the content has something like ~100 million
machine-generated pages polluting the internet as of 6 months ago, being
hosted and re-hosted under dozens of different domains. At what point does it
become spam in your opinion?

------
alexeisadeski3
Thank god for theverge and Ars...

------
induscreep
Audio Technica ATH-M50 no there.

------
anaphor
head-fi is still my go-to source for headphone discussion :)

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bsullivan01
Why they do it? Because it works (until it hits HN front page).

From my experience, running client sites, Google is blindly trusting anything
from big brands, screwing the small business sites. It's almost like content
quality doesn't matter at all, especially after all the animal updates (Panda,
Penguin etc.) Small sites are desperate as they have lost as much as 90% of
traffic for no apparent reason.

It must be profitable for Google too, their earnings have skyrocketed since
then, even as they hit a plateau in market share. Occam's razor and all.

Edit: The competing theories as to why Google does it are that Google wants to
shake small business into advertising, considering that brands already do.
Once you lose traffic you can advertise or close doors. Another one is that
so-so search results are better to increase ad clicks. Considering that Google
has a monopoly and still a strong brand, the second theory cannot be ruled
out.

~~~
acoyfellow
I've seen SMB sites get "getting screwed" by Google, because they had hired an
SEO guy who got them backlinks that ended up getting taken away. Or they still
have bad on-page SEO.. Most of the time it was a one time hire kind of thing,
and they just expected the traffic to always stay the same with no effort.

This guy named Glen runs an incredible SEO blog, and he's got case studies of
brand new sites/page [1]. He explains how single page sites and YouTube videos
are beating out big established sites. His SEO work and breakdowns on his blog
are outstanding, and there is great information on there. The marketing
departments of every startup should be on this guys mailing list. I have 0
affiliation with him.

I've never seen anyone bring his name up on HN, and it's about time someone
does. He has been saying all year: 2013 has been awful from Google's
standpoint. People are gaming the system harder than ever, and maybe theres
some smart people on HN who could use bits and pieces of what Glen
does/preaches.

Since Google is always changing the algo, Startups tend to avoid considering
using SEO as a way to get immediate results.. But there is still some time
left in 2013, and instead of all the information marketing spammers
benefitting, I believe it should be HN (legit businesses & startups)!

[1]- [http://www.viperchill.com/google-
storm/](http://www.viperchill.com/google-storm/)

~~~
pothibo
This is crazy. Just subscribed to his mailing list. Thanks!

~~~
acoyfellow
No problem. IMO he specifically needs to get more attention around here.. It's
tremendous information for anyone looking to grow using SEO, and who want the
most relevant information possible. I don't know a better SEO resource.

------
contextual
So we're upvoting this spam content on the front page of HN?

