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bas
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Posted: Sun Jul 03, 2005 9:09 am
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| Quote: | | Another way of looking at this is that Google is paying humans to evaluate how well its computers are working, with the aim of improving how they work, so Google can rely even more on computers. |
This is exatly what is happening right now on msn and google. The approach is to train the system by example of what should be the top results and what shouldn't. Based on that input the computers learn, see what kind of factors can determine the difference and apply it to the rest. Google is using patterns to compare, MSN is using neural networks.
It is important that people are aware of the impact of this switch in technology: there is no predefined set of factors that determine your rankings!
Computers look at situations, do their math, and presto there are the rankings! Even the SE engineers will not know what the exact factors will be. In theory this can result in different factors for different keywords. So, bye bye SEO. Wouldn't that be a blessing!?
Of course, you should be able to make your site SE friendly, but that would be it.
Does that change anything? Not in my opinion.
When i first got into AM game, I learned about having a good content site about stuff you know. Become an expert. That i did (as software project management is my profession  ) Then I learned how easy it is to repackage info and to get free SE traffic. So, I got distracted by this temporary quick fix opportunity.
That is it, a temp distraction from the orginal plan. That plan is still solid. And it will remain.
On the subject of going where the money is... Just stick to your niche... be good at it. Create a loyal base (using email, rss sites forums, etc) on subjects and not based on products. Whatever product becomes hot you can always put it in front of your loyal listeners. My local hardware stores is over 100 years old. They provide good customer service, give you info, let you try stuff out for free. They make money not because they sell the latest coolest hardware, but because people trust there opinion.
Cheers
Bas
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Cloak
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Posted: Sun Jul 03, 2005 10:52 am
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There are trends.
Big Picture Business trends of significance.
But they deserve recognition, on other forums.
This one is too thinly targeted for such wide sweeping observations.
Regards
Martin. |
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bas
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Posted: Sun Jul 03, 2005 11:23 am
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 sorry if my post was on the wrong forum. Will not discuss any future trends any more. My bad.
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Last edited by bas on Sun Jul 03, 2005 11:45 am; edited 1 time in total |
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Cloak
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Posted: Sun Jul 03, 2005 11:28 am
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adios to you all. |
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Phil Tanny
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Posted: Sun Jul 03, 2005 8:34 pm
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| bas wrote: | | sorry if my post was on the wrong forum. Will not discuss any future trends any more. My bad. |
Bas, now that cloak has left us, please continue with posts like that. I found it interesting. Not your bad.
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AllanGardyne
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Posted: Sun Jul 03, 2005 11:59 pm
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| bas wrote: | | This is exatly what is happening right now on msn and google. The approach is to train the system by example of what should be the top results and what shouldn't. Based on that input the computers learn, see what kind of factors can determine the difference and apply it to the rest. |
Google itself says something similar.
On its webmaster guidelines page
http://www.google.com/webmasters/guidelines.html
Google says...
| Quote: | | Google prefers developing scalable and automated solutions to problems, so we attempt to minimize hand-to-hand spam fighting. The spam reports we receive are used to create scalable algorithms that recognize and block future spam attempts. |
So if you're succeeding as a "thin affiliate" today, there's an increasing chance that you won't succeed tomorrow.
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Bobby
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Posted: Mon Jul 04, 2005 2:27 am
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I thought I'd chime in here with a couple of observations.
As an analogy, consider all the threads you can find where people who have been in this business a while are complaining about the messages being delivered by the "guru's". It sometimes seems as if the same "internet marketing" information is constantly being re-packaged with new hyped-up names and released to glowing reviews by all the other guru's who have developed essentially the same information.
Actually, it's beyond complaints - people are simply ignoring the guru's - sometimes unsubscribing from email newsletters they have read for years.
I think the same thing is happening with search engines. Depending on the topic, it's getting to the point that searching at a search engine is just the start - you have to then search through the search results to find accurate and useful sites vs. the "I created a 50 page website in 10 minutes with this new software" sites.
I started a couple of threads here on the topic in general in relation to AdSense here - http://www.associateprograms.com/discus/ftopic11456.html and here - http://www.associateprograms.com/discus/ftopic11342.html
I have a prediction and it's based about 50% on optimism that it will come true and about 50% on an expectation the marketplace will force it to come true.
My prediction is either one of two things will happen:
1. Someone is going to come along and clean the clock of Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc. with a search engine that actually generates high quality search results. DMOZ would seem to have the basic right idea, but the implementation is lousy.
or
2. Google is going to recognize the problem with poor search results, AdWords/AdSense spamming, etc. and develop a solid solution. Maybe they can do it with these hired evaluators and maybe not. But if this happens, we'll wake up one day and a lot of people living off the "thin" sites will be in a panic as they will have been removed or relegated to page 137 of the search results.
I subscribed to Allan's newsletter years ago and there was one message I remember from way back then - "Develop good quality content pages on a topic you know or are willing to get to know"
I followed that advice and it has served me well despite changes and market shifts - and I plan to stay the course.
Nowadays, it seems many people are looking for an easy income and have modified that advice to become, "Develop content pages on a topic that is likely to make some money."
I think that approach is a house of cards. I hope the future will prove me correct.
Bobby |
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robertb
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Posted: Mon Jul 04, 2005 4:12 am
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Google is shooting themselves in the foot to an extent. I've had completely innocent, pure information sites go from 2000 visitors a day to less than a 100 overnight. I know many other big names here have had similar circumstances.
For people that want to make a living doing this, is it really worth it spending all of the time and money to generate a site that Google can throw out on a whim. People generate the scrapper and thin sites because it's the most secure way to not waste time and money building a site that could be banned regardless of what you do.
Yes, there is always the arguement that Google will short things out over the long term, but that excuse doesn't work when you try to tell the bill collector that. 
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AllanGardyne
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Posted: Mon Jul 04, 2005 6:15 am
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| robertb wrote: | | I've had completely innocent, pure information sites go from 2000 visitors a day to less than a 100 overnight. |
I feel your pain. Would you care to give a few details about sites that have been hit, to help others try to avoid the same problem?
Are you talking about datafeed sites, or what?
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Phil Tanny
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Posted: Mon Jul 04, 2005 12:04 pm
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Great post Robert,
| robertb wrote: | | Google is shooting themselves in the foot to an extent. I've had completely innocent, pure information sites go from 2000 visitors a day to less than a 100 overnight. I know many other big names here have had similar circumstances. |
Truthfully, I'm sort of clueless about search engines. But I've been self employed 25 years and can report with great confidence that every single time I've made my income dependant upon someone else I've wound up regretting it to the precise degree of that dependance.
We might apply that general principle to our field in ways like this.
All of us want links to help us boost our PR and rankings on the engines. Every link thread I've ever read has been about rankings.
What we often fail to do is focus on building our relationship with our link partners. How many of us have a mailing list set up just for our link partners? How can we build these relationships beyond a simple link swap? We might be able to diversify, and build a safer base, by working more in that direction.
| robertb wrote: | | For people that want to make a living doing this, is it really worth it spending all of the time and money to generate a site that Google can throw out on a whim. People generate the scrapper and thin sites because it's the most secure way to not waste time and money building a site that could be banned regardless of what you do. |
Yes, the rules we are supposed to follow to get decent rankings are deliberately hidden, and have to be changed continually. On top of that, Net business models fairly regularly rise to the top, and then sink like a stone. In that environment, taking a short term perspective does have it's logic.
Few of us here would suggest we abandon a reach for quality, but I do think it's fair to question whether the public really cares about quality. In what other mass media can we confidently say that quality has risen to the top?
What does 50 years of TV teach us? Flip the dial a few times and find out.
All of that said, I do think there remains one very good reason to challenge ourselves to produce the very best quality we are capable of.
Life is short. We are what we eat, and what we create.
One of the great assets of the spammers, hypesters, gimmick crowd etc is a certain blankness. To be good at that strategy you have to be born with, or develop, a kind of blind inner emptiness.
I call this world the "cleverness culture" and the sad irony is that, when you look at the big picture, the real bottom line, relentlessly developing oneself in that direction just isn't all that clever.
The real bottom line is not money, but happiness, right?.
So, in a way we could say the short termers are realistic and focused on the bottom line.
On the other hand we could ask, does buildling one's life around cheesyness and gimmicks really serve the real bottom line?
Finally, it's interesting to recall that we provide all of Google's content. Google is actually more dependant on us than we are on them. Imagine for a moment that we all blocked Google from indexing our sites. Google would die, we would continue, admittedly on crutches.
But Google's power is concentrated, and ours is very very diffuse. Google is one, we are millions, each looking out for ourselves.
Maybe a webmasters union will arise one day?
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bas
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Posted: Mon Jul 04, 2005 1:45 pm
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| Phil Tanny wrote: | Few of us here would suggest we abandon a reach for quality, but I do think it's fair to question whether the public really cares about quality. In what other mass media can we confidently say that quality has risen to the top?
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Although internet has a mass medium reach, I consider myself not in mass media just because of the niche approach.
The view I have on the current situation is that we are blessed with the relative easiness it is to get an audience. In this way all of us that are now in the game can establish a feeling of what our audiences want. That is a blessing new comers will not have in a couple of years.
So, we should learn as fast as we can right now, to be prepared for the future.
E.g. I use my current income with smaller SEO-ed sites to create expensive well researched, clearly written, nice layout, loaded with goodies, etc sites.
The opinions about google are always depending on who you ask, and how successful they are (or not  ). Why I am stepping away of being obsessed with SEO is the fact that it is a rat race, you just have to keep on running to stay in the same place. Or you have to use epo (or another illegal stimulance  )... that helps until you get caught.
In my opinion you have three strategies to be unique:
- compete on price
- compete on quality
- compete on novelty
Looks like normal marketing not ? 
As I am not Amazon, have no unique product, I will stick to quality.
I have a feeling that I personally are making the switch from affiliate marketer to publisher. It might in effect by a small difference, but the change feeling is tremendous.
Cheers
Bas
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robertb
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Posted: Tue Jul 05, 2005 4:33 am
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| AllanGardyne wrote: | | robertb wrote: | | I've had completely innocent, pure information sites go from 2000 visitors a day to less than a 100 overnight. |
I feel your pain. Would you care to give a few details about sites that have been hit, to help others try to avoid the same problem?
Are you talking about datafeed sites, or what? |
I'd prefer not to post all of the info about it. It's an SBI site I used to have in my signature file here.
It had hundreds of inbound links, from other forum postings in my niche, Yahoo and DMOZ directory listings, article swaps, etc. The homepage has a PR 6, but a lot of the "sub" pages don't have any PR at all now and haven't for some time, although they are cached. It's a true quality resource with entirely unique articles written by me.
My thoughts on the problem:
-Maybe too many affiliate links via BeFree on the site and Google has become the wiser about these (think thin affiliate)
-SBI sites for the most part leave a big "footprint" (ie. alot of the HTML in the templates is the same). A lot of SBI sites I know have been hit lately, so who knows if Google doesn't like these.
Besides that, I'm relatively clueless to what I've done to get it Google's bad books. It's frustrating to say the least....
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Phil Tanny
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Posted: Tue Jul 05, 2005 11:47 am
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| robertb wrote: | | A lot of SBI sites I know have been hit lately, so who knows if Google doesn't like these. |
If this is true I would guess it is being discussed on the SBI forum.
If you can document some of the stories you've heard regarding SBI sites and bring it to Ken's attention you might be able to tap in to his volcanic energies. If there's anything to this theory I'm sure he'd want to know, and I'm sure he'd tackle the problem with enthusiasm.
Not sure even Ken is big enough to get a straight answer out of google, but he has a lot of resources at his disposal so it might be worth a try.
Whatever the reason, my condolences. Ouch... How are you doing in the other engines?
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robertb
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Posted: Tue Jul 05, 2005 12:48 pm
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| Phil Tanny wrote: |
If this is true I would guess it is being discussed on the SBI forum.
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I'm not saying this is an "over-arching" problem, because there are certainly tons of people that are doing perfectly fine.
I just found it suspicious that a couple of my SBI sites were dinged hard in Google around March, a couple other SBI sites from an other well known guru here who shall remain nameless, and I believe Allan said is Cheap Computers site took a hit (can't remember if this was the same time or not).
Google is great at detecting patterns, which is why they can easily penalize those spammy TE pages when the standard templates are used. I'm not saying all or most SBI sites content are of poor quality, but if there is enough that are questionable and Google implements an algorithm to deal with it, then undoubtedly it will get some of the good guys. Or, Google has been known to penalize IP addresses and servers which generate spammy pages, which good also get the good with the bad.
I don't want this to start a panic; this is simply my observations of what's happened in a few isolated cases.
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Phil Tanny
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Posted: Tue Jul 05, 2005 1:19 pm
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OK, gotcha Robert.
I wonder if Google might implement a review service, most likely for a fee.
You submit your site to Google, and they tell you whether they have any concerns about your site.
I was considering some design issues for my site, and I wrote google to ask if they would have a problem with it.
I was surprised that they immediately responded politely to a series of messages from me, and was disapointed that they refused to answer my question in any way.
I didn't want any advice on rankings, just wanted to know, will you still consider me a good partner if I do X.
So, we are supposed to follow the rules, but we aren't allowed to know what the rules are. This is the kind of situation that arises when one company/person starts getting in to a near monopoly position.
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