Sick of about.com

Anyone else sick of seeing about.com pages ranking high in search engines, especially google because I am. Fortunately they are not ranking for my keyword but when I am surfing in general I see lots of them. Some of the internal pages dont have many/if any external backlinks so its all due to the authorativeness (if thats a word) of the site.

 

I am tired of seeing them as well.
They rank fairly well for many keyphrases, but I don't see them as competition.

I feel that if I was to write a page targeting the same keyphrase about.com ranks well for, I feel my page would out rank theirs. Simply by better copy/more content, and content that actually fits with the keyphrase and is more relevant to the user searching.

but yes, I'm tired of seeing about.com pages with minimal info on a topic. they are usually surface deep articles.

 

Agreed. about.com is sooooo useless. i can't believe it is still around and gets such high traffic.

 

Yes! Finally someone is as disgusted as I am. Man, they just feel like scraper sites sometimes, don't they? I hate them. They are so hard to use and so hard to find what you are looking for. They are filled with so many sponsored ads that it just gets ridiculous after a while. Aren't they owned by Google.com in the first place? I rememebr they were bought out by someone, can't remember...

On the bright side, most of the editors/authors are nice and you can listed in there if you ask them.

 

yep, tired of about.com too. good news is that NYT bought it (I believe), so it'll become a subscription service most likely, so many of its pages won't be spiderable anymore.

about.com has the most useless and generic information on it (not to say that I wouldn't kill for a few links from that site though )

 

I agree. Useless. I actually have them as a competitor in the 3d ultrasound set of keywords I target. Their info is all very biased in this niche, even though it is a lot more on target than anything else I've seen there. Way too many ads on their site. When you have so many ads that you have to use filters to even read it, you have a problem.

 

And so say all of us, I have never had a better day/month than the last just now and my earnings and rankings are..well as much as could have ever dreamed of for my keywords, however About still feature above me for my one real "big" one word keyword and I just cant see any way past them. Albeit I am not in a product related environment I do try and glean extra money from a product that I have introduced in my genre and therefore they see me as commercial so they wont link to me or talk to me and they are an extremely powerful beast.

 

I agree - they have a silly amount of DMOZ listings and they show up all the time when they dont deserve to be.

 

21,500 in the google directory. I checked out a few of these and they certainly should not be listed. The information is very basic and the pages was covered in affiliate adverts.

 

i hate those guys too

i think they sold the whole network for some ridiculous amount of $ though...

 

I like about.com. Good info.

 

I have been familiar with them since the were the miningco. I get traffic through them for my google ads that run through their ADD section of about.com. I also do some posting on the forums with links back to my own site. If ya can't beat them...join them I guess...

 

! werd iseen them for years

 

besides containing very little info, much if which is outdated and full of sponsored links, a while ago i tried to get one of my sites listed by contacting the editor (using their outlined procedure). no response, no listing added.. even though it was perfectly suitable for the category and was more popular than some of the other listings in the same category.

in my mind, there is not a single reason why i should like them

 

OH, and by the way, a lot of those "editors" are in there for their own commercial interests. For example, I tried to get one of my travel sites listed in their guide and I was rejected because they said my site had too many ads (and yet, their page has more ads than the so called 'content' that they wrote).

To make a long story short, it turns out that the editor was also the webmaster for one of my competitors in the local travel sector. It's DMOZ all over again.

 

sorry you feel that way about about.com lol no pun intended