A Must Read Thread!!! The Website Content Controversy

Google’s recent changes to their search rankings (see details here) to reduce spammy content (mainly from “content farms”) has led to a lot of talk about the importance of having good, unique content. It got me thinking about the topic of adding new content to my own sites.

The reason I bring this up is that people are constantly telling me I should add new content to my sites to keep visitors happy and increase search engine traffic, and that I should redesign my bad/amateur looking sites for those same reasons. You would think this is sound, logical advice, but in my 15+ year history of running over 400 of my own sites, I have found this to not be true at all. My results may not be typical, and I am sure lots of people make tons of money by having lots of pages on their sites and keeping them constantly updated, but not me.

Here are my observations about content:

1. I have just as many 1 page sites that rank at the top of Google search results as I do big sites with lots of pages that rank well. Many small sites that I created in a day years ago do just as well as huge content sites that I spent months working on.

2. Aside from the quantity of the content, I have also found that the complexity of the site makes much of a difference. Over the years I have created many simple sites (silly lists, joke pages, online quizzes etc.) and also created many very complex sites (DigitalFilms.com and CreateVids.com for example) that took months worth of programming and content creation, and I have not found much of a difference in the profits on them. I have had sites that cost me $10,000 to create make $0 and I have had sites that cost me $0 to create make me $10,000.

3. Once I launch a site, I have not found adding more content usually adds any significant traffic or income to it. Of course if you launch a bad site that is lacking in content, it should be improved later. But, at whatever time I decide a site is complete and then officially launch it, I have not found adding to it helps any. To illustrate my point, I will give you some examples:

A) WatchMovies.com – The domain gets around 4000 visitors a day, even when I just had it parked. I initially changed it from being parked to a very simple and boring 1 page site about movies. After a few months I added over 700 actual movies that you can watch for free online. I also added movie reviews and movie trailers. More recently I added a page where you upload your photo and see which celebrity you resemble, a 2700 game video arcade,movie quizzes, a 20 questions type game where the computer tries to guess what movie you are thinking of, and more movie related content, yet all these different versions of the site still get the same traffic as always and make the same amount of money as always.

B) Ailments.com – I have over 6000 ailment pages, written for me by a doctor, which have been online for several years and are indexed by Google, yet the site only gets 100 visitors a day. I started the site with fewer ailments, but adding new ones did not add any significant traffic.

C) iAnimals.com – I have thousands of animal pages, many with unique hand written descriptions, plus thousands of videos and jokes and other animal content, yet the site gets no more traffic than when I had no unique content on on it.

D) Adoptme.com – I spent around $100,000 creating this site 10 years ago and I did not make any changes to it for the next 5-6 years. I eventually added some amazing new features, like being able to chat live with your pet, augmented reality, the ability to play online games against, jobs for pet, a Facebook app, and dozens of other new features. Users loved all of this, but it still has not attracted more users or made more money than it did when I first started the site.

E) Dumb.com – When I first started this site many years ago, it was a very simple looking copy of some of the dumb related content from Bored.com. 3-4 years ago I changed it into a big site with lots of unique content and have been adding new content ever since. But, it does not get that much more traffic than it used to get.

4) I paid one Flash designer over $90,000 for various animation projects over the past 4 years, all of which were funny, well done, and great content to add to my sites (for example, see http://adoptme.com/videos/index.php and http://www.dumb.com/vacations/ ), yet none of it made more than a few hundred dollars in revenue. So, I lost over $89,000 on this content.

5) For many years I had graphics designer working for me full time, and the sites he created for me looked amazing. But, I also created many sites myself with no graphics at all (I don’t know how to do that) and most of those sites did just as well. I have had the same results with site redesigns. When I first started Bored.com in 1997 it was just a plain text site with a list of links on it. I hardly changed the site design at all for the first 5 years, and then eventually I added some graphics to it, but even then everybody said it looked like an amateur outdated site. Before I sold it I did a few more fancy site designs, but none of that ever increased the traffic.

Another example is a site I started a few month ago at CyberCops.com. I created the original text-only version in under an hour just to get it launched. It looked very unprofessional, and you would think people would not use a site like that unless it looked legitimate. But, I more recently had somebody create a professional site design for it, yet it still gets exactly the same number of help requests (several a week) as the old text only version did.

6) I have found the main advantage of changing a site design is optimizing ad placement and ad sizes. Making changes to where you place the ads, or using different ad sizes, does sometimes make a big difference in how much money you make from a site. This is not always related to making the site look nice though. For example, I recently doubled the income on one of my sites in 5 minutes just by moving a 728×90 AdSense banner ad from the bottom of the page to the top of the page. Many times changes like that can be done without really changing the main site design, it is just a matter of rearranging things a little on the site.

Conclusion: I am not telling people to avoid adding content to their sites or to not make them look nice. What I am saying is that in my experience, the cost of doing these things is usually not worth it. I would rather add a text page of content (for example like putting a list of pickup lines or a page of jokes on Dumb.com) for free instead of paying to add expensive programming/content. Adding more content is hardly ever a bad thing, it is just a matter of making sure it will make more money than you spend on it.


This article was taken from "Impulse Corp"
Hope now the clients will understand and start getting a quality writer regardless of their rates.

Thanks...

 

I'm not sure why this is labelled 'must read'... still, having lost valuable minutes of my life reading it, here goes.

Search engines have only one way to detect 'quality' content at present (although more techniques are in the offing) and we all know how flawed THAT method is. All of them, however, have excellent techniques for detecting unique content.

The difference between unique content and good content may be obvious to a human, but it isn't to a machine. And having read your cutnpaste in the post up above, it would appear to me that your 'problem' (if that is what you would like to call it) is caused by the current inability of machines to evaluate 'good' rather than just 'unique'.

A 90k bunch of flash games may be great, but unless you build unique machine readable content around them to get the search engines interested in the first place, and backlinks to give it some 'ooomph', they probably won't rank you. After all, there's no shortage of flash games out there, and some of the best cost a lot less than 90k to develop. A crap game well promoted will beat a good game poorly promoted, almost every time.

Time is also a factor. You mention the cop site. And how in a few months nothing much has changed despite the revamp. Search engines move at their own sweet speed. Rule number 1, innit! A 'few months' is nowhere near long enough statistically to draw any conclusions about the effects of the revamp.

No offense intended, natch.

 

I just wanted to get good info's for ma fellow members in DP and i never intend to cut paste for fun. Some people do not have chances to get such informations. and i never mentioned that i wrote the post...

 

Did you at least have permission to repost the article here? Just because you identify where it came from, does not excuse you from copyright infringement.

I saw a number of reasons why these sites wouldn't do well, to mention a few - Hulu, WebMd, PetFinder (what one would assume a pet site with the name of AdoptMe is about) and other assorted industry leading sites that would be very hard to beat. All have page rank scores of 7 or 8. Hulu and WebMD spend millions on advertising both online and off. PetFinder is supported and used by virtually every animal shelter and rescue organization in the country. Sure they can be beat, any site can, but not with $80,000 - 100,000.

As far as new content always equaling new traffic, I've found it depends on the site and the competition - which is pretty much the answer to everything on the web. I see traffic spikes in days with some sites and virtually no change on others after adding new content.

While the author has some truly great domain names, none of them are probably getting much more than type-in and other domain name-related traffic which of course means any new content is meaningless. Seems like with several of those domains, it would have been a better return for his investment to use them to catch type-in traffic and be done with it. At least one of them looks very much like that anyway - Ailments. If he did have an MD write all of the articles, it never says so anywhere on the site that I could find. Without that bit of information, I'd rather rely on Wikipedia, WebMD or the Merck site.

 

I have to agree with you....

 

If you agree with me, where's the controversy? Some fellow invested a great deal of money without really doing his homework. There's millions of versions of that story floating around the web. Nothing new or controversial about that.

 

It's actually about the new terms that Google has come up with and the quality of writing is what to be stressed...

 

I take it you're a copywriter.

or should I say

I took it copy you's a writinger

To YMC:- the controversy is that he agrees with you. Pretty controversial stuff. Controversies will run and run on this controversitisation.

 

That might be the point you are trying to make but your example does not buttress your point.

 

so where are the examples of spending $0 and have lots of success? I only see the failures...

 

You can see the following site instead... www.impulsecorp.com

 

not working, friend. I suggest you drop this and try a new thread. The final thing I have to say on the matter is that LOTS of people can't make a souffle. That doesn't mean souffles are impossible to make. Byeeee.

 

Maybe i just have to agree with you and it won't make sense if I am to argue again and again... anyway thanks for your suggestion mate..

 

It seems to me that you can't do right for doing wrong! I applaud what you were saying in your original thread - you were putting across facts, so cannot be berated for trying to help...

 

you're welcome mate.

You might be better advised to just come out with it and fess up to what it is you are trying to sell - no one will mind (that what the forum is here for!)

 

Spot on contentboss! - that's the kind of advice all post authors should use in their threads...

 

Yeah i have to agree with you guys.. my intention was just share some facts that i feel valuable as well as get some feedbacks from other members regardless whether they are positive or negative...

 

That's good. As for positive or negative replies, people can be negative without being downright rude, don't you agree?

 

No matter whether they are being rude or not.. if you feel it benefits you just take it if not just leave it and move on...

 

This is a good example of the 80/20 principle.

Focus on the things that work most of the time.

Personally i would not trust a poorly design/ bad content website.