While I know some of you could care less about what they say, there's been two recent posts on the Google company blog that would seem to have huge repercussions for the article directories, content spinners and providers of "weak content." The most recent post http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/new-chrome-extension-block-sites-from.html announces a way for Google Chrome users to block sites with "shallow or low quality content" from the search engine results that they see. Those 'votes' will then be used in calculating how a site ranks in the SERPs. An earlier post http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/01/google-search-and-search-engine-spam.html also mentioned low quality content and the things G is doing to fight it with special attention directed towards those sites monetized with Adsense. Both of these articles have come up in other forums, so no, I am not a follower of that blog. But, I can see both of these initiatives creating a demand for higher quality writing. What say you?
I think this is still in the beta stages right? At least, that's what I read last month. Googly has been flooding us with an endless supply of betas that sadly, has worn their welcome off. Nevertheless, if this picks up, it does create a very serious problem for a very significant chunk of the online population. It may even affect us passively (think backlinks, and the effect their corresponding drop in status when sites are judged to be, 'unsatisfactory). However, it brings into question the effectiveness of the new algorithm that will be used to detect the sub-standard sites, article directories and the like. It also begs the question on how Googly will inevitably monetize this. I think all this has been brought about by Bing. There are whispers that the intuitive algorithm Bing is deploying is making fast ground on Googly, and might even (or already is) taking over the lead in terms of search result accuracy. However, if we leave all that aside, and consider the impact it will have on web writer/ content providers / copywriters - I think this is the best news all of us can ever hope for. Demand will start to pick up again, as webmasters rush to update their rewritten PLR contents with original ones. Mark my words.
Those who provide good content to visitors will be rewarded (Eventually) if this comes to pass. I would also feel good if I got a better position in Google by virtue of the strength of my content rather than my SEO skills.
I like the idea of rewarding good content and punishing bad at first glance but it seems like it would be way too easy to game the system. That site in my niche or my customer's niche that rules the SERP's? Why not just have everyone vote it down? To me the most telling aspect of this is that it seems G is indirectly admitting that they can't automate the review process. Additionally, there's a big difference between the blogger who is sharing great information but might not be fully proficient in English and the site with spun gibberish. Doesn't seem like there would be a way for a program, even if it's one by Google, to tell the difference between weak English skills and nonsense. It would be nice to see content rated higher than SEO. There's some topics that are so heavily monetized that I often start at page 5 or 6 of the results to skip all of the MFA sites and get to sites with real information. Seems like it would have been easier and more effective to truly punish duplicate content. I found an article yesterday that had been indexed and posted on over 230 sites. How does having 230+ pages with the same exact content in the results "enhance user experience?"
Google probably could/should implement a system that rewards good content in a sneaky way without telling anybody or letting anybody know. Google should gradually de-emphasise the SEO/backlinks of websites and put more emphasis on visitor satisfaction and good content.
It certainly makes original content far more important to web-masters. And it makes the services of writers even more valuable. The thing is, Google has ALWAYS placed importance on original content. So all of those who copy/paste thinking they can just get away with it have been fooling themselves. If someone doesn't have the time to write content themselves, and they cannot afford to pay another to write quality content for them, they really shouldn't bother trying to build a site. It might have worked in the lawless days of the web, but not now. Google has finally started to focus on their primary goal - to place the most relevant content (original and of value) above all the copied spam out there. NOTE: Writers have a big opportunity right now. Promote that story and make sure everyone in your target field is aware that their high traffic site could vanish off the Google landscape if they've placed more importance on linking than content. You could offer to rewrite everything they have before they loose their traffic completely - and make a killing in the process.
If that extension took off, I think there'd be enough real users that any impact from people marking down competitors sites would be minimal. I like the look of it just from a personal customization view anyway - there are some sites that always appear in my searches, but that I'd rather ignore. This will be a good way to do it.
They've been working on this for a while - the arrival of all the 'collaborative' spinners made it easy for them because content spun with those sorts of tools on 'auto' mode is usually *rammed* with grammar errors and syntactical booboos. These are *really* easy to spot, and don't require cross-referencing with other pages - they can be reduced to a series of simple on page tests which is obviously very cheap, computationally. All the users of the cheap spinners out there (unless they are taking the time to hand correct all the screwups) just basically volunteered to wear big neon signs on their heads saying 'Hi Google - ban me please'.
One of the things about google and trash sites that really make me wonder is 90% of trash sites(spun content) that I come acrossed have google adsense on them. Google has done a great job of cleaning out bad players gaming SEs in the past like porn sites but they were not making money from them. So it makes me wonder does google really want to do away with spun content full of google ads? They are putting google ads on sites that come up in google just under google paid ads so a good precentage of traffic that misses the paid ads will get hit with more google ads and most people with real quality sites don't want to fill them with ghetto looking adsense ads that generate small amounts of pocket change every few hundred visits. I look at these spun sites coming up in google and just cant help but think, if google really wanted them off the page how hard would it be? And how much lost revenue would it cost google? A lot of people are migrating over to Bing competition could change things. Am am going to bookmark Bing and see will I get less sites with spun content and adsense ? If so I will stop using google.
Problem isn't the need of top quality writing, problem is still potential clients willing to pay peaanuts for such content *** sigh ***
google will index anything and everything. as long as keywords are present. :-( most of the content online tend to be repetitive.. it's all for search engine ranking now.. literary art in the digital age is quite rare but it's out there we just have to know where to find it
My hope is that if G really does figure out how to stop rewarding any and all new content and only give credit to stuff worth reading that people won't be willing to pay even peanuts for the spun gibberish and other incomprehensible writing.
I think that it will make the over used huge plr database article less likely to be used..which in turn will hopefully drive the price back up for articles. This $5 for 10000 plr articles is rediculous. I sell 10 article packs for $40 and only 50 packs per niche of well researched keywords and do fine with the people who favor quality over quantity..Time will tell how this works out for us all.