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Our "Brand" Stands for 'Anything That Will Make Money' Posted: 18 Jul 2011 02:15 PM PDT Want a good example of Google's brand-bias stuff being a bunch of bs? Niche expert value-add affiliate websites may now lack the brand signal to rank as the branded sites rise up above them, so what comes next? Off-topic brands flex their brand & bolt on thin affiliate sections. Overstock.com was penalized for having a spammy link profile (in spite of being a brand they were so spammy that they were actually penalized, counter to Google's cultural norm) but a few months later the penalty was dropped, even though some of the spam stuff is still in place. Those who were hit by Panda are of course still penalized nearly a half-year later, but Overstock is back in the game after a shorter duration of pain & now they are an insurance affiliate. prnewswire.com/news-releases/oco-launches-insurance-tab-125739128.html And this "fold the weak & expand the brand" game is something the content farm owners are on to. Observe: When TechCrunch was redesigned they folded a couple other sites into it. (Nice sponsored deep link Dell, yet another brand advantage!) AOL has folded 100 brands down to 20. Some of the smaller AOL brands that focused on celebrity stuff were killed, the Huffington Post over the past year has been adding categories like divorce, doing tie-ins with BET & most recently added sections for culture and celebrity. While most the content farms were decimated, that left a big hole in the search results that will allow the Huffington Post to double or triple the yield of their content through additional incremental reach. And, yes, this is *the* same Huffington Post that is famous for aggregating 3rd party content (sans attribution), wrapping a Tweet in a page & ranking it, and gets mocked by other journalists for writing 90's-styled blocks of keyword spam: Before I go on, let me stop and say a couple of more important things: Aol, Aol Acquires Huffington Post, Aol Buys Huffington Post, Aol Buys Huffpo, Aol Huffington Post, Huffington Post, Huffington Post Aol, Huffington Post Aol Merger, Huffington Post Media Group, Huffington Post Sold, Huffpo Aol, Huffpost Aol, Media News. See what I did there? That's what you call search-engine optimization, or SEO. If I worked at the Huffington Post, I'd likely be commended for the subtle way in which I inserted all those search keywords into the lede of my article. And, of course, AOL is a company with the highest journalistic standards: I was given eight to ten article assignments a night, writing about television shows that I had never seen before. AOL would send me short video clips, ranging from one-to-two minutes in length — clips from "Law & Order," "Family Guy," "Dancing With the Stars," the Grammys, and so on and so forth… My job was then to write about them. But really, my job was to lie. My job was to write about random, out-of-context video clips, while pretending to the reader that I had watched the actual show in question. AOL knew I hadn't watched the show. The rate at which they would send me clips and then expect articles about them made it impossible to watch all the shows — or to watch any of them, really. Doing fake reviews? Scraping content? Putting off-topic crap on a site to monetize it? Those are the sorts of things Google claims the spammy affiliates & SEOs do, but the truth is they have never been able to do them to the scale the big brands have. And from here out it is only going to get worse. We highlighted how Google was responsible for creating the content farm business model. Whatever comes next is going to be bigger, more pervasive, and spammier, but coated in a layer of "brand" that magically turns spam into not-spam. Imagine where this crap leads in say 2 or 3 years? It won't be long before Google is forced to see the error of their ways. What Google rewards they encourage. What they encourage becomes a profitable trend. If that trend is scalable then it becomes a problem shortly after investors get involved. When that trend spirals out of control and blows up they have to try something else, often without admitting that they were responsible for causing the trend. Once again, it will be the SEO who takes the blame for bad algorithms that were designed divorced from human behaviors. I am surprised Google hasn't hired someone like a Greg Boser or David Naylor as staff to explain how people will react to the new algorithms. It would save them a lot of work in the long run. Disclosure: I hold no position in AOL's stock, but I am seriously considering buying some. When you see me personally writing articles on Huffington Post you will know it's "game on" for GoogleBot & I indeed am a shareholder. And if I am writing 30 or 40 articles a day over there that means I bought some call options as well. :D Categories:  google

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