SEO Book.com |
| Increasing SEO Complexity Lowers Result Diversity Posted: 27 Apr 2011 11:56 PM PDT Changing the Cost-benefit AnalysisIn the last post I mentioned how the US government tried to change the cost benefit analysis for some sleazy executives at pharmaceutical corporations which continue to operate as criminal enterprises that simply view repeated fines as a calculable cost of doing business. If you think about what Google's Panda update did, it largely changed the cost-benefit analysis of many online publishing business models. Some will be frozen with fear, others will desperately throw money at folks who may or may not have solutions, while others who gained will buy additional marketshare for pennies on the Dollar. "We actually came up with a classifier to say, okay, IRS or Wikipedia or New York Times is over on this side, and the low-quality sites are over on this side." - Matt Cutts Now that Google is picking winners and losers the gap between winners & losers rapidly grows as the winners reinvest. And that word invest is key to understanding the ecosystem. Beware of ScrapersTo those who are not yet successful with search, the idea of spending a lot of money building on a strategy becomes a bit more risky when you see companies like Demand Media that have spent $100's of millions growing an empire only to see 40% of the market value evaporate in a couple weeks due to a single Google update. There are literally thousands of webmasters furiously filing DMCA reports to Google after Panda, because Google decided that the content quality was fine if it was on a scraper site, but the exact same content lacked quality when on the original source site. And even some sites that were not hit by Panda (even some which have thousands of inbound links) are still getting outranked by mirroring scrapers. Geordie spent hours sharing tips on how to boost lifetime customer value. For his efforts, Google decided to rank a couple scrapers as the original source & filter out PPCBlog as duplicate content, in spite of one of the scrapers even linking to the source site. Outstanding work Google! Killer algo :D Even if the thinking is misguided or an out of context headline, Reuters articles like Is SEO DOA as a core marketing strategy? do nothing to build confidence to make large investments in the search channel. Which only further aids people trying to do it on the cheap. Which gets harder to do as SEO grows more complex. Which only further aids the market for lemons effect. Market DominationAt the opposite end of the spectrum, there are currently some search results which look like this All of the colored boxes are the same company. You need a quite large monitor to get any level of result diversity above the fold. The company that was on the right side of the classifier can keep investing to build a nearly impenetrable moat, while others who fell back will have a hard time justifying the investment. Who wants to scale up on costs while revenues are down & the odds of success are lower? Few will. But the company with the top 3 (or top 6) results is collecting the data, refining their pitch, and re-investing into locking down the market. Much like the Gini coefficient shows increasing wealth consolidation in the United States, search results where winners and losers are chose by search engines creates a divide where doing x will be very profitable for company A, while doing the exact same thing will be a sure money loser for company B. Thin Arbitrary Lines in the SandThe lines between optimization & spam blur as some trusted sites are able to rank a doorway page or a recycled tweet. Once site owners know they are trusted, you can count on them green lighting endless content production. Scraping the Scrape of the ScrapeMany mainstream media websites have topics subdomains where they use services like DayLife or Truveo to auto-generate a near endless number of "content pages." To appreciate how circular it all is consider the following
At some point in some such loops I am pretty certain the loops start feeding back into themselves & create a near-infinite cycle :D An Endless Sea of "Trustworthy" ContentThe OPA mentioned a billion dollar shift in revenues which favors large newspapers. But those "pure" old-school media sites now use services like DayLife or Truveo to auto-generate content pages. And it is fine when they do it. ...but... The newspapers call others scammy agents of piracy and copyright violators for doing far less at lower scale, all while wanting to still be ranked highly (even while putting their own original content behind a paywall), and then go out and do the exact same scraping that they complain about others doing. It is the tragedy of the commons played out on an infinite web where the cost of an additional page is under a cent & everyone is farming for attention. And the piece of pie everyone is farming for is shrinking as:
Brands Becoming the MediaRather than subsidizing the media with ads, brands are becoming the media:
Search Ads Replacing the Organic Search ResultsAdWords is eating up more of the value chain by pushing big brands
Other search services like Ask.com and Yahoo! Search are even more aggressive with nepotistic self promotion. Small Businesses Walking a Tightrope (or, the Plank)Not only are big brands being propped up with larger ad units (and algorithmically promoted in the organic search results) but the unstable nature of Google's results further favors big business at the expense of small businesses via the following:
If you are a small business primarily driven by organic search you either need to have big brand, big ego, big balls, or a lack of common sense to stay in the market in the years to come, as the market keeps getting consolidated. ;) Categories:  |
| You are subscribed to email updates from SEO Book.com To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google Inc., 20 West Kinzie, Chicago IL USA 60610 | |
No comments:
Post a Comment