Not so In-Demand Media

Given Google's recent announcement that they are cleaning up the spam sites (see our article below) probably means that the "cr*p content" sites like Demand Media's ones will probably also not get top billing either, which willl significantly impact their IPO - and future profitability. Search Engine Land:

This announcement comes just as Demand Media gets set for an IPO. Demand owns eHow, LiveStrong.com, and several other properties that often get labeled as “content farms,” and is reportedly going to go public next week. AOL, with Seed.com and Yahoo, with its Associated Content purchase last year, are also in the content farm business. Those two, in fact, will be speaking on a panel called "Content Farms" Or The Smartest SEOs In the World? at our SMX West conference in March.

By cr*p I mean unhelpful given its prominence - eHow's advice is muchly of the level of the Feynman Problem Solving system

1. Write down the problem.
2. Think very hard.
3. Write Down the Solution

Still, live by the SEO, die by the SEO. It would have happened eventually. But timing, as they say, is everything.....

Update - fascinating post by eHow's original owner Josh Hannah on why Google may rate it so highly:

Google seems to weight domain-level credibility very heavily, and to not be very good at understanding if individual pieces of content are any good. And historical credibility, once earned, seems to decay very slowly.

When I co-owned eHow, it had a bunch of really high quality content, in a time where the web had much less high quality content. (There has been a content explosion -- both high quality and content farm style -- since 2004-05, when it started to be economically feasible.) For the 20,000 articles on eHow at the time, we ranked in the top 2 results for exact searches on 99% of them, and I think justly so.

When Demand Media bought eHow, they built a content machine. It is my opinion that 80%+ of eHow's "credibility" with search engines was earned prior to 2007, yet 95% of their content was created after 2007. My view is that Google's algorithm is not well architected to deal with this kind of situation, where the domain is the same, but in essence the product is entirely new.


Possible reasons why Google doesn't manually degrade eHow:

- Google is in love with the idea of a pure, algorithmic, scalable solution to problems and will invest great energy in this before manually tweaking
- eHow addresses a lot of long-tail content topics, for many of which they are probably the best answer (even if they are not a great answer). The eHow algorithm for choosing which articles to write clearly takes this into account.
- eHow generates tens of millions in AdSense revenue for Google annually. Wikipedia generates none.
- Google has more pressing quality problems in product-focused areas, where it seems like the first ten search results are dominated by garbage product spam. Whatever you think of eHow, it's generally better than that.

Tut - wash yore mouth out on that last one, you're wrong sez Google and its Fanbois