DMN3 Blog

The answer to how much Search Engine Optimization/Search Engine Marketing will be impacted is not clear yet. Here’s what we do know…

Google has been under intense pressure from both competitors and users to do something about “search spam.” Search spam is low quality content found in search engine ranking results. There are other kinds, e.g., redirects to casinos and porn sites, but low quality sites represent the biggest user problem.

Google has been accused of being slow to react to downgrade or eliminate rankings of low quality content sites because it profits from most of them. Remember that content is the currency of the Internet. Content marketing sites derive their income mostly from “online advertising” although some have a “subscription business model”.

According to Bing VP Harry Shum, seventy percent of these low quality content sites are populated by online ads served by Google's AdSense. Google makes money from these sites. Hence the criticism of Google for not taking action against such sites while other search engines have, including their outright ban by Blekko, an recent search engine startup.

Content marketing sites provide a continuum of content quality, ranging from those providing very specific and high quality content on one end to sites that provide content of no value on the other end.

The content marketing business model of the Internet is straight forward: provide content with keywords that are optimized for search engines with the goal of gaining traffic by ranking high in search engine results pages (SERPs). That traffic results in income, either through subscriptions or online advertising. Most Internet content sites are advertising supported.

Generating high quality content can be an expensive proposition. This is where content/article farms have gamed Google’s search engine. They discovered that keyword content quantity was more important than content quality in obtaining high search engine rankings. They pay as little as three dollars for an article from freelance writers found on sites like www.textbroker.com.

Another problem is “scraper sites.” These sites use automated programs to scrape content from other websites and repurpose them. The result is the same in that these sites end up with a vast quantity of stolen content focused on keywords for which they want to rank high. Such sites often repurpose the content as “how-to” articles.

The end result is a large amount of low-quality content farm sites that rank high in search engine results for hundreds of thousands of key word search strings.

Being ranked high generates a lot of traffic. A lot of traffic means that there are lots of eyeballs on the page. Google’s AdSense program would then load the page with online ads for products and services geared to those keywords. In the end, the content farm site and Google makes money.

How much? Demand Media (eHow) just went public with a valuation of 1.5 billion dollars. This is the same content site that sold in 2004 for $100,000.

It should be noted that SEO/SEM professionals also use articles and whitepapers optimized for certain keywords as part of their strategy to increase search engine rankings for them. The difference between white hat SEO and black hat SEO techniques is often the quality of the content. Because high quality content is time consuming and expensive, a black hat SEO professional will generate a large quantity of low quality content and submit them to article farms such as ezinearticle.com with links back to the website to increase the number of incoming links which can result in higher search engine rankings.

Google is constantly tweaking its search algorithm to provide better results, including countering black hat SEO techniques. Some months as many as 500 minor changes are made according to Google’s own estimates. Its stated goal is to provide the most relevant content possible to users of their search engine.

In February Google announced a major change to its algorithm as it declared war on low quality content sites. The change to its algorithm impacted, by Google estimates, 11.8 percent of search queries. The update was designed to reduce rankings for low-quality content sites. These include sites that do not provide much value to users or copy content for other websites. The goal is to provide higher quality content in search rankings.

Google also recently added a Personal Blocking Extension to its Chrome Internet browser. It allows individuals to block sites they find of little value in their search engine query results. While the sites blocked by individuals were not used in the algorithm update, Google reports that the change addresses 84 percent of them.

This large of a change in Google’s search algorithm will create winners and losers.

Initial reports are that the algorithm change has drastically reduced the rankings of many low quality content sites, including ones used by Search Engine Marketing professionals. For example, ezinearticles.com, findarticles.com and hubpages.com have so far experienced an approximately 90 percent decline in keyword rankings.

One “content farm” that apparently escaped this algorithm change is eHow, despite the fact that its competitors didn’t. After the algorithm change, eHow’s keyword rankings actually increased by fifteen percent.The result has left eHow in a more dominant position in Google search engine ranking pages.

It is too soon to know the impact on SEO efforts of using content to increase search engine rankings for keywords. If your SEO strategy involves creating good quality content, you probably don’t need to worry about its impact in the long run.

We will just need to stay tuned until the full impact of the algorithm change is known.

If you feel you have been unjustly hurt by the algorithm change, you can post here: Google’s Webmaster Central Think You’ve been affected by the algorithm change…

To stay on top of this issue you can also visit: http://blog.searchenginewatch.com