Death Blow to Minisite-Makers .... what now?

[alien51]

According to an excerpt from the news in CNN:

"In the post, Google describes minisite as sites with "shallow or low-quality content."

Adding the extension will let users create a "personal blocklist." They won't see content from that site again in Google searches done while using Chrome.

It also sends Google a list of all the sites users have blocked."

Personally, I'm not against Google's algorithm punishing websites with poor content by giving low ranking... but asking users to vote for websites that should be blocked from the internet, leaves the door open for people to sabotage their website competitors by voting them out.

And should this mean that your website should NEVER go online, if it has little content yet???

This also leaves a permanent black-eye to "nice" domain names whose previous owner got stricken out of Google search.

 

[DugoohooRep]

the rules are always changing, we can not control google nor visitors. We have to evolve to adapt the rules.
1, minisites builers have to spend more time to make more unique, original contents,more beautiful designs, attractive to visitors.
2, minisite service providers have to work harder to develop more powerful system to help customers easily setting up new rules fullfilled minisites.
3, it is like a game or war, each side has to evolve to survive. If minisites control google, google lose credits to users, if minisites lose ranking in google, minisites owners lose money. All we can do is to improve our minisites and our minisite building system.

Thanks

Lee

 

[alien51]

Its all gonna be a waste of time anyways when all of the Wikipedias, eHows, JCPenneys, and BestBuys are gonna rule "G" anyways?

They actually consider the eHow website as garbage. They say that website is just like asking the man on the street for advice on just about anything.

Wikipedia... ever noticed that you need "citations" for every piece of info you place there? That means you cite the information somewhere else, then put that info in Wikipedia. Talk about "original content". And almost the entire planet get their education from Wikipedia, rather than say Encyclopaedia Britannica dot com.

Wikipedia must be the world's largest AGGREGATOR and SCRAPER of content.

You think JCPenney is a RESPECTED website role model? Read this:

Google caught JCPenny paying for Link Farms
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/business/13search.html

---------- Post added at 05:21 PM ---------- Previous post was at 05:05 PM ----------

I totally agree.

The next big danger is Facebook.

Facebook is what it is, because there is no other competition. People have no where else to go to.

Evenif a competitor shows up, they can't leave Facebook since all their friends are there.

Facebook is in a more commanding position, than Google.

 

[gemstar]

The idea of irony is obviously well and truly lost on you it seems. I never said my sites were great, in fact, I'll freely admit they are not glowing examples. At least I understand what they are which you obviously can't with your sites.

I don't have a problem with your sites per se...more your rather flippant attitude which more than wreaks of the pot calling the kettle black.



Yes...this site is full of irony already...lol. Some are just oblivious to it. :D

I think you missed the point that was being made to you; my sites, your sites and sites like whypark (or any other system like that), with regurgitated content on them are in the firing line.

I don't need your site to look at youtube vids...I can go to youtube...lol. Just like people could find my content elsewhere as well.

See what we are saying??

Can you see the target on your sites now??

:lol: FireFly take it easy! I love a good flame war at times. All in fun brother no offence:wave::lol:

 

[RogueWriter]

Wikipedia... ever noticed that you need "citations" for every piece of info you place there?

Go to wikipedia sometime, and do a search for the "Affiliate Marketing" page. It is amazing how self serving and spammy the links are there, no doubt the editing being done by the surprise recipients of links at the bottom.

Just write a report about some aspect of affiliate marketing, post it on your blog and voila, you can apparently link from that page.

 

[firefly]

:lol: FireFly take it easy! I love a good flame war at times. All in fun brother no offence:wave::lol:

Not a flame war...lol.

Just pointing out that a lot of us have sites that are directly in the cross hairs now.

that's all.

Cheers

 

[gemstar]

Not a flame war...lol.

Just pointing out that a lot of us have sites that are directly in the cross hairs now.

that's all.

Cheers

All the best my friend.:wave:

 

[barefoottech]

I make my living selling Minisites
Am I worried?
NO Way
Google has said it is Spammy Keyword flooded Landing style minisites with little or NO USEFUL content that is in their sights.

Some of my minisites have actually improved their rankings dramatically since the supposed Purge. All the crap sites I was competing with have disappeared leaving my useful sites to truly shine.

 

[DugoohooRep]

Nice work, Barefoottech!

The new rules require domaining industry to evolve from minisites to quality minisites!

 

[alien51]

Google has said it is Spammy Keyword flooded Landing style minisites with little or NO USEFUL content that is in their sights.

Google did say also that they plan to obliterate "low quality" content websites, as well.

Spammy keyword flooding, is fair game. A computer program can detect that. But Google wants to pass the job of "editorial scrutiny" to website readers and asking them to "vouch" if a website has "lousy" content.

I can understand people want to make money, but not all have poetic, literary inclination. And no matter how they try, sometimes you can detect that this website writer is just trying hard to fill his webpage with "text" to make the site "heavy" to feed the google bots with something to chew. But we humans know that he simply wrote 3 paragraphs worth of garbage.

It's easy to defeat a bot. But you can't fool humans as much. And when people thumb down your website, you're gone.

 

[barefoottech]

Exactly
I did say NO USEFULcontent
3 paragraphs of crap is not useful.

 

[carob]

More interesting will be a Facebook filter - giving priority to sites your friends like, or ones that people like them like. This is already coming in with location-type services.

Apparently behind this new Google algo is pressure about scraping sites - for example scraped content from Stackoverflow outranks the original content on Stackoverflow regularly. It is always hard for Google to know who really has the original content, this is ongoing.

I put a small page about a local group with their contact details onto an original content site of mine, just to help them out. It ranked number 2 for that search, so anyone wanting to find that group could easily do so. Then suddenly the top 4 result positions were occupied by 4 results from one site scraping content bigtime in that subject area. Go figure.

The recent algo changes jumped a minisite of mine from nowhere to number 1 for a super search term, so I'd say it's a mixed result so far but watch this space.

 

[mwzd]

I wonder how long it will be before a company 'guarantees' black marks against your competitor for $xxx/1,000 marks...

Not very long, this could be the start of the biggest flame war or the first world wide web war if people start doing it and google relies ONLY on this info to rank sites, which wouldn't be possible. Otherwise they'd probably end up in the block list of a few hundred million people given M$s clout.

They've never liked that kind of site, and they've been getting a lot of pressure from industry people who have their ear.

Google is the world's largest aggregator, they don't really create content, what then makes them an authority on content quality? And as for not liking that 'kind' of sites, who likes competition?

They actually consider the eHow website as garbage. They say that website is just like asking the man on the street for advice on just about anything.

About 90% of the advice you'd get from a 'man on the street' of his area of knowledge / expertise will be BETTER than the info that Goog searches for you.

And it's ironic, they're also asking the 'man on the street' to provide his opinion on what is and what is not quality content on stuff that might not be within that person's area of expertise, unlike wikipedia / ehow.

And when people thumb down your website, you're gone.

Not going to happen, if anything Goog will afford 1-3% of their algo weightage to people's opinion.

This is a classic case of much ado about nothing, I've been web publishing for a long time, what I've learnt is keep your target audience in mind while developing and google will follow in terms of ranking.

 

[DugoohooRep]

if one company hires one million people to block all its competitors, what will happen?

 

[enlytend]

It's funny that eHow gets mentioned in a positive light a few times in this thread. Sites like that(paid content churned out quickly by people who may or may not have a clue) are assumed to be a target of this as well.

And no matter how they try, sometimes you can detect that this website writer is just trying hard to fill his webpage with "text" to make the site "heavy" to feed the google bots with something to chew. But we humans know that he simply wrote 3 paragraphs worth of garbage.

That's what they're after. Banal, useless crap like ...

If you're buying men's shoes you need to know all about shoes for men! Men's shoes come in black, brown and all colors. Most shoes for men have shoelaces, though sandals are men's shoes too and you just stick your feet in them. Men have been wearing shoes for hundreds of years. Cave men didn't wear shoes but after that everyone did. If you're a man buying shoes you have to make sure they're the right size for your feet. Not to worry, men's shoes come in all sizes and you can find the right pair whether you have big feet or little feet. Men's shoes also have different widths for wide feet or narrow feet. We have the best selection of men's shoes here!​

(If you just took a quick look back at your site to see if I plagerised it when I wrote that, you might be a target.)

if one company hires one million people to block all its competitors, what will happen?

One would HOPE that Google, who knows very well that people are always trying to game their system and have been doing so for years, might have thought of that! They're well aware of the fact that many people define SPAM as "Sites Positioned Above Mine."

 

[alien51]

It is always hard for Google to know who really has the original content, this is ongoing.

Sometimes, this "original content" issue becomes overrated.

How can 12 million webpages possibly produce "original content" talking about the same thing?

What these "professional writers" do, is read the "original content" from somewhere else, then simply write their "opinion" about what they read. Then it becomes practically "original content" since everyone is entitled to give an opinion about anything under the sun.

Most of the time, people simply complain about the "writing style". Because accept the truth or not, many people do not really have any talent in writing.

But just because you can write your "opinion" with the quality of a novelist or a Pulitzer Prize winner, it doesn't mean what you are writing about is exactly "original content".

Keyword spammers, I think, are just the lazy people. Professional copy writers use "more effort" to tweak their writing style and use their talent to make it appear their "content" is original, but actually the gist or substance of their articles also came from somewhere else.

 

[SmokinJoe24]

Play Nice Boys and Girls.

I have 60 mini sites all built on exact match domains, they are all doing fine so far. But I am not building any future on them.

I mainly built the minisites to avoid making nothing with parking.

Taking a serious look at cleaning out the middle of the road domains and the junk and building real sites on the strong names.

Good Luck to all.

 

[cantstop]

face the wheel

I make my living selling Minisites
Am I worrried?
NO Way
Google has said it is Spammy Keyword flooded Landing style minisites with little or NO USEFUL content that is in their sights.

Some of my minisites have actually improved their rankings dramatically since the supposed Purge. All the crap sites I was competing with have disappeared leaving my useful sites to truly shine.

remember there was a recent update... that makes sites move around.and made some "shine"..
I don't think they have started yet... all these blog post on the official blog;this is fair warning....the manifesto..we will know from the howling when it gets going .Maybe still decorating the new offices at amphitheater parkway

 

[TCK]

You wouldn't happen to have a link to this article? Sounds like much of this would apply only if you are using Chrome.

In any case, Google will not very likely hurt sites that send quality traffic to their PPC advertisers.

Would be nice to have a link to that article. Thanks.

According to an excerpt from the news in CNN:

"In the post, Google describes minisite as sites with "shallow or low-quality content."

Adding the extension will let users create a "personal blocklist." They won't see content from that site again in Google searches done while using Chrome.

It also sends Google a list of all the sites users have blocked."

Personally, I'm not against Google's algorithm punishing websites with poor content by giving low ranking... but asking users to vote for websites that should be blocked from the internet, leaves the door open for people to sabotage their website competitors by voting them out.

And should this mean that your website should NEVER go online, if it has little content yet???

This also leaves a permanent black-eye to "nice" domain names whose previous owner got stricken out of Google search.

 

[enlytend]

I don't have the cnn link, but here's where they probably took the info from:

The Chrome extension release:
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/new-chrome-extension-block-sites-from.html

Announcement about the "Panda" update, which kicked in on 2/24.
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/finding-more-high-quality-sites-in.html

Major sites affected by Panda (aka "Farmer"):
http://searchengineland.com/who-lost-in-googles-farmer-algorithm-change-66173

 

[misterman88]

Google is the world's largest aggregator, they don't really create content, what then makes them an authority on content quality? And as for not liking that 'kind' of sites, who likes competition?


About 90% of the advice you'd get from a 'man on the street' of his area of knowledge / expertise will be BETTER than the info that Goog searches for you.

And it's ironic, they're also asking the 'man on the street' to provide his opinion on what is and what is not quality content on stuff that might not be within that person's area of expertise, unlike wikipedia / ehow.

wow, talk about taking the words right out of my mouth before i could say them!!!!