Pierre Chappaz is not well known in the United States. The activities of this French (now living in Switzerland) entrepreneur are mostly known in Europe. He’s the founder of Kelkoo, one of the oldest search engines for shopping, and he helped the RSS aggregator Netvibes grow up. Last week, Pierre Chappaz killed [...]

Source: forbes.com → | ∞ Permalink

Nobody can deny that great money is there for the taking by ranking first for [your key phrase here]. But in my opinion, getting search traffic is the just tip of the iceberg. The real challenge isn’t to produce optimized content, but to produce memorable content. And for that reason, I’ve always believed sites like Ezine to be about as valuable to the end user as a third nipple on my face. So imagine the explosion in my pants then when I read just recently that the so-called Google Farmer update could bring an end to this madness.

Same feeling shared here. Now if they could only remove crappy keyword-rich domain sites sooner than later...

It’s possible to run high traffic websites without a shred or sniff of a first page on the Big G. You just need to be able to market your message in the right places to the right audience. The idea of abandoning search traffic altogether is, I would imagine, too much of a leap for most. So try looking at things in a different way.

That is true, that requires great creativity and a strong marketing strategy. Guys like @johnchow or @shoemoney did it.

Thx to @jeremypalmer for tweeting this article.

Source: finchblogs.com → | ∞ Permalink

Google's latest algorithm change has impacted nearly 12% of queries. That means that a lot of sites, big and small, are looking at their web analytics reports

Source: searchengineland.com → | ∞ Permalink

The system behind Demand Media is an automated topic suggestion tool which finds keywords topics and compares them to metrics such as search volume,

Source: blogstorm.co.uk → | ∞ Permalink

Interesting. As we already know, Google is adjusting their algo to appease the large unhappy Adwords advertisers :)

Source: fonerbooks.com → | ∞ Permalink

“We deeply care about the people who are generating high-quality content sites, which are the key to a healthy web ecosystem,” Singhal said. “However, we don’t manually change anything along these lines.”

“Therefore any time a good site gets a lower ranking or falsely gets caught by our algorithm — and that does happen once in a while even though all of our testing shows this change was very accurate — we make a note of it and go back the next day to work harder to bring it closer to 100 percent.”

“That’s exactly what we are going to do, and our engineers are working as we speak building a new layer on top of this algorithm to make it even more accurate than it is,” Singhal said.

So if you are large enough, spend a lot of money to advertise on Google and whine enough, Google will fix things up? Come-on.

Source: wired.com → | ∞ Permalink

Those publishers, which many dismissively refer to as content farms, include Demand Media, Yahoo’s Associated Content and AOL’s Seed. Demand Media uses software that looks at activity on search engines, Facebook and Twitter; generates headlines based on it; and assigns freelancers to write corresponding pieces. The result is articles like “How to Lose Weight in Your Face,” which is a top Google result for related searches and includes tips like “drink plenty of water.” But that approach might not be so effective for long. In recent weeks, there has been swelling criticism in technology circles of these types of Web sites, and of Google for listing the articles as top results.

Must read.

Source: nytimes.com → | ∞ Permalink

Judging by Demand Media's successful IPO, HuffPo getting bought for $315 million and Wikimedia raising over $16 million from Wikipedia users and fans, it appears online content is red hot (again). So when a company asks me to have a look at their online article directory, which they say gets visited by more than 20 million unique users every month, I pay attention. Even more surprising are those stats when you look at the size of the company: only 11 employees, but ArticlesBase is already - self-reportedly - raking in about $500,000 a month, at a 80% profit margin. What gives?

Wow these stats are impressive... like it or not, they are making a lot of dough, enough to turn their business around when the Google hammer will fall down on them.

Source: techcrunch.com → | ∞ Permalink

We have a 58 page document detailing AOL's master plan.

Ok this is really interesting and i want to go through it all, there is definitely something to learn about.

31,500 articles per month * average of $99 a piece = ~$3.12M/mth in content generation.

Now i understand why these companies focusing on automated content generation have a big future. I am sure they can cut the $99 by half with a decent result, if not better.

Source: businessinsider.com → | ∞ Permalink

It’s big money: Demand Media went public recently, and AOL’s leading the charge with its low cost Seed.com service and, arguably, its $315 million buyout of the Huffington Post. Journalists roll their eyes at this stuff, but content farms — for better or worse — are hard to ignore right now, driving down prices and flooding the market with stories. But what if you took the content farm model even further — by crowdsourcing everything? That’s the objective of My Boss Is a Robot, an experimental exercise to see how automated the process of journalism can become. It’s being overseen by two San Francisco-based journalists, Jim Giles and MacGregor Campbell, who want to understand what automation and crowdsourcing mean for journalism in the long term.

This is, with no doubt, the future of content creation and a big headache for any search engine out there.

Source: gigaom.com → | ∞ Permalink

An experiment being conducted by an alliance of journalists and computer scientists aims to combine the distributed human brainpower of Amazon's small-task outsourcing engine, Mechanical Turk, with a software boss pre-programmed with all the logic required to stitch myriad discrete human-accomplished tasks into something resembling the work of a single person.

And a little bit about AOL's Seed - the bionic journalism (read more at techcrunch)

Source: technologyreview.com → | ∞ Permalink

This is great.

Source: businessinsider.com → | ∞ Permalink

Narrative Science transforms data into high-quality editorial content. Our technology application generates news stories, industry reports, headlines and more — at scale and without human authoring or editing. Narratives can be created from almost any data set, be it numbers or text, structured or unstructured.

This is very interesting and a new headache in Google's fight to remove content farms i think.

The startup popped up on my radar because they got a round of $6M, lead by a VC who's, i guess, okay with flooding the web with non-human generated content... and add another level of challenges to the "battle to make a better internet" some of us are fighting for...

And some more about this service:

Narrative Science delivers: Long & short form articles, headlines, summaries & more Customized formats, voices & points-of-view All original & optimized content Scalable coverage for niche & local markets

I guess as long as there is money to be made, there will be a VC.

What's your take on this?

Source: narrativescience.com → | ∞ Permalink

Scathing criticism of content farms and google

"Demand Media operates based on a simple formula for success on the Web: create a ton of niche, mostly uninspired content targeted to search engines, then make it viral through social software and make lots of money through ads."

"The bottom line is that the quality of content produced by these 'content farms' is dubious, which has an impact on both publishers and readers."

Source: readwriteweb.com → | ∞ Permalink

Google's Matt Cutts makes an official response to the criticism, discusses a shift in focus from webspam to content farms.

Source: googleblog.blogspot.com → | ∞ Permalink