Recently, there have been a series of negative articles about content farms.
Content farms, such as Demand Media’s eHow and similar low-cost content publication sites, are now deemed an industry “concern”. “Industry” being the traditional publishing idustry, and concern presumably being “competitive threat”.
A trade group called the Internet Content Syndication Council (ICSC) has been circulating a document entitled “Council To Counter Web Content Generators Growing Clout“. They talk about “job threatened journalists” and “diminishing content standards”. Look, see what happens when the proletariat gets their hands on the printing press! 
There are so many blogs on search marketing.
Then there are so many forums.
And Tweets.
So much SEO noise, and so little time.
So how does anyone make sense of it? The deluge can be overwhelming for the experienced SEO, let alone the poor beginner. If you are just starting SEO, here are the ten areas you should spend most of your time on when you’re starting up.
1. Stop reading Blogs/Forums/Tweets/Facebook. Too much noise, takin’ all your time
“SPAM = Site’s Positioned Above Mine” – Greg Boser
There is obviously no shortage of information on SEO.
But thanks for turning up here
The sheer avalanche of SEO information can be overwhelming, for beginners and experts alike. Who do you know who to listen to? What information do you need to know, and what information is filler?
Why should you even listen to SEOBook?
1. Most Information Published On SEO Is Filler
You can learn 80% of what you need to know about SEO pretty quickly. You don’t need the additional 20% in order to achieve, unless you’re a masochist – otherwise known as an SEO professional
Does Google like auto-generated websites wrapped in Google AdSense ads?
The short answer is no.
The long answer is a bit more convoluted. But so long as they are…
- well branded
- well funded
- operating at scale
- good at public relations
- wrapped in AdSense ads
…the answer is yes, autogenerated websites full of scraped content are fine.*
*based on Mahalo.com
Mahalo SEO Spam Case Study
The Sales Pitch & Launch
Originally when launching Mahalo, Jason Calacanas claimed that it would be spam free and that SEOs would have hell to pay.
The following is a guest post by Ari Ozick, a member of our SEO Community who frequently shares great insights.
The above graph is based on an intensive questionnaire of over 2500 world class SEOs, including freelancers, in-house corporate types and SEO entrepreneurs. In the questionnaire, I asked one simple question – what is the most profitable activity in your business. The results are in, and as the graph clearly shows, Twittering away the day is by far the most profitable activity for most SEOs. Apparently there is more money to be made on twitter then there is in link building and out ranking the competition.
How are your referral stats looking? Noticed more traffic from Bing lately?
According to a Nielsen report last month, Bing is growing faster than any other search engine. It was reported Bing had 10.7% of the total search market, up 2% from the month before. Yesterdays report from Hitwise suggests Bing has since dropped to around 8.96 percent.
So, somewhere around 8-10% perhaps.
The new statistics, from internet research firm Hitwise, will make disappointing reading for Mr Ballmer, who has said he is willing to spend as much as $11bn on search. Earlier this week he told The Daily Telegraph: “We’re trying to give Google a little competition in the search business
SEO came about soon after the advent of the web crawler. The commercial imperative was obvious – where there was web traffic, there was money to be made. Positioning a page first in the engines was pretty much a licence to print money.
Still is, of course.
Throughout the history of search and SEO, the predominant metaphor of the web has been one borrowed partly from publishing – the page – and partly from computer science – the domain. A domain contains pages. A domain is a silo. A domain has clear borders.
If you have the budget resources the best time to hire an SEO is before you start your website projects. However, most people new to the web lack the cashflow needed to buy quality SEO services. Further if they don’t understand the complexities of the market and get bombarded with cheap (and low to no value) SEO package offers from web hosts, registrars, and email spammers they may think SEO should be cheap and easy, causing them to buy garbage – and become distrusting of the concept of SEO.
Online Marketing is Complex
One thing I believe about online marketing (and SEO in particular) is that the more rigid the advice the lower its value, particularly when it is cast out to a general audience. Why? Online marketing incorporates psychology, sociology, game theory, etc. The human mind is complex. Understanding how many of them work together (or against each other) is even more complex.
There are hundreds or thousands of ways to win a market. Each idea is a tool that has potential risks and potential rewards on a per market and per project basis.
IIf you could tell the web 2.0/read-write/blogging/crowd-sourcing crowd one thing about search marketing, what would it be?
In a recent talk, given to bloggers, by Google Engineer Matt Cutts, Matt posed the question:
“What Do SEOs know that bloggers might not know?”
Matt goes on to talk about the merits of keyword research in terms of topic selection, and how understanding this concept can bring you a great deal of traffic. In summary, if you find out what keywords people search on, then add these to your page, you stand a good change of having those searchers land on your page. As SEOs know, there’s more to it than that, but that’s the quick version
