Is the Huffington Post Google's Favorite Content Farm?

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Videos Home ? Blogs ? Aaron Wall's blog Gain a competitive advantage Today! Say What!? PreviousGoogle's Matt Cutts Talks Down Keyword Domain NamesNextDownload IE9Is the Huffington Post Google's Favorite Content Farm? Mar 12th Tweet by Aaron Wall 7 comments posted in google
publishing & media

I was looking for information about the nuclear reactor issue in Japan and am glad it did not turn out as bad as it first looked!

But in that process of searching for information I kept stumbling into garbage hollow websites. I was cautious not to click on the malware results, but of the mainstream sites covering the issue, one of the most flagrant efforts was from the Huffington Post.

AOL recently announced that they were firing 15% to 20% of their staff. No need for original stories or even staff writers when you can literally grab a third party tweet, wrap it in your site design, and rank it in Google. Inline with that spirit, I took a screenshot. Rather than calling it the Huffington Post I decided a more fitting title would be plundering host. :D

We were told that the content farm update was to get rid of low quality web pages & yet that information-less page was ranking at the top of their search results, when it was nothing but a 3rd party tweet wrapped in brand and ads.

How does Huffington Post get away with that?

You can imagine in a hyperspace a bunch of points, some points are red, some points are green, and in others there’s some mixture. Your job is to find a plane which says that most things on this side of the place are red, and most of the things on that side of the plane are the opposite of red. - Google's Amit Singhal

If you make it past Google's arbitrary line in the sand there is no limit to how much spamming and jamming you can do.

we actually came up with a classifier to say, okay, IRS or Wikipedia or New York Times is over on this side, and the low-quality sites are over on this side. - Matt Cutts

(G)arbitrage never really goes away, it just becomes more corporate.

The problem with Google arbitrarily picking winners and losers is the winners will mass produce doorway pages. With much of the competition (including many of the original content creators) removed from the search results, this sort of activity is simply printing money.

As bad as that sounds, it is actually even worse than that. Today Google Alerts showed our brand being mentioned on a group-piracy website built around a subscription model of selling 3rd party content without permission! As annoying as that feels, of course there are going to be some dirtbags on the way that you have to deal with from time to time. But now that the content farm update has went through, some of the original content producers are no longer ranking for their own titles, whereas piracy sites that stole their content are now the canonical top ranked sources!

Google never used to put piracy sites on the first page of results for my books, this is a new feature on their part, and I think it goes a long way to show that their problem is cultural rather than technical. Google seems to have reached the conclusion that since many of their users are looking for pirated eBooks, quality search results means providing them with the best directory of copyright infringements available. And since Google streamlined their DMCA process with online forms, I couldn’t discover a method of telling them to remove a result like this from their search results, though I tried anyway.
... I feel like the guy who was walking across the street when Google dropped a 1000 pound bomb to take out a cockroach - Morris Rosenthal

Way to go Google! +1 +1

Too clever by half.

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Comments Dwight March 12, 2011 - 10:12pm
Arbitrage

I love it - "(G)arbitrage never really goes away, it just becomes more corporate." Stated perfectly. (and the fight continues for equality amongst us all in the web world....)

PaulNHS March 13, 2011 - 1:32am
I ran into this same problem

I ran into this same problem search for an article titled "White House veto threat on home refinance bill" when you Google the title name the original article doesn't even come up on the first page. In fact it comes up number 15. And the original article clearly states that "This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed." yet every news source is and ranking higher than the original.

davesaunders March 13, 2011 - 2:25pm
New agenda?

Aside from ironically raising the results of some very spammy sites, it seems like Google has found a way to arbitrarily grant "authority" to big media sites. The return of old media elitism is coming to the web.

NeonDog March 14, 2011 - 12:18am
Brilliantly said...

How long before every result on the first page is either a "whitelisted authority" that is basically free to do what they please or a Google-owned property?

I'd say not very long at all...and then you're only option is Adwords. Oh, but they'll suspend your account without remorse if you're not spending 7-figures which might enable you to speak to a real person.

Google doesn't want to own the web- Google wants to BE the web.

mike@mediakrush March 15, 2011 - 7:52pm
Garbitrage

So let me get this straight... Content is no longer king. Other peoples content on someone else's site IS king - but only if you have Google's blessing.

So where does that leave the rest of us?

Aaron Wall March 22, 2011 - 8:16pm
there is still opportunity of course

But one has to be more and more creative with both cost & strategy in order to remain profitable.

tiggsy March 22, 2011 - 6:31pm
Do you think they want us all to use Bing?

I don't want to do it, because MS is anathema, but if I have to...

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