I like to break things

I spent most of today hanging out at the park with Lil’lady, drawing pictures and generally enjoying the weather. It was a nice end-of-vacation day. I decided to settle down with a little web reading.

Once again I followed a bunch of links and ended up on a thread where someone was crying because Google hurt their favorite content farm’s page rankings. Someone else asked if it was possible that there would be a class action suit and was answered that “Why, yes. And we’ll win. Because Google’s a monopoly!”

Oh, for fuck’s sake, really?

A few years ago Google instituted a policy against link selling. I remember because people were crying about that. They were getting their pagerank slapped down to zero because they were in violation of this policy. Why did Google do this? Because average people were googling and finding crap at the top of their search results. This lead to average people, like Other Sis, declaring that Google was crap for a search engine. So, Google did what they had to do to satisfy the average people who use it (more so than the SEO gamers who live off it). Guess who didn’t have to pay big bucks for hurting the income of so many people?

Now, Google has targeted content farms. Why? Because they pay poor schleps to game the search engine and bring in ad views/clicks. Average people, such as Millie, were getting bullshit like what you’d find on eHow. This lead them to declare that googling anything was a waste of time. Hell, I almost lost my mind when they introduced the Personal Blocklist for Chrome, because I’m sick to death of sifting through nonsense to find something for which I’m searching.

Google’s cleaning up it’s search because they don’t want to lose their market to Blekko or Bing or Yahoo!. They started in the search business, they do it better than anyone and they don’t want these content farms littering up their yard. They have every right to determine how their algorithm works and can decide to add “exclude if (is crap);” to that algorithm.

It sucks that the people who depended on these companies for income are having their income slashed. It sucked for those people who sold links lost that income too. But that’s the risk people take when they sign up to work with companies that were designed to profit from Google’s algorithm. They want their writers to use keyword specific titles and use Google’s keyword tools to find the best topic to bring them page views¹. They became dependent on a company that was dependent on Google. And what they gave Google was shitty content.

So, Google gave them a smack. “Sorry that you’ve built your business on our backs, content farms, but you’ve churned out way to much garbage and made the place stink. Now we’re going to push you a few pages back in the search and let some cleaner, sweeter-smelling content come to the front. Next time, maybe churn out something that people actually want to read.” And then the people who do populate Google with readable content raise a few pages in the serps and get a chance to have their honest work seen.

These people arguing that they’re going to bring a class action suit against Google are completely deluded. That would be like being in a mall and depending on the mall for business. The mall allows you to come it. You create ridiculous product– some of which is fraudulent or illegal or even dangerous. You want to get mall shoppers to come into your store so you tempt them with what they may be looking for (with your keywords), you put out flyers everywhere. Convince them that your store has exactly what they need. So they come in only to see crap and lies. They leave the store. They begin to think this mall is full of scammers and can’t be trusted. They’re pissed that they’ve wasted so much time wading through irrelevant materials to try to find what they came for. They’re pissed because their mall is littered with so many flyers promising this and that, while the real store refuses to live up to that promise. They complain to the mall. So the mall puts them in their own little back corner, with very little foot traffic. They stop letting their flyers be seen. They clean up the mess the crap shops created, so that the customers would stay happy. This way the customer doesn’t have to put up with the garbage and are still able to enjoy their mall.

Does this make the mall evil? For cleaning up it’s own property and protecting it’s own customer base? Is the mall discriminating because those little shitty shops were put all the way in the back, instead of being front and center? No. The mall allowed them a place to reside within it, but put it further back so the shop wouldn’t be the first thing shoppers found.

These content mill contributors have made it harder for freelance writers to make money. I’ve been offered to ghost blog for someone who would pay me $50 for 10-500wrd articles. That’s $5 an article. I remember the first time I got paid for writing it was $30 for a 400 word piece of junk. That was really low back then and I was embarrassed to have been doing it. I did it under yet another pseudonym. I got another article sold for $40 and that was pretty fucking great for me back then. Then more people started writing for $5 a pop. So, people who are writing so hard for residuals and/or for pennies a word make it harder for people who are trying really hard to write articles that they can make money from and be able to use that as a sample for other potential clients. The people who have all their pennies coming from the content mills are hurting now but it’s not because of Google. Google is doing right by the people who use it. They aren’t the least bit responsible for the people who have built their business model on gaming Google’s system.

I’m glad that Google has done this latest change. Because I don’t have to wade through junk to find what I’m looking for. Granted, I better than the average person at using Google, but I’ve done it as if I was a neophyte. Right now it isn’t perfect, but freaking eHow and Associated Content don’t steal the first page of all searches. That’s good for people who use Google for how it’s meant to be used, not so much for those that use it to line their own pockets.

Maybe these content generators should pay a little money and get their own blogs. They can promote the hell out of their stuff, stick ads all over the place, and keyword it up. They’d be doing what the content mills do, but getting a bigger share of the profits. And their sites would probably rank higher in the serps right now. Shoot, learning how to link back and forth with other content generators and you can have your own little network.

You’re not going to win against Google’s decision to change it’s algorithm. They have standards and customers and shareholders to please. They didn’t contract with your content mill to provide you with an income. It’s time for you to learn that it’s never a good idea to depend solely on someone else’s business model for your own. If you want to stay on the good side of the search engine God, maybe you should learn their TOS and act in a way that doesn’t violate that. Google isn’t required to index anyone’s pages for search and they certainly aren’t required to give a good page rank to any site that wants to game it. Find a way to write without gaming the system, get people to link to you and to read you, and then your site will raise in the serps. And your site will become well received and will receive requests from advertisers. You don’t have to worry about residuals then, do you?

Stop whining about Google doing it’s job and start finding a better way to do yours. Generating search spam is really not guaranteed money. And it certainly isn’t something about which to be proud.

1. They’ll get that residual payment, after all. [↩]