Technology, Seo | featured news

Ever since Google released its Penguin update last year, which penalizes sites for being linked to by low quality sites, I’ve been getting a regular stream of link removal requests. (Yeah, I know this implies that my site is low quality, but I’ll let that go.)

Because Binh, Popcorn, and I had been blogging for months for Movies With Butter (a.k.a. MWB), we decided to apply for inclusion in Google News. I tried applying for Wopular, but I didn’t make the cut because they don’t accept one man shops. With MWB, we have three and because of that, we made the cut.

Demand Media, a content farm targeted by Google's Panda Update, is shifting focus from text to video. On its flagship site eHow, it's producing less written content and more how-to videos, moving from one ecosystem into another.

Last Thursday, Google launched another algorithm change to their search engine that rewards “fresher” content. For example, if you’re searching for a current event, the latest news articles would pop up to the top of the page. 35% of the search results are affected. I was thinking this should be great for a news sites like Wopular. I checked Google Analytics on Thursday and instead of getting a traffic boost, I got the opposite - a dip.

Talk about getting its ass-kicked by Google’s Panda Update, Mahalo’s been hit pretty hard. Jason Calacanis, the founder, has never been shy about how his site gets traffic - by paying writers cheaply to crank out content for the top Google keyword searches. In other words, an SEO play - a content farm.

Senh: This sounds like the content farm equivalent for e-books. It should be interesting to see where it goes. In the short term, it'll probably work. By using Google Trends and similar online analytical tools, they can create books that are more timely. The danger in that is if they get caught up in just cranking out "stuff." Then they'll turn into e-book spam. If that happens, Amazon and other distributors will start refining their searches for e-books to filter out "content farms" like Google.

Senh: It's unfortunate, but as soon as Google adds an editorial layer on top of their search engine, it's game over for the company - then you can definitely say there's a bias in their search results. It opens up a whole can of worms. What I don't get is why Rick Santorum couldn't do the same and get his followers to tweet and blog about him to push his official site up to the top of the results.