| AdWords, AdSense, and the Creation of Crap |
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 published in LED Digest 2098: International Perspectives Moderator Comment Once upon a time a company named Google came up with a groundbreaking contextual advertising model called AdSense. It was so effective that hundreds of thousands (millions?) of Web sites launched with the sole purpose of leveraging the AdSense network. These sites, often with no actual content or at least no original content, proliferated online for many years. With some exceptions, they are dominating the SERPs to this day. But the tide is changing, as it must. The thread started by Jim Berry in issue 2096 on "Google AdWords & AdSense Spam" has some interesting points. The discussion explores how a shift is inevitable away from scrape-and-slice sites towards the rewarding of quality, original, useful content. Yes, content! Content is still important; in fact, with the Web drowning in what Ken Evoy calls "crap sites," perhaps content is more valuable than ever. Read below for a highlight of Ken Evoy's post... From: Ken Evoy Subject: AdWords, AdSense, and the Creation of Crap
> ...we've noticed a huge increase in the
> number of sites that have no real content...
- Jim Berry, LED Digest 2096
From "trash sites" written by humans to "scrape-slice-and-dice" site-generators, the sheer volume of junk is terrifying. We see it because we are running our own spider to index the Net and bring back the most sophisticated measures of who is doing what on the Net yet. How bad is it?
My guess, based on what we see during our spidering (reviewing random samples by eye to learn how to eliminate the truly bad from the index), is that 75% of sites are trash. Our index will ultimately provide a better estimate of competition because we have the luxury of not having to provide the "search" side of things. So we can focus on the long-term and present a non-biased statistically significant sampling of the Net. Not even Google, not even Alexa's new beta of their Web snapshots, can do that.
Right now... their databases are stuffed with junk. Of course, when you do that to engines, they fight back with vigor. And I every confidence they will fight back and win, although this fight is far softer, far more amorphous, than they've ever faced.
The core drivers have reversed. Instead of monetizing a GREAT site, AdSense drives the creation of CRAP sites.
The solution? Google hates to throw humans at problems. I admire them because they will take the hit while figuring out how to solve a problem for the long-term, through technology. But however they do it... They must figure a better way to score sites. They must not let bad sites into AdSense. And they must drop bad sites from their program, WITHOUT dropping good ones. Not easy. Bad people, the equivalent of con artists offline simply bang out tons of pre-written, low- value info, copying or slightly modifying open-source stuff, or buying "ready-made" stuff. But it doesn't matter if a human touches it. Trash is trash.
Human visitors recognize it. And Google is learning to take it out to the curb. Google tracks human satisfaction nowadays. The days of on-page relevance are long put to bed. That's just the ante now. The key? Google tracks hundreds of off-page criteria that give them a good estimate of what humans think. These canNOT be Search Engine Optimized (SEO'd)...
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