Latest posts by James Martell (see all)
- Building A Better Fathers Day With Gifts That Give Back - June 6, 2013
- The Simple Path To Google Rankings Success - January 14, 2013
- Google Rankings – The Gift That Keeps On Giving - November 12, 2012
Doing so means you get exposure to thousands and thousands of other CommentLuv users and your posts get sent out to the massive subscriber list.
Google loves this site and indexes it multiple times per day and posts always get lots of comments so you can be sure of some excellent exposure.
See the Write For Us page for more details
btw.. you can get this author box here
I knew it was only a matter of time…
When Google went public in 2004 I thought to myself they’d eventually have to start tap dancing to the tune shareholders wanted to hear.
Recent news of a rift between two founding Googlers over whether Google Places pages offer low value content or not confirmed that the *money guys* and the *don’t do evil* guys are in a battle that we all need to watch because the outcome of that fight will affect the way those inclined towards *natural search* do business.
Google Classifies Google Places As A Content Farm
According to a recent article by Michael Arrington on TechCrunch.com, Google shockingly targeted it’s own *Google Places* pages as spam and removed them from their index.
And I say, good for them!
The fact is, these Google Places listings are mostly nothing more than *scrapper* sites anyway.
Although I agree with the concept of helping local searchers find valid content about businesses in their area, I don’t think it’s fair to let aggregated content, such as that served up by Demand Media, who reportedly generates nearly 100% of its revenues (2 billion) from low quality aggregated content wrapped in Google Adsense ads, get an edge over the little guy.
And it seems Matt Cutts, one of the original Google executives and head of the webspam team, agrees with me on that. He pulled no punches on an official Google blog recently by saying: “Google absolutely takes action on sites that violate our quality guidelines regardless of whether they have ads powered by Google”.
Whoops!
Apparently that includes Google Places listings too, which did not go over well with another longtime Google exec, Marissa Mayer who runs Google Places or Google’s revenue chief Nikesh Arora, who according to a report on TMZ, recently spent two weeks in the Caribbean as a guest of Demand Media CEO Richard Rosenblatton. (on a corporate yacht, named of all things, AdSense)
Geez, do you think they talked about things like low value scrapper sites getting an edge over quality, original
Do you think Rosenblatton reminded Arora that Demand Media is a major partner, and advertiser with big bucks to spend?
One also wonders if angry words were spoken about our friend Matt Cutts, the guy responsible for the recent *Panda algorithmic update* that jeopardized the revenues of some pretty big websites and inadvertently nixed Google Places and the ads that run near them.
The Debate Goes On
Although it’s reported that those Google Places pages were restored in a few hours it is no doubt going to be an issue going forward.
The fact is, this new *farmer* algorithm takes direct aim at content-farms, like Google places and Demand Media. It is supposed to be fair to everyone. It should not favor billionaires or even Google itself.
And, notwithstanding that Marissa Mayer is reported to have said “screw the webspam team”, I think it should be a wake up call for her.
It’s discouraging to see two long time Google executives fighting over this; one favouring crappy, aggregated content, the other adhering to a founding company principle, “don’t be evil”.
To me *don’t be evil* means don’t favor billionaires, shareholders or corporate fat cats over principles.
Further to that Cutts is on record as saying. “If Google were to determine that Google properties were not providing high quality results, it would not matter whether or not those Google properties were displaying Google ads.”
In other words, Marissa Mayer needs to improve the quality of her content like the rest of us are required to do and fat-cat billionaires should get no favors because they have corporate yachts to schmooze on.
Over to You
I wrote this article assuming the TechCrunch.com piece was the real deal. It was an April Fools joke. Admittedly like many I fell for the joke. 😉 …but it does bring up the question — does a long-time Google executive have more clout than a 2 billion dollar advertiser? What do you think?
About the Author
James Martell lives in White Rock, BC with his wife Arlene and their four children. James is a pioneer in the affiliate marketing industry and was successfully profiting with affiliate websites as early as 1999. In addition to running a popular affiliate marketing training he interviews industry experts on his affiliate marketing podcasts.
