paperson - 7:06 pm on Dec 23, 2004 (gmt 0)

The business model is certainly not without risk. When they went to the ArticleInsider.com model earlier this year, they initially did quite well in Google but eventually fell off the cliff with Yahoo because of the 301 redirects. Then AI grew too quickly for their inbound links and towards the end of the summer, they started to lose their Google rankings. With the last Yahoo reindexing (and due in some part to Y fixing their 301 redirect issue), they are now all over the organic listings again. I suspect they will eventually come back up on Google at some point and they fully intend to acquire other properties (with good PR) to continue to prop up AI.

The issue I have with them is that the 2nd, 3rd, or 4th customer they bring on for a specific keyword may not get the results for the deposit they are putting up. Google SERP will return only the top two results from AI. Yahoo SERP will return mutliple results on the first page.

Example: Las Vegas Widgets - right now our AI listing has 4 of the top 10 results for this SERP in Yahoo. When we had the Google SERP this summer, we were limited to the 2 of 10 organic listings.

Clients that will come in and buy a campaign based on Las Vegas Widgets will not rank higher than the first sponsor for a SERP. The older content will have the edge (after the freshbot effect) and the new clients, I believe, IMHO, will not see the results that their current clients have.

Can you sustain the growth of a company when you are completely dependent on Google, Yahoo, and MSN for their organic results. That's the most valuable territory and that's what we're all fighting for.