I dont know what anyone else thinks but they seem to have used the same keywords as another well established SEO site. All is fair in love and war and all that but surely this is simply going to lead to an even faster demise of the SEO game on Google?
Also it looks like they are an Overture affiliate - funny but I was under the impression Overture didn't want any large SEO sites
Anyone have any thoughts?
[edited by: IanTurner at 10:05 pm (utc) on Jan. 14, 2004]
Blatant spamming by an affiliate - source code probably has affiliate.espotting.com and the results mirror searchmole's for same keyword.
The one thing they've not thought of - surely by appearing SO quickly they will raise questions within Google especially with IPO coming up.
They don't want to be seen to be successfully spammable by SEO's - especially where affiliate deals can be set up quickly and easily with ppc's.
Surely they will also do a disservice to all the 'good' affiliate sites out there?
Seems to me this could be the reason why the bid terms appear to be dropping on espotting - the advertisers have figured this one too?
Too many spammers spoil the broth!
Unfortunately I can forsee only one solution in reality - removal or heavy penalisation of sites that display espotting results. This will be a shame but short of implementing some radical ideas soon - all that Google will be showing is ppc affiliates!
Well as I mentioned somewhere else in a thread, Google would be bonkers to remove ppc seo's ahead of the float - right now every penny will be worth atleast 10 times the value - I reckon we have until the IPO to make hay then after this we will almost definately see the florida algo applied across a much larger set of keywords. And yes it may also be being discussed at Google to block SERPS with an espotting code
From my understanding they are playing with the algo on their dev server at the moment to see what impact it will have on the service and revenues if the pull oout a lot of the espotting etc affiliates.
Lastly, an affiliate who has a contract with google for their paid listings feed are possibly more secure on the seo front than those that have comptitive results from espot or ov. This is simply an opinion and not based on fact so I would welcome others thoughts on this.
not just ESpotting affiliates
Sorry - agreed - it is becoming an issue with all the ppc engines as for all of them it must be a major source of revenue
be bonkers to remove ppc seo's
Not if the accuracy of their search is comprimised
One thing Florida showed is that Google can and will clean up areas to the 'benefit' of their results - see car insurance and hotels for starters
I have discussed this on the IPO forum - Google has to be very careful as it's playing with a fickle audience - joe public. They have no allegience if results are not providing results - with falling usgae would come falling revenue from Adwords etc.
a contract with google for their paid listings
that's an interesting one - there are not many of those (outside of adwords sites) - maybe that's the way to be kept in the SERPS - use adwords?
I am sure this would raise a few legal issues however should they keep there's and no - one elses.. but I am sure they have thought of that one already! ;)
Yes the IPO gives them new money to do more things my.google.com etc with weather, tv etc etc... but with Yahoo switching to Inktomi (apparently this quarter - and possibly not the Inktomi we see there now if the threads are to believed) they will nto have it all their own way.
Don't get me wrong I think they would be mad to remove it all - but likewise I can't see them sitting back and allowing it to happen in the way it has the past three / fours months or so...
IMHO - my guess is that Florida will be rolled out to top 200 or so generic search terms to clean up majority of data....
In order to address the issues of the affiliate sites we are not talking a couple of hundred keywords. Most of these sites probably have the capbility to replace a couple of hundred in a couple of hours. These sites deal in 10s of thousands of keyphrases, and probably wouldn't even notice less than a thousand going missing.
a couple of hundred keywords
Sorry - meant a couple of hundred generic terms e.g. insurance, mobile phones, health insurance, shopping etc.
Of which I agree there are hundreds of thousands of combinations of keyword search terms associated
PHEW - bit of a hangover this morning - please bear with my silly mistakes!
Google needs to come up with a long term algorithmic solution, along the lines of Florida, and I would bet money we see it before the end of March.
One more aspect of this is that once Yahoo swaps to Inktomi, the impact of sites like this on the UK SE market will be somewhat smaller, unless they can do the same on Inktomi. However, Inktomi is so poor at spidering in comparison to Google (for the moment) that they simply can't get indexed. Have a look and see for yourself.
But as a searcher today, god what a nightmare these review/compare/aggegate sites are.
I was trying to find some information out about something, and it took 4 pages of crap before I found an "information" page.
If I'm searching for something, I want information on that specific term, I don't want to find a page full of search results from another search engine. They need to change the algorithm so that these aggregate sites are on about the same elvel as DMOZ sites - ie when there is nothing else to see.
The PPC affiliates have complete freedom with their sites to SEO how they want to and to target any key phrase they want to.
