Forum Moderators: phranque
I have not seen his site, but let us assume he does not have a staff of 4000 writers working full time for the past 10 years.
Do we, as internet users, WANT this autogenerated crap site on our net? Did google do wrong by eliminating them (in some places) from their ranking?
NO and NO!
These site are complete crap, filled with autogenerated pages with affiliate products, ads, and newsfeeds. They do not input anything useful, to anybody.
Sure they get clicks, and some have said that this shows that they are useful to users, but this is mistaken.
Just because a user clicks a link on these pages doesnt mean they serve a purpose, it only means that most likely the keyword they googled was too crowded with SEOed crap pages that anything good was on page 291, thus they clicked on the one that SEEMED to be what they wanted, NOT becuse it was infact useful.
A small of 2 pages of original content provides more than 380,000 pages of autogenerated search engine optimizatext.
I know many WebmasterWorld members have sites such as these, so I ask you, what do you think, can you justify your exsistence in the grande scheme and goals of the internet?
the grande scheme and goals of the internet
I'm not sure that there ever was a grand scheme, and the internet is not an entity and has no real goals. However, the essence of your argument is well-founded. When a spam site such as your 380,000 page site falls out of the SERPs, it is usually a victory for the end user.
It is possible to have a 380,000+ page site with real content on every page, of course - just look at the site you're on now! These kind of sites tend to be very strong and steady in the results.
Spamming the index is always a short-term strategy, but it can pay hansomely. However, it is the good content sites which win in the long run.
The web will change for the better when the majority of people who build websites become more concerned over the quality of their output than they are about short-term (or even long-term) profits.
Until that time (ie. never) the best we can hope for is for search engines to develop algorithms which return quality websites in the SERPS and bury the rest of the rubbish.
One that I come across often because of my research comes up if you type in the name of a French village and then a word like "histoire". Even if the village has valid pages for it, there is somebody with a good domain name who has created pages with names of a village as the <h1> and then just a few hundred common secondary search terms. I have never found a page on this site with actual information about one of the towns.
More recently, I come across pseudo-directory sites. You type in a search like "pseudo-directory" in Google and it gives you pages that consist of nothing but ad banners, your search term and variations on your search term and supposedly related terms (pseudo-psychology, pseudo-science and then from there on to parapsychology and occult). These links just take you to a similar auto-generated pages.
The last one I remember (yesterday) was a search that had the word "separation" in it and got one of these pages that had nothing to do with my search phrase, but it did have links for "divorce" and "breaking up" (nothing to do with the search, but okay if they led to actual content pages, which they don't. Then there were links for "degrees of separation" which triggers inclusion of a "Kevin Bacon" link and, having found an actor in the list of related auto-generated terms, the page also had a link for "Clint Eastwod" and so on. I can't remember the search itself because the only thing the terms I mention had in common were their utter disconnectedness from the original search.
The page then has banner ads hawking books on overcoming divorce, DVDs of Clint Eastwood movies, etc.
I've been wondering about a Google proxy where you can build in spam filters for your searches. If you click the "Spam" button in the browser bar, your proxy will henceforth filter out Google results including that site...
Okay, I'm ranting and getting carried away, because this phenomenon has been really aggravating me lately.
Tom
BTW, I wrote two really good (I think) pages yesterday - significant research, including several articles in the American Journal of Sports Medicine and other scholarly studies. If I can do that 190 days per year, that 380 pages. So it would only take one hundred of us working ten years to get 380,000 pages. If I let quality suffer a little, we can probably bring that down to 50 of us. I just need to find 49 more guys and another ten years and I'm set! Realistically, though, the topic in question will likely be utterly exhausted in about 1000 pages.
Okay, I'm ranting and getting carried away, because this phenomenon has been really aggravating me lately.
It wasn't a rant. It was identifying a problem that makes the internet next to useless at times.
The one site I manage always does well in the serps, because it's a content site with a specific reason for its existence. BUT, when I use the internet to find information for my own purposes, the serps are often a joke. It p*sses me off to no end. Google, Yahoo, whatever, mainly present a load of garbage that needs much sifting to find anything other than dross. A pox on all their houses; they're primarily giant databases full of spam.
Just my 2...uhm 1 cent worth :)
The mindless dribble mostly dominates location-based searches, but what if people start using software like this to target most other keywords?
There is some evidence that many users don't look at the site descriptions, or at least they look then are easily distracted by off-topic results. I see this in my logs when my sites are accidentally well-optimised for something irrelevant. So these sites will be getting hits, followed by people leaving to get what they really want, and possibly clicking Adsense or banners on the way out. So if the webmaster's measure of success is these clicks then those sites will not go away.
[webmasterworld.com...]
Especially post #5 and Brett's reply (post #7). It's the fundamental truth brought about by click-through advertizing such as Adsense or similar - if can be advantageous to have crap rather than decent content as it pushes the user away from your site - and if you've got it set up just right, the "away" will be through an ad.
Aside: Now with three Adsense panels permitted, the technique has even better chances of being a good earner.
Its been in Google for well over 2 years and continues to do quite well.
You created original content by inputting data, such as names, dates, descriptions which was then autogenerated and compiled into useful pages.
Many ecommerce sites have thousands of pages and are created much in the same way as your site.
The sites this post discusses are "crap sites" without any REAL content.
As the previous poster said, I am emphatically not talking about sites like the one in your profile. Eight years of entering data is not exactly auto-generated! What you have is a dynamic, database-drive, content-oriented site with real value. I'm a historian - your site is the kind of think that I'm usually looking for.
I'm talking about sites where people basically enter something like the crossword dictionary that cross-links 20K terms. They then create pages like the ones I mentioned. So for example, I would enter "Bishop of Digne" and I would get a page with <h1>Bishop of Digne</h1> and then I would get links like
Bishop of New York
Bishop of Boston
which sound okay, except the pages linked to have NO INFORMATION about those bishops.
Then I would get links like
->chess, checkers, games, poker, gambling (keying on "bishop")
->rook, pawn, queen (keying on "chess")
->Freddie Mercury, Bob Dylan, REM (keying on "Queen" the rock group).
-> -> Las Vegas, Atlantic City... (keying on "gambling")
Not a single one of these links would lead to a real page. Every link leads to another set of auto-generated links on the same domain with no content, but liberally sprinkled with advertisements. As someone said higher - a POX ON THEM. They are wasting my time.
Tom
