Continuations: With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility - Continuations
Richard
· 1 year ago
I'm not sure how to see a threat here. Yes Google is taking on an increasing number of competitors, but Hotmail could have told you that long ago (I'm now a gmail user so I don't think that went too badly).
One potential danger is if the Knol pages get better treatment in the search rankings, but Google may have started that way because they believe the can influence the content enough to keep it clean. If the first page of google results starts to fill up with spam they'll have a hard time competing with anyone on anything for long.
As an aside, I wonder what completes the sequence "forgotten", "spam-filled", "flawed-but-fascinating"...
albert
· 1 year ago
I think the threat is to the ecosystem that google has so successfully enabled to date. Would the ecosystem be a better place if instead of launching knol google had tried to assist wikipedia and other sites that have similar functionality?
Philippe Bradley
· 1 year ago
But is it really a threat to the Internet ecosystem? If the Internet has ever proved anything, it's that its ecosystem *doesn't* rely on professional content producers. So will the ecosystem be worse off if Google forces professional content producers to shut up shop?
Google is merely yet another nail in the coffin for professional online producers - the main driving force, bigger even than Google, is the amateur-empowering basic nature of the Web. And that nature may burn Google's fingers if it tries its hand at professional content with meaningful stakes (I'd like to see figures on investment into Knol but I doubt it's a big bet) - there's no reason why Google should be immune in this arena when nobody else has been so far.
albert
· 1 year ago
There is another comment thread here that captures well why this is very much an issue for long tail content.
Q dub
· 1 year ago
Google's basic responsibility is to keep the search results fair. Given their inherent understanding of their own ranking, and possibly talent in designing a system that attracts high quality talent, it's not surprising that Knol results would evenhandedly earn the top spots. The "don't compete with your customers" code is broken in industry all the time, but it's only ugly because it is often linked with unfair competition, not because it is inherently immoral.
albert
· 1 year ago
The early experiments that Danny Sullivan has conducted on this very question are not promising. Also competing with your customers may be common but *not* if you have 70 percent or more market share.
Q dub
· 1 year ago
Shoot, it would be very disappointing if it turns out Google manipulated their own search results to promote new content.
Personally, I think the push into second-click content is a trip to low-ROI zone. It's especially true if they go into content that is already heavily using ad-sense, where the incremental revenue is merely the recapturing of ad-sense dollars paid out to the old content creator. Also, what happens when they push out an endemic/niche site with really damn good CPM, only to replace it with moderate ad-sense CPM? All in all, my fear is you have a bunch of low ROI or ROI negative google projects killing ROI positive businesses because they are kept afloat by an upstream cash cow.
albert
· 1 year ago
That captures some of my concerns very well.
Philippe Bradley
· 1 year ago
their reputation for not manually altering their search results - and thus returning only unbiased, objectively-determined 'quality' results, is worth infinitely more to them than Knol ever will be. It would be brand suicide.
qdub, i think you're more on the mark with your comment made 2 levels up - they have an inherent knowledge of SEO, and they'll never get blacklisted, they'll be fully aware of what path their spiders take through the site, what it sees, what it likes, what it dislikes, etc. Expect Danny Sullivan and co to pay very close attention to Knol's design features and to extrapolate good SEO practices from it. This may not be all bad for clever content publishers...
as for the CPMs (and the ROI corollary - as I said, it'd be interesting to see how much google has staked on Knol - doubt it's much)... it would seem unlikely that, with the insider's perspective we just agreed they have, they would be putting low CPM content up; after all, doubtless they have a sandbox environment that they can run a knol page in and see what CPMs it would likely fetch, and what it would displace in the rankings, no? Besides, is there any reason to presuppose that these will be low-CPM pages? The emphasis is on authoritatively put together, highly-useful, zero sales-pitch quasi-encyclopedic content, with high-interest visitors... sounds like for a given topic it ought to tend to a naturally high (relative) SERP, and for high CPMs too (again relative to others in the niche), over time. I can't quite see it displacing higher-returns business, especially further down the line.
It may kick the crutch from out of a single-keyword reliant publisher but is there anything inefficient about that? This ecosystem can heal itself extremely well - it's one of the most diverse ecosystems of human activity, and low low low barriers to entry mean something else, better adapted, will just flow into the virtual space left by it.
spam and content scraping is an interesting question: will anyone risk google's fury by copying their content or trying to insert your own links into it?
albert
· 1 year ago
The ecosystem is *not* diverse when it comes to search, where Google alone accounts for 70% and the top three engines cover 90%+ of search. Also, the google search algorithm allows for "manual" changes already (I believe "discretionary" would be a better word), for instance to eliminate or demote google bombs from the results. This and other tuning of their algorithm rightly involves human judgment and google to date has shown great judgment. A big point of the whole discussion is that these judgment calls that need to be made get a lot harder as more of the content is on google owned services.
Richard
· 1 year ago
There should be a simple basis for the decisions - people want to find what they're looking for when they do a search. In the same way that internet marketers (some) try to create more useful content to attract lasting search traffic while improving the quality of the results in their niche, Google should be adjusting the results (if they do) based on helping the user. They won't implode the minute they forget this but so far they've been doing it pretty well and it has pushed them higher - that can easily be reversed.
All Comments
One potential danger is if the Knol pages get better treatment in the search rankings, but Google may have started that way because they believe the can influence the content enough to keep it clean. If the first page of google results starts to fill up with spam they'll have a hard time competing with anyone on anything for long.
As an aside, I wonder what completes the sequence "forgotten", "spam-filled", "flawed-but-fascinating"...
Google is merely yet another nail in the coffin for professional online producers - the main driving force, bigger even than Google, is the amateur-empowering basic nature of the Web. And that nature may burn Google's fingers if it tries its hand at professional content with meaningful stakes (I'd like to see figures on investment into Knol but I doubt it's a big bet) - there's no reason why Google should be immune in this arena when nobody else has been so far.
Personally, I think the push into second-click content is a trip to low-ROI zone. It's especially true if they go into content that is already heavily using ad-sense, where the incremental revenue is merely the recapturing of ad-sense dollars paid out to the old content creator. Also, what happens when they push out an endemic/niche site with really damn good CPM, only to replace it with moderate ad-sense CPM? All in all, my fear is you have a bunch of low ROI or ROI negative google projects killing ROI positive businesses because they are kept afloat by an upstream cash cow.
qdub, i think you're more on the mark with your comment made 2 levels up - they have an inherent knowledge of SEO, and they'll never get blacklisted, they'll be fully aware of what path their spiders take through the site, what it sees, what it likes, what it dislikes, etc. Expect Danny Sullivan and co to pay very close attention to Knol's design features and to extrapolate good SEO practices from it. This may not be all bad for clever content publishers...
as for the CPMs (and the ROI corollary - as I said, it'd be interesting to see how much google has staked on Knol - doubt it's much)... it would seem unlikely that, with the insider's perspective we just agreed they have, they would be putting low CPM content up; after all, doubtless they have a sandbox environment that they can run a knol page in and see what CPMs it would likely fetch, and what it would displace in the rankings, no? Besides, is there any reason to presuppose that these will be low-CPM pages? The emphasis is on authoritatively put together, highly-useful, zero sales-pitch quasi-encyclopedic content, with high-interest visitors... sounds like for a given topic it ought to tend to a naturally high (relative) SERP, and for high CPMs too (again relative to others in the niche), over time. I can't quite see it displacing higher-returns business, especially further down the line.
It may kick the crutch from out of a single-keyword reliant publisher but is there anything inefficient about that? This ecosystem can heal itself extremely well - it's one of the most diverse ecosystems of human activity, and low low low barriers to entry mean something else, better adapted, will just flow into the virtual space left by it.
spam and content scraping is an interesting question: will anyone risk google's fury by copying their content or trying to insert your own links into it?