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Recently economist, technology investor, analyst, blogger and all-around go-to guy Paul Kedrosky published a scathing post on his Infectious Greed blog entitled “Dishwashers, and How Google Eats Its Own Tail.” You can (and should) read the entire post for yourself, but the gist is his stymied efforts at searching for appliance reviews online.
In his quest to find dishwasher reviews, he found that the vast majority of top-ranking results were for advertisements, repackaged advertorial content, and fake blogs linking back to advertisers. His assessment based on his anecdotal evidence was that searching for products that yield high scores in keyword search algorithms (“dishwasher reviews”) was useless, and Google needs to work harder to eliminate this issue.
In response, Chris Dixon, founder of Hunch, dug a little deeper to figure out the source Kedrosky’s frustrations and published “Anatomy of a Bad Search Result” on his blog. Dixon found that there were a number of sites set up to resemble blogs and linking back to one common source—in this case, consumersearch.com.
The crux of his response was that these fake blogs mine content about whatever keyword term they are seeking to promote from other sites, string this content together to look like a blog, then link back to a commercial site. But who was responsible? Consumersearch, an SEO consultant, a member of an affiliate program, or someone else? The problem as he saw it was that “you have a multibillion dollar economy built around keywords and links,” so of course companies will create cookie-cutter content to drive traffic and conversions.
The question then becomes what to do about it. We have arrived at this juncture in search marketing because search has value—much like in physical real estate, it’s all about location, location and location. Companies take whatever measures they can—or in some cases whatever they think they can get away with—to land prime search results page (SRP) real estate. Add in the importance of inbound links to the search relevance equation, and you are going to see this type of practice.
The technology exists to serve its human masters, and as such it can be and is constantly improved to meet our needs. Search companies like Google constantly change their algorithms and add new features like behavioral tracking and sales data in order to determine relevance. It’s easy to make the argument that search engines are so good at finding results to common queries that they’re finding anything and everything, quality or not. And what a problem to have.
Besides, do you remember back to 1995 when you could just submit a site to Yahoo! and it would show up almost instantly? Or add a physical address to Google without responding to an automated phone call or postcard? The web in 2010 is an unimaginably crowded ecosystem, so it’s folly to blame Google because they haven’t yet solved a relatively new problem. Every day new services are added and updates are made to ensure that their search product can get its arms around the web and see the forest for the trees.
In short, don’t panic. Companies should keep operating above the table when it comes to search marketing, keep producing quality content as it relates to their products and services, and engage in targeted search marketing to the best of their abilities by the rules. Scammers and short-term profit-seekers will always spike, but their moment in the sun is always short-lived. Algorithms will get better, and they’ll learn to separate the wheat from the chaff. It won’t happen overnight, but it will happen.
