In google we must have faith
Google released a pretty sizable update to it’s algorithm last week, this along with an earlier change that Matt Cutts describes as targeting duplicate content, seems to show what Google think the web should be like. You should produce engaging original content, presenting other peoples information - however nicely - is bad, well not good.
They say that 84% of the sites that have been affected by this change were flagged as spam by their users anyway and that they are pleased with the results - other people are not so pleased as this guardian article shows. The Google spam team have a hard job, identifying pages and sites that contain information that will not be relevant to their users and other teams have the task of rewarding sites that produce information that users want. However there are a lot of sites out there that use content from other places, how many sites use Wikipedia text, it’s creative commons after all. Many sites have built their entire business around traffic from Google and so when Google turns around and takes some of that traffic away it’s not surprising that they are pissed off, after all they’ve probably put in a lot of effort creating their website.
Now I agree with Google, the Internet should be about contributing to the net, not stealing other peoples work and passing it off as your own somehow so that people can click on adverts, that faceless Wikipedia editor didn’t do it so that you could make money - I know that makes me slightly hypocritical but I don’t think that anyone could disagree with the statement?
On the other hand with great power comes great responsibility and Google may have trodden on some peoples toes here, the rankings may come back as people actually click on the links but maybe Google has the foresight to see that the greater gain will be that these sites refocus on quality content and we have a better Internet - that would be a good thing, no?
It seems that some sites have the right idea when it comes to content - http://bit.ly/dPXTBL. They are talking about all of the things that Google wants people to do.
Google has made it harder for people to find sites that display rehashed content from other sites on the web, these could have been sites that provided navigation options for people - but then Google would no doubt argue that they aren’t the place to be finding these pages - the original sites are.
If you’re browsing the web looking for related information then you have to start somewhere and simple browsing isn’t what Google are about, these sites should focus on getting and keeping users themselves. In some ways this runs against some of the talk behind google instant which does let people discover aside content.
I agree that Google might be doing themselves an injustice now but in the long term, if sites end up producing better content it may be good for them.
http://bit.ly/fJ7JvB has a fairly good list showing the changes…
It’s certainly important that new content gets added to the web. If nothing were ever added, the internet would either stagnate entirely, or the proliferation of sites farming out other sites’ content would mean the web ate own tail, constantly re-chewing the result of it self-scraping until the whole thing was mush.
Having said that, if there were nothing to the web but isolated sites of original content, no-one would ever find any of it. There is clearly an important role for sites taking the effort out of finding the relevant and the interesting. They can do that by making browsing easier by, say, aggregating browsable lists, perhaps with summaries and/or arrange by topic (e.g. fark.com, stumbleupon.com), or by providing search/query tools (e.g. Google). There’s also a role for sites that provide access to information available elsewhere but represented to make it more understandable, or to highlight the particular bits the user wants to see.
By marking those sites providing ease of browsing as less valuable than original content, Google may give their users better answers to specific queries, but they make it harder for them to stumble across something they would never have thought of searching for themselves, or to find sites to browse for other things of interest in the same topic area without having to search for specific bits of information all the time.
By steering traffic away from other sites in the ease-of-access layer of the web, Google also risks appearing anti-competitive as it is the broad area in which they operate themselves. It also makes it harder for people to find sites that better handle particular sorts of query, or present certain types of information more usefully than Google can, even if they’re not original in content terms. Such a discovery might be the best result for a Google user, and encourage them to use Google again when the specialist site is out of its element. By not choosing not to provide that, Google might do themselves a disservice.