I'd say you're doing exactly what Google wants and needs by putting the world's information online and making it indexable by them. It's a symbiotic relationship and searchers are grateful to both you and Google for helping them find what they need (that vet database you bought for example) online.
Not only that but Google profits directly through ads that appear in search results showing your data. And indirectly keeping 32% of revenue if you're running adsense.
Now if it's covered in ads that destroy the content or if the site uses cloaking or tries to trick you into signing up or thinking you have to sign up the way stackoverflow's competitor did, then that's worth a penalty.
Information that is unique and useful, presented in an honest and timely fashion is exactly what Google wants and desperately needs more of.
Don't confuse what I'm describing here or in the blog entry with duplicate content or content that has been scraped and remixed to look unique.
As a searcher, no I am not grateful to content farms, "directories", and other pseudo-content. In fact I find it quite frustrating that searches for common maintenance problems, housekeeping, medical topics, etc., now turn up page after page of superficial, ad-ridden content. I have the sense that the actual act of finding information on the internet has become quite a bit harder since, say, 2004.
What do you think of sites like DMV.org that wrap 50 godawful state websites and non-websites with nationally uniform easy to navigate content, plus ads mixed in?
It adds a lot of value to me, and Google rewards with huber page rank than government websites, which one assumes get a huge authoritativeness bonus from Google.
A lit of folks get indignant that someone is "just" exposing true information for money. That is 99% of what Google does and why everyone loves them. If you cut the money out, the ride stops. Organized information is more valuable and more costly than scattered hidden information.
Here's the question... would you pay for better information? Perhaps one with an encyclopedic knowledge that was constantly expanding, say an eHow with depth.
> Perhaps one with an encyclopedic knowledge that was constantly expanding, say an eHow with depth.
We already have one of those: it's called the World Wide Web.
If only bottom-feeders could stop getting in the way of navigating it, we could get back to answering useful questions with a quick Web search the way we used to.
People used to buy books and magazines or go to the library.
The great thing about the internet was that it replaced the hassle and expense of doing that. It works pretty well even with the nearly-content-free sites clogging up the system.
Incidentally, for Q&A, IBM might have something that will beat google search:
I think the biggest issue with the way I was operating the database-driven sites was that the content was paper thin. One piece of information on each page is not what Google wants. They want rich information from authorities on the subject. All I was doing was automatically building out sites from a large databases of information, it wasn't high quality reviews or reports.
Not only that but Google profits directly through ads that appear in search results showing your data. And indirectly keeping 32% of revenue if you're running adsense.
Now if it's covered in ads that destroy the content or if the site uses cloaking or tries to trick you into signing up or thinking you have to sign up the way stackoverflow's competitor did, then that's worth a penalty.
Information that is unique and useful, presented in an honest and timely fashion is exactly what Google wants and desperately needs more of.
Don't confuse what I'm describing here or in the blog entry with duplicate content or content that has been scraped and remixed to look unique.