Did Google kill the long tail?
ritholtz.com
Did Google kill the long tail?
1–10 of 27 posts
Re: Did Google kill the long tail?
#2Following the link, I read that Google is actively hiding the keywords used while searching. Site owners who are not using Analytics will not see in their logs what brought people to their site.
Isn't that like sabotage?
Re: Did Google kill the long tail?
#3Original source: http://www.seobook.com/learn-seo/infographics/longtail-fail....
Re: Did Google kill the long tail?
#4The takeaway from this seems to be that Google no longer rewards attempts to game its SERPs. I can't help but think of this as a good thing.
Re: Did Google kill the long tail?
#5No, dear, if your business relied on people spelling words incorrectly you were already doomed.
Google is a winner takes all deathmatch, except it creates many more winners by letting different products or services win in every individual search term. This is the long tail of stuff you couldn't even find out about before the internet landed in our laps. The long tail isn't even fully populated. You can't buy a book about unicorns riding skateboards, but I'm sure that once you can, you'll be able to find it easily through google, or bing, or amazon, or apple, or well, the whole wonderful internet.
You see, the "long tail" isn't about stuffing dreadful SEO optimised semi-products cloned from content mills, it's the outlet for creators of awesome products that no one ever knew they wanted, until the internet let each and every community of peculiar but particular consumers coalesce. Stop calling it the "long tail" but call it "commerce", call it "shopping", call it "stuff you never knew you wanted or could get" but don't confuse it with "stuff people can't spell".
Re: Did Google kill the long tail?
#6Let me guess, Google is also evil for buying the domains "gooogle.com" and "gppgle.com". How will sellers of gppgles be able to compete with that evil monopoly!?
Re: Did Google kill the long tail?
#7This infographic is like watching a politician spin their selfish agenda into a "think of the children!" plea. Pretty funny actually.
Re: Did Google kill the long tail?
#8The takeaway from this seems to be that Google no longer rewards attempts to game its SERPs. I can't help but think of this as a good thing.
The issue here is that it's still really easy to game SERPs, it just takes more money to do so and a willingness to step in gray hat territory. Search plus your world has the potential to make it very hard if not impossible to game SERPs, however.
The takeaway from the infographic should really be that Aaron Wall (of seobook.com) runs a business that teaches (white hat?) SEO to small business owners. It's in his best interest to make SEO seem incredibly complex, difficult, and full of dangers. Which is relatively true: effective SEO is hard to do. Wall, like any good SEO, keeps up with algorithm changes. He's a smart guy, and he's most likely figured out how to overcome all of the challenges in that infographic (for $X.XX he'll show you!). It's linkbait. And great inbound marketing.
Also, Aaron Wall is a very outspoken critic of Google. There's a post every week or two on his blog about Google's ethics (or lack thereof). It's really fascinating stuff, well worth a read [1].
Re: Did Google kill the long tail?
#9The kind of models that the infographic claims are being hurt by Google's policies and engine tweaks are more of the bottom feeders and scavengers than those which constitute the long tail. These are not niche website serving the under-served market segments but the ugly underbelly where even the dirtiest black hat techniques are righteously defended.
Re: Did Google kill the long tail?
#10So - I had a mate that built an application that made it trivial to deploy a niche ebay site with tens of thousands of pages. He had an insane number of them - and briefly got his revenue upwards around two hundred k per year (tho panda kicked in before a year of that income level was achieved). Google raped his servers indexing all his pages and sent him an enormous amount of traffic.
This was the long tail. Folks trying to get to a place that have the niche item they are looking for - having to wade through an endless see of affiliate sites to get there.
Now ignoring for the moment Aaron Wall's thesis that this is all part of Google shitting on the little guy - here's an undeniable fact:
The proliferation and sophistication of affiliate spammers made it impossible for Google to continue taking chances on 'unknowns' that hadn't previously done the work of establishing themselves. Hence the reliance on brand strength that Google was forced to turn to.
This is unfortunate. It was wonderful to see so many deserving people getting ahead and building new brands on account of the relative freedom Google granted to the long tail previously. But making it so cheap and easy to get ahead in this way attracted a zillion folks that just wanted to suck as much juice from the system.
Does that mean Aaron Wall and others are wrong about Google intentions? (i.e. to keep users within their own garden) Probably not... But I think the onus on folks like Aaron Wall to provide a positive account of what else Google could have done. Otherwise, I remain convinced that Google was heading into Yahoo and Myspace land if they hadn't made the changes they have.