While I agree with SEOBook that Demand Media and their ilk are the story of the year in large scale content production and optimization, I disagree that this necessarily ushers in a new generation of low quality content in the SERPS.
Long tail search results have always been about "good enough" content as opposed to superior content. Why? Because there isn't enough volume to support superior content production at the tail.
As a searcher, I don't care if I'm looking at good enough search results / content from a niche player, or from a big company like Demand Media.
And if Demand has found an efficient way to own a big chunk of the previously fragmented long tail of search, hurray for them.
You could almost make the case that one company with economies of scale is MORE likely to be able to afford to produce quality content for low volume queries than the thousands of displaced niche publishers.
This is just another example of how cheating spreads rapidly. If lots of people are cheating then you'll eventually have to cheat to stay in the game.
Not that SEO is all cheating, but really that people are using SEO techniques to push up their content above other content just because they gamed the algorithm. Eventually everyone has to start gaming the system.
The question I have now is how much cheating can go on before it breaks. I'm curious about this in general because cheating happens a lot (e.g. our recent financial collapse brought on my non prime mortgages). Question is can we measure cheating, can we head it off before a collapse, how much can a system endure and remain stable?
huh... What little I read was interesting, yet I was constantly distracted by the sheer volume of huge, brightly colored ads or labeling. Talk about information pollution.
that is not logical because everyone wants their content found and there are only 10 spots on the first page (and adding more results per page does not fix the issue)
Everyone wants their content to be found, but that doesn't mean everyone's content is equally worthy based on content or relevance.
Obviously you need to rank the sites, but it just seems to me that the ranking algorithm they use doesn't correlate that well with relevance if it has to be gamed.
Long tail search results have always been about "good enough" content as opposed to superior content. Why? Because there isn't enough volume to support superior content production at the tail.
As a searcher, I don't care if I'm looking at good enough search results / content from a niche player, or from a big company like Demand Media.
And if Demand has found an efficient way to own a big chunk of the previously fragmented long tail of search, hurray for them.
You could almost make the case that one company with economies of scale is MORE likely to be able to afford to produce quality content for low volume queries than the thousands of displaced niche publishers.