Nice people thread part 3- Nice as pie

GDB2222

tomterm8 wrote: »

Er... the people who read that blog aren't normal people, the people who read that blog are webmasters, and for a lot of webmasters, these sites were crowding out their own content. Pretty much anyone who has a content site outside of these shared sites have just had a boost as a result.

Were weaker pages on these shared sites perhaps getting too high a ranking simply because there was a lot of good unrelated content on the shared site? If so, the algorithm change would appear to help the end-users.

As someone else said, google have their own axe to grind with Knol, and yes I'm cynical enough .....

PasturesNew

tomterm8 wrote: »

Pasturesnew... have a look at this http://www.sistrix.com/blog/985-google-farmer-update-quest-for-quality.html .

Cheers. Good list.

My main site isn't a forum. It's a site that I built nearly 5 years ago that has static content + some rss feeds.

It's not terribly good as the CMS was bl00dy hard/slow to manage (DotNetNuke) so having built it painfully slowly piece by piece I've never felt the enthusiasm to improve/update it

vivatifosi

Mmmmm.... Interesting dilemma Pastures and tomterm. I personally don't like content farms and hope that they do get pushed further down the listings, especially where they involve things like health. When I first started searching for results on skin cancer, I'd get all kinds of mumbo jumbo about buying some juice or another or following some crank regime rather than high placed forums like mpip (the melanoma forum) or good government sites, so I do welcome this move from Google, particularly where peoples' health is at risk. I don't want it to impact on your incomes though.

Incidentally, I used Google scholar to identify the most advanced researchers in the field of Melanoma and took this to my hospital and asked for my analysis to be done there (they hadn't managed to get a result on my sample from any of the experts in the UK so I was living in limbo). They agreed and I finally got a result and my life back. Google is therefore a company that I trust and respect, so I hope they get this latest change right.

tomterm8

GDB2222 wrote: »

Were weaker pages on these shared sites perhaps getting too high a ranking simply because there was a lot of good unrelated content on the shared site? If so, the algorithm change would appear to help the end-users.

As someone else said, google have their own axe to grind with Knol, and yes I'm cynical enough .....

Well... yes and no... of course this algorithm change doesn't have the sence of being finished yet. If they had got it right, they would have rolled it out... so... I don't think these are the final results.

These web sites affected are content farms. So I don't buy the idea they are going after affiliate sites... i.e. sites for products... if you think of the internet as two different things: commercial internet and content internet... Amazon would belong to the commercial internet, selling products.

These sites belong mostly to the content internet.

Now, these sites have never been that hard to outrank... if you see a ezinearticle in the top ten, you know you can normally outrank it for that keyword...

Predominantly these sites went after keywords people don't care that much about...

So, say no one is that interested in how to change a plug... these content farms would notice that and get an article written about how to change a plug... and spend only a little money or no money doing it.

The sites are strong enough to get it ranked... or were until a couple of days ago.

So when you type in how to change a plug... well, there is your article. Users click on it, and because the site didn't spend that much time or money on it they get a fluffy article that often doesn't really help that much.

They worked by producing very large quantities of content that isn't that good on subjects most people don't care enough about to do a specialist site.

But here's the thing I am seeing when I search on the interweb in america at the moment... remember no one is much interested in writing content about 'how to change a plug'... if it were that important to them they could have easily outranked most of these sites.

So, get rid of these sites... and the content is actually just as bad... because no one actually cared enough to outrank these sites anyway.

misskool

vivatifosi wrote: »

Mmmmm.... Interesting dilemma Pastures and tomterm. I personally don't like content farms and hope that they do get pushed further down the listings, especially where they involve things like health. When I first started searching for results on skin cancer, I'd get all kinds of mumbo jumbo about buying some juice or another or following some crank regime rather than high placed forums like mpip (the melanoma forum) or good government sites, so I do welcome this move from Google, particularly where peoples' health is at risk. I don't want it to impact on your incomes though.

Incidentally, I used Google scholar to identify the most advanced researchers in the field of Melanoma and took this to my hospital and asked for my analysis to be done there (they hadn't managed to get a result on my sample from any of the experts in the UK so I was living in limbo). They agreed and I finally got a result and my life back. Google is therefore a company that I trust and respect, so I hope they get this latest change right.

This is also my main bug bear about the way the internet searches work.

Someone on my facebook link the other day posted a youtube from a website called natural news.com which purported that hpv vaccines themselves cause cancer and that hpv itself doesn't. She believed it completely because they then went on to list the ingredients of the hpv vaccine in all scientific sounding names and said what havoc they caused to your body and how their natural cure would work.

I can't believe how many people believe websites like that which are whack jobs

vivatifosi

misskool wrote: »

Someone on my facebook link the other day posted a youtube from a website called natural news.com which purported that hpv vaccines themselves cause cancer and that hpv itself doesn't.

Madness. We get people in the library asking for books on natural cures to cancer too. I also have a theory that with hpv and hiv, because they are sexually transmitted, all sorts of religious whack jobs get involved too and dirty the scientific waters.

GDB2222

vivatifosi wrote: »

Madness. We get people in the library asking for books on natural cures to cancer too. I also have a theory that with hpv and hiv, because they are sexually transmitted, all sorts of religious whack jobs get involved too and dirty the scientific waters.

It may not be madness as much as desperation. I once worked with a woman whose daughter was sadly dying of cancer (skin cancer, incidentally). They had exhausted all that mainstream medicine could do, and only then did they turn to faith healers and the like. I would grudgingly admit that these charlatans fulfil a social purpose, but not a medical one.

tomterm8

Snake oil salespeople have always been with us, and they are generally not as nice as Pop Haydn. (p.s. if anyone loves magic... do a youtube search of pop hadyn, it will make your day better).

Actually snakeoil is big business, and so will not be affected very much by this... mostly people selling snake oil have their own sophisticated spam networks.

lostinrates

tomterm8 wrote: »

Snake oil salespeople have always been with us, and they are generally not as nice as Pop Haydn. (p.s. if anyone loves magic... do a youtube search of pop hadyn, it will make your day better).

Actually snakeoil is big business, and so will not be affected very much by this... mostly people selling snake oil have their own sophisticated spam networks.

A long term friend of DH's family and later a friend of ours, he lived near us in London and had been terribly lonely since his mother died, was a successful homeopath in London. He had a sort of cure all injection. He died...I mentioned it here...of cancer...but before that he HAD been alarmingly healthy and spry into his retirement. He kept trying to give us ''the injection'' but I was wary with so much other stuff going on for me medically. I think DH had it once....kind of out of politeness. He felt it had cancer curing potential, or at least enabled the body to withstand a lot else....you knew he liked you when he tried to inject you (it was hard to tell otherwise as he was very waspish at times )

Viva, I think that's a good theory I can accept as likely. People get very upset about other people's sex lives and morality....I fail to see how what people do in bed impacts on me if I'm not there and no one of legal age is unwillingly harmed.

vivatifosi

GDB2222 wrote: »

It may not be madness as much as desperation. I once worked with a woman whose daughter was sadly dying of cancer (skin cancer, incidentally). They had exhausted all that mainstream medicine could do, and only then did they turn to faith healers and the like. I would grudgingly admit that these charlatans fulfil a social purpose, but not a medical one.

I can understand that too. My aunt died of secondary cancer related to melanoma so I know how evil it can be.

It's when it is the first discovery relating to illness that I have an issue. It is the same with allergies. I have a relatively unusual food allergy. I went for a Vega test (one of the oddball ones that they do in shops) and came back clear for the thing I was allergic to and a list of the "usual suspects to avoid (wheat, dairy, citrus). I therefore got very ill because I'd got the all clear as far as I was concerned and carried on eating the problem food. It was only when I ended up totally ill and referred to hospital that they did the proper tests and worked out what it was, even though common sense had already told me what the problem was (doh:o). So the snake oil salesmen exacerbated the situation.

For late stage illness however I can understand trying anything once medics have said "sorry we can do no more". I can also understand people wanting to do all they can alongside their treatment to stay healthy: eating well, exercising etc. There is good advice on these subjects too, but they get drowned out by the 'guaranteed miracle cure' adverts. Faith healers I also don't have a problem with if they don't charge as they then are showing that they are people of faith rather than ripping people off. Sorry, rambling a bit, just have less of an issue with misguided and more of a problem with genuinely misleading the frail and ill for a profit. Along with the manufacturers of chemical weapons and cruel despots who fire on their people they are the lowest of the low.