- ZDNet Tags:
- Advertising,
- Web sites,
- Search,
- Blogs,
The controversy around a young Web site called Associated Content boils down to perspective.
Does
it exist to game Google search results and generate revenue through
Google's AdWords advertising service by displaying contextual ads next
to the copy? Or is it a new kind of media site, chock-full of original
articles written mostly by average folk about everything from
presidential pardons and karaoke to smoker's guilt and ventriloquism?
Add
to the mix at Associated Content two prominent board members--Tim
Armstrong, head of advertising for Google in North America, and venture
capitalist Eric Hippeau, a managing partner at SoftBank Capital, who
also happens to serve on Yahoo's board of directors--and you have a little company that's drawing outsized and quite possibly unwanted attention.
But while there are plenty of questions about this start-up, no one seems to be able to say it's actually doing anything wrong.
"This kind of service is not entirely clear-cut," said Danny Sullivan, editor of the Search Engine Land blog. "It's not a case that they are bad or should be banned, but they are embroiled in this kind of a debate."
Denver-based Associated Content
was formed in 2004 and received $5.4 million in funding from SoftBank.
It bills itself as a "user-driven information portal" and content
provider, licensing content to other online publishers. The articles
are "optimized for discovery and revenue generation," according to a
news release on the company Web site. In other words, they're designed
to be easy to find on Google through various search optimization techniques used by many publishers, not just people accused of gaming search results.
The
company asks bloggers to write on the subjects of their choosing and
accepts text, video and audio. Contributors can be paid based on the
quality of the article and keyword optimization.
In most
ways, Associated Content's methods seem fitting for any typical Web
site--do your best to get play on Google search results and make money
off its advertising. In fact, Associated Content is hardly the only
company churning out content to match with Google ads. The success of
Google's AdSense program, which matches ads with content on Web sites,
and the growth of blogging applications have led to the emergence of
pay-for-blogging companies that help match willing writers with sites
that want content.
What
separates legitimate content marketplaces from so-called "Made for
AdSense" companies that generate content purely for marketing purposes
is the intent of the company and the quality of the articles, said Rand
Fishkin, co-founder and chief executive of search marketing firm SEOmoz.
That
gets closer to the heart of the controversy. The dividing line between
people who don't have a problem with Associated Content and those who
do seems to come down to one of the most hard-to-define aspects of a
Web site: quality. And quality, as most people know, is terribly
difficult to define. As the 20th-century U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart once said in declining to venture too far into a definition of pornography: "I know it when I see it."
The
complaint is that much of the content coming out of some of these
pay-for-blogging sites is lousy because it's designed more for ranking
higher in search engines than to inform or educate readers. Associated
Content was taken to task for that in an article headlined "Bottom
Slurping for Google Juice," on the Clickz news site.
Search Engine Land's Sullivan followed up on his blog,
suggesting that Associated Content could be contributing to the
"pollution" of search engine results and "manipulating Google's
rankings" by using, for instance, repetitive hyperlinks from the same
word within an article to another page on the site.
"Some
people just want to make money off AdSense and they just need content,
so they'll effectively freelance stuff from authors. It gets into these
gray areas," Sullivan said in a recent interview. "The only issue with
Associated Content is they've got a Google executive on the board.
Because the company is in this gray area it becomes an issue for them.
What they are doing isn't wrong, but it is subject to debate."
"The
key issue here is you've got someone directly involved in Google's
revenue generation also involved in a company that is taking advantage
of ways to generate revenue from Google," said Andy Beal, founder of
Internet marketing consultancy and blog Marketing Pilgrim. "That's the conflict."
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Distributed by Hasan Shrek, independence blogger. Also run online business ,internet marketing solution , online store script .
Beside he is writing some others blogs for notebook computer , computer training , computer software and personal computer
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