WEBVTT - TechStuff Tidbits: Content Farms and Clickbait 0:00:04.400 --> 0:00:07.800 Welcome to tex Stuff, a production from I Heart Radio. 0:00:12.119 --> 0:00:14.720 Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm your host, 0:00:14.800 --> 0:00:17.720 Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer with I Heart Radio, 0:00:18.000 --> 0:00:23.680 and how the tech area for today's text stuff tidbits. 0:00:23.880 --> 0:00:25.680 That's the new thing I'm doing on Wednesdays where I 0:00:26.120 --> 0:00:29.240 do a shorter topic. I thought I would talk a 0:00:29.240 --> 0:00:32.760 little bit about content farms and click bait, and I 0:00:32.800 --> 0:00:36.320 think of these as kind of like cousins. So we'll 0:00:36.320 --> 0:00:41.040 start with the concept of content farms. Now, to understand 0:00:41.040 --> 0:00:44.680 how content farms became a thing, it's necessary to talk 0:00:44.720 --> 0:00:48.440 about web advertising and search engines because those are the 0:00:48.520 --> 0:00:53.320 two components that made content farms a viable business idea. 0:00:53.800 --> 0:00:58.880 So here's the super short version of web advertising. Obviously, 0:00:58.880 --> 0:01:03.240 it involves making deal with some sort of advertising entity 0:01:03.320 --> 0:01:07.280 where that entity will give you money in exchange for 0:01:07.400 --> 0:01:11.119 allowing the entity to put up advertising on your site 0:01:11.160 --> 0:01:15.000 in some way. Now, usually that money is actually contingent 0:01:15.080 --> 0:01:18.600 upon some other criteria, not just that you allow them 0:01:18.640 --> 0:01:23.200 to take up landscape, because that's just not good enough. 0:01:23.240 --> 0:01:25.840 If no one ever goes to your web page, then 0:01:25.959 --> 0:01:28.319 the ad is doing nothing. It's it's like if you 0:01:28.360 --> 0:01:31.400 put a billboard up in the middle of the Sahara 0:01:31.440 --> 0:01:36.920 desert where nobody goes. So web advertising quickly adopted a 0:01:36.959 --> 0:01:40.720 few different models, and I'll give a few examples. So 0:01:40.800 --> 0:01:44.760 one was just based on page views, so the advertiser 0:01:44.959 --> 0:01:48.200 would get data about how many people had visited that 0:01:48.280 --> 0:01:51.280 web page in a given amount of time, and they 0:01:51.360 --> 0:01:53.320 might also get a little more data such as, you know, 0:01:53.360 --> 0:01:56.600 how much time the average person spent on the page. 0:01:57.000 --> 0:02:00.600 And generally speaking, the more people who visit, the longer 0:02:00.720 --> 0:02:03.480 that they stay on a page, the more valuable the 0:02:03.520 --> 0:02:06.800 page is uh and the more likely they are, obviously 0:02:06.840 --> 0:02:12.120 to encounter or even perhaps act upon advertising. So you've 0:02:12.120 --> 0:02:14.239 got a lot of different concepts wrapped up in here. 0:02:14.360 --> 0:02:18.760 You would typically have a uh, you know, a per 0:02:18.960 --> 0:02:23.320 thousand deal for views. So you might say like, okay, 0:02:23.320 --> 0:02:26.640 well we'll pay you five dollars per thousand views this 0:02:26.680 --> 0:02:30.240 web page gets, because that means one thousand times people 0:02:30.280 --> 0:02:34.240 saw are at You also had the concept of how 0:02:34.320 --> 0:02:37.600 much you could demand for those thousand views, right if 0:02:37.680 --> 0:02:40.079 people you know, if you could show that people come 0:02:40.120 --> 0:02:42.920 to your page and they spend twenty minutes on it, 0:02:42.919 --> 0:02:45.839 that would be phenomenal. That would be an incredibly long 0:02:45.880 --> 0:02:48.840 time for someone to spend on a web page that's 0:02:48.880 --> 0:02:53.359 not say a social network platform or something like YouTube. 0:02:54.280 --> 0:02:58.080 Then you could demand higher prices for those thousand views, 0:02:58.120 --> 0:03:00.959 whereas if people you would come to your page and 0:03:00.960 --> 0:03:04.440 then almost immediately bounce, you would probably only be able 0:03:04.480 --> 0:03:07.400 to get a small amount per a thousand views. So 0:03:07.440 --> 0:03:10.040 all of that factors in right. And of course there 0:03:10.080 --> 0:03:13.960 are other advertising models as well, uh, such as ones 0:03:14.000 --> 0:03:17.520 that pay out not on page views but on user 0:03:17.600 --> 0:03:21.000 actions such as clicking through the ad to go to 0:03:21.120 --> 0:03:24.840 a related product or service page, or in some cases, 0:03:24.919 --> 0:03:30.160 actually making a purchase following such an action, So like, 0:03:30.880 --> 0:03:33.040 not only did they click through the ad, they bought something, 0:03:33.120 --> 0:03:38.080 and that's where the revenue comes from for the person 0:03:38.120 --> 0:03:41.160 who's allowing the ad to be on their page. So 0:03:42.000 --> 0:03:47.360 that forms the basis of making revenue on the web 0:03:47.920 --> 0:03:50.800 at that basic level. There are obviously many other ways 0:03:50.840 --> 0:03:54.680 to do it, but generally speaking, the web advertisement side 0:03:55.040 --> 0:03:59.120 is the revenue side. The search engine bit that's the 0:03:59.200 --> 0:04:03.680 discovery side, that's the opportunity, that's how you get the 0:04:03.720 --> 0:04:08.040 people to your stuff. And if we get meta and 0:04:08.080 --> 0:04:11.440 we start looking at web traffic, we can actually start 0:04:11.520 --> 0:04:15.240 to see what people are looking for. And if you 0:04:15.240 --> 0:04:18.320 know what folks are looking for, then you can try 0:04:18.360 --> 0:04:20.680 and meet that need. So there are a lot of 0:04:20.720 --> 0:04:23.039 web analytics out there where you can actually find things 0:04:23.040 --> 0:04:26.280 like how many people searched for a certain term, Like 0:04:26.360 --> 0:04:29.440 there's Google trends right where you can look and see 0:04:29.480 --> 0:04:31.680 what people are looking for. And if a lot of 0:04:31.680 --> 0:04:34.279 people are looking for something and there aren't a lot 0:04:34.320 --> 0:04:38.279 of great options to go to to see that something, 0:04:38.800 --> 0:04:42.400 there's an opportunity there. Well, this is interesting because you know, 0:04:42.480 --> 0:04:45.559 I you can call me a content creator. I actually 0:04:45.640 --> 0:04:47.960 don't like that term. I know a lot of people 0:04:48.080 --> 0:04:53.440 use it, but it seems so like, uh, robotic to me, 0:04:53.760 --> 0:04:56.600 Like there's no there's no humanity in the in the 0:04:56.720 --> 0:04:59.080 terms content creator as far as I can tell. But 0:04:59.400 --> 0:05:03.520 maybe I'm just projecting too much. Anyway, if you think 0:05:03.520 --> 0:05:08.200 of someone who creates stuff on the web, they might 0:05:08.279 --> 0:05:11.119 come at that from one of many different ways. Maybe 0:05:11.160 --> 0:05:13.240 they they're doing it because they have a true passion 0:05:13.279 --> 0:05:16.520 for whatever it is they do, and they just follow 0:05:16.600 --> 0:05:20.120 that passion and that's why they're creating the thing they create. Uh, 0:05:20.160 --> 0:05:23.320 that to me feels really you know, pure and lovely 0:05:23.640 --> 0:05:26.359 and I love seeing those kinds of people on the 0:05:26.400 --> 0:05:29.719 web and I love seeing them flourish. There are others 0:05:30.400 --> 0:05:33.480 who they want to create. They don't have a specific 0:05:33.480 --> 0:05:35.720 passion they want to follow, but they want to create 0:05:35.760 --> 0:05:38.159 because they think think that's the way they want to 0:05:38.160 --> 0:05:40.040 make a living. And there's nothing wrong with that. I'm 0:05:40.080 --> 0:05:43.359 not I'm not saying that this is lesser than So 0:05:43.760 --> 0:05:47.560 they're not necessarily following their passion for any particular topic. Rather, 0:05:47.680 --> 0:05:50.760 they are looking to see what topics are people interested in, 0:05:51.240 --> 0:05:54.200 and then they go out to cover those topics in 0:05:54.320 --> 0:05:58.240 order to meet that need. Like they think, well, why 0:05:58.279 --> 0:06:00.640 can't I be the person to create this thing that 0:06:00.760 --> 0:06:05.360 people want to see? And again, there's nothing wrong with that. Um, 0:06:05.400 --> 0:06:08.040 it's just a different method of going about it. And 0:06:08.160 --> 0:06:11.640 I also don't know. I don't know. I consider myself 0:06:11.680 --> 0:06:13.920 more of the first category than the second category. I 0:06:13.960 --> 0:06:16.400 don't know how sustainable that is over the long run, right, 0:06:16.440 --> 0:06:19.520 I don't know if you would burn out faster if 0:06:19.560 --> 0:06:23.479 you were just constantly trying to meet the the needs 0:06:23.680 --> 0:06:28.080 of your identified audience. Anyway, this would mean that sites 0:06:28.120 --> 0:06:31.360 what could do things like, uh, look around at analytics 0:06:31.360 --> 0:06:34.200 and see that maybe people are looking for information about 0:06:34.200 --> 0:06:36.520 how to, I don't know, hook up a toe hitch 0:06:36.600 --> 0:06:39.880 to a truck. I'm not giving that example for any 0:06:39.920 --> 0:06:42.839 specific reason, but if you ask me about it in person, 0:06:42.839 --> 0:06:47.720 I'll tell you the specific reason. Anyway, you then decide 0:06:47.720 --> 0:06:50.800 you're gonna make a dash for creating an online resource 0:06:50.839 --> 0:06:53.880 that at least claims to show how to hook up 0:06:53.920 --> 0:06:56.520 a toe hitch to a truck. And you know that 0:06:56.600 --> 0:06:58.920 since people are searching for it, they're bound to find 0:06:59.080 --> 0:07:02.320 yours because you already saw that there's actually a lack 0:07:02.600 --> 0:07:06.640 of resources out there. Now, remember this is like, you know, 0:07:06.920 --> 0:07:10.400 more than a decade ago at this point, But creating 0:07:10.760 --> 0:07:14.680 the piece not isn't that necessarily enough on its own? 0:07:14.760 --> 0:07:16.560 Like that, you know, just because you wrote something doesn't 0:07:16.600 --> 0:07:19.960 mean it's going to rank well. So you also need 0:07:20.040 --> 0:07:22.840 to make sure that piece shows up pretty high up 0:07:22.880 --> 0:07:26.360 in search results. So you practice something called search engine 0:07:26.400 --> 0:07:30.320 optimization or SEO, and you use a bunch of different 0:07:30.320 --> 0:07:33.160 strategies to give your page a good chance to rank 0:07:33.280 --> 0:07:37.119 high on search results on engines like Google. In fact, 0:07:37.400 --> 0:07:40.840 you would probably only focus on Google because so much 0:07:40.920 --> 0:07:44.560 search traffic goes through the Google engine. If the majority 0:07:44.680 --> 0:07:48.080 of the people are using Google to search stuff, then 0:07:48.160 --> 0:07:50.480 it just makes sense to focus your efforts there. You 0:07:50.520 --> 0:07:53.680 wouldn't want to go and focus on smaller search engines 0:07:54.040 --> 0:07:56.400 because even if you did well, you'd still only be 0:07:56.400 --> 0:07:59.240 getting a fraction of the traffic that Google could send you. 0:08:00.160 --> 0:08:03.120 So you focus on Google. Back in the day, Google 0:08:03.200 --> 0:08:07.240 was actually you know, easy to gamify, easy, being in 0:08:07.320 --> 0:08:11.000 quotation marks easier, I guess I should say, and uh. 0:08:11.040 --> 0:08:13.920 And you know, most folks don't ever bother to go 0:08:14.000 --> 0:08:16.600 beyond the first page of search results. In fact, a 0:08:16.600 --> 0:08:19.280 lot of people never bother to scroll down below what 0:08:19.480 --> 0:08:22.600 is called the fold. So if you know, whatever you 0:08:22.600 --> 0:08:26.040 see on your on your page when you first do 0:08:26.080 --> 0:08:29.320 a search result, anything below the bottom of the screen 0:08:29.360 --> 0:08:31.680 that's called below the fold, it would require you to 0:08:31.760 --> 0:08:34.200 scroll down to see it. A lot of people don't 0:08:34.240 --> 0:08:36.280 even bother to do that. So you definitely want to 0:08:36.280 --> 0:08:39.200 be in those first couple of results. If you can 0:08:39.280 --> 0:08:41.400 get your article about toe hitches to rank up there, 0:08:41.440 --> 0:08:44.480 you're almost guaranteed to capture a ton of traffic from 0:08:44.520 --> 0:08:47.560 the people who are looking that information up and through 0:08:47.600 --> 0:08:51.400 web advertisements on your page about toe hitches, you can 0:08:51.520 --> 0:08:54.880 generate revenue as more and more people come to the page. Now, 0:08:54.920 --> 0:08:57.800 that's just one little topic. Obviously you couldn't make a 0:08:57.880 --> 0:08:59.880 living off of that. But what if you could scale 0:09:00.480 --> 0:09:04.120 that operation up like big time, Like what if you 0:09:04.160 --> 0:09:08.280 were to hire dozens of writers at a pretty low 0:09:08.520 --> 0:09:12.120 rate of pay. In fact, some content farms would outsource 0:09:12.240 --> 0:09:15.600 articles to writers in countries like the Philippines, where it 0:09:15.640 --> 0:09:18.640 wasn't uncommon for folks to make just a dollar an hour. 0:09:19.480 --> 0:09:22.200 One person said she averaged between five and ten dollars 0:09:22.200 --> 0:09:26.000 an hour writing articles and managed on average to have 0:09:26.040 --> 0:09:29.640 an output of about one article per hour. But then 0:09:29.679 --> 0:09:32.000 there are other content farms that would pay more by 0:09:32.040 --> 0:09:35.240 the word, and that could range like three to five 0:09:35.320 --> 0:09:38.240 cents a word, and that would be for the higher 0:09:38.280 --> 0:09:41.200 paid writers. Of others who were entry level, they might 0:09:41.200 --> 0:09:43.360 be getting a little bit of like a penny and 0:09:43.400 --> 0:09:47.480 a fraction per word. So there is an incentive to 0:09:47.520 --> 0:09:50.079 generate a lot of words, right, because that's how you're 0:09:50.080 --> 0:09:53.079 getting paid. If that's the metric. So some would do 0:09:53.120 --> 0:09:55.960 a per article basis, some would do an hourly basis, 0:09:55.960 --> 0:09:59.400 some would do per word basis. In the United States, 0:10:00.200 --> 0:10:05.040 in two simply hired the average content writer makes around 0:10:05.040 --> 0:10:09.240 thirty four thousand dollars per year today. Uh. Now, keep 0:10:09.280 --> 0:10:12.240 in mind we're also talking about era where content farms 0:10:12.280 --> 0:10:15.520 are not nearly the thing they were a decade ago. 0:10:16.360 --> 0:10:19.360 Thirty four thousand dollars is a hair under the annual 0:10:19.760 --> 0:10:22.840 median personal income for folks in America, so it means 0:10:23.080 --> 0:10:27.640 you would actually be below the median for income. However, 0:10:27.679 --> 0:10:30.080 I should add that this is from again a post 0:10:30.080 --> 0:10:34.120 content farm perspective. Back in the content farm days, the 0:10:34.320 --> 0:10:38.800 content writer average was probably a little bit lower. All right, 0:10:38.840 --> 0:10:41.640 So let's say you can hire a bunch of writers 0:10:41.720 --> 0:10:46.360 for really low wages, so you have a fairly low overhead, 0:10:46.679 --> 0:10:48.640 and you know, maybe they make money on a per 0:10:48.720 --> 0:10:52.080 article basis. Maybe part of their compensation is related to 0:10:52.120 --> 0:10:54.760 revenue generated by the article, so that they get essentially 0:10:54.800 --> 0:10:59.240 residuals if the article is really popular. That did happen 0:10:59.480 --> 0:11:02.679 in the cont farm days, at least in some content farms. 0:11:02.760 --> 0:11:06.679 It wasn't applicable to every writer for every content farm, 0:11:06.920 --> 0:11:09.640 but it did happen. So folks who you know, managed 0:11:09.640 --> 0:11:12.080 to hit on something that really did well, they could 0:11:12.080 --> 0:11:14.920 actually potentially make money. A sort of a long tail 0:11:15.240 --> 0:11:18.680 kind of revenue generator where over time they would get 0:11:18.720 --> 0:11:22.040 residual checks, usually not a lot per article, but if 0:11:22.040 --> 0:11:23.880 you write a lot of articles and several of them 0:11:23.880 --> 0:11:28.200 are hits, it could be a nice little source of money. Well, 0:11:28.480 --> 0:11:31.479 the goal is to build out a very large operation 0:11:31.600 --> 0:11:35.600 with relatively low overhead, and you just churn out articles 0:11:35.640 --> 0:11:38.920 based upon web traffic patterns. So it's not that you're 0:11:38.920 --> 0:11:41.800 a website that has a focus, right. That would be 0:11:41.800 --> 0:11:45.720 the the antithesis of a content farm, Like you wouldn't 0:11:45.720 --> 0:11:48.959 typically find a content farm about a specific topic. No, 0:11:49.200 --> 0:11:54.040 content farms would tackle anything and everything largely based upon 0:11:54.120 --> 0:11:57.560 analysis of web traffic. They would flood the Internet with 0:11:57.679 --> 0:12:01.439 tons of articles about stuff where there was a perceived 0:12:01.520 --> 0:12:06.360 gap of information, which again represented an opportunity. The term 0:12:06.440 --> 0:12:10.960 content farm frequently implies that the actual content on the 0:12:11.040 --> 0:12:15.000 site in question is of inferior quality, that, in an 0:12:15.000 --> 0:12:19.880 effort to minimize costs while maximizing effect, writers spew out 0:12:20.000 --> 0:12:24.840 hastily written pieces, perhaps poorly researched, or even just playing 0:12:24.880 --> 0:12:29.760 wrong or useless. Because the goal isn't to produce good work, 0:12:30.160 --> 0:12:33.040 The goal is just to fill those niches in search 0:12:33.080 --> 0:12:37.079 results in order to capture the traffic. This was all 0:12:37.120 --> 0:12:40.400 about pouncing on opportunities that opened up through search, and 0:12:40.600 --> 0:12:43.400 for the writers, particularly those who were paid on a 0:12:43.559 --> 0:12:47.679 per article basis, the motivation was to write more assignments 0:12:47.720 --> 0:12:51.640 to make more money. It was a machine for generating 0:12:51.720 --> 0:12:55.040 substandard work. That's not to say that every piece written 0:12:55.080 --> 0:12:57.520 for a content farm was bad, or that the people 0:12:57.720 --> 0:13:01.400 writing for content farms were ad or sloppy writers. A 0:13:01.400 --> 0:13:04.319 lot of them are quite good. But rather I mean 0:13:04.360 --> 0:13:07.079 to say the nature of the business put very little 0:13:07.120 --> 0:13:12.680 emphasis on quality and a whole lot more emphasis on quantity. 0:13:13.120 --> 0:13:14.760 All right, we're gonna take a quick break, and when 0:13:14.760 --> 0:13:17.200 we come back, we will talk a little bit more 0:13:17.400 --> 0:13:27.840 about content farms and then click bait. One thing I 0:13:27.840 --> 0:13:30.920 didn't mention before the break is something else the content 0:13:31.000 --> 0:13:35.400 farms became notorious for, which was stealing content from other sites. 0:13:36.160 --> 0:13:39.160 I mean, what's cheaper than paying someone to write an article, 0:13:39.400 --> 0:13:43.280 taking someone else's article, stripping it of some details, and 0:13:43.280 --> 0:13:45.040 then putting it up on your site. In fact, on 0:13:45.080 --> 0:13:47.520 more than one occasion, I would come across one of 0:13:47.520 --> 0:13:50.200 my own articles that I had written for house stuff 0:13:50.240 --> 0:13:53.079 works dot com and I would see that my name 0:13:53.160 --> 0:13:55.880 had been taken off the article, but it was definitely 0:13:55.920 --> 0:13:59.559 my article, like word for word, not even you know, paraphrase, 0:13:59.640 --> 0:14:03.400 but literally just copy and pasted and would even include 0:14:03.800 --> 0:14:07.600 in many cases illustrations that came out of our office. 0:14:07.640 --> 0:14:11.079 We had artists working in our office who would make illustrations, 0:14:11.360 --> 0:14:14.400 and you would even see like how stuff works written 0:14:14.559 --> 0:14:19.560 on the illustrations. In some cases, it was a blatant 0:14:19.600 --> 0:14:24.760 case of plagiarism, and that in itself was difficult to 0:14:24.760 --> 0:14:26.960 deal with because it was popping up all over the place, 0:14:27.000 --> 0:14:28.680 like it was popping up faster than you could take 0:14:28.720 --> 0:14:33.600 action on it. Now, this whole content farm strategy worked 0:14:33.640 --> 0:14:36.800 for as long as ranking and search could be gamified. 0:14:36.880 --> 0:14:40.880 As long as you could reliably get into those top 0:14:40.920 --> 0:14:46.120 search results, then this was open season. Rushing to fill 0:14:46.120 --> 0:14:48.360 the voids would pay off, with some sites ballooning to 0:14:48.600 --> 0:14:52.400 thousands or hundreds of thousands of articles, and dozens of 0:14:52.440 --> 0:14:54.800 new articles would launch every single day, all in an 0:14:54.800 --> 0:14:58.600 effort to dominate search. There was no there's no even 0:14:58.680 --> 0:15:01.640 pretense that these were sites that were trying to get 0:15:01.640 --> 0:15:04.520 people to go to the site on their own and 0:15:04.520 --> 0:15:08.000 then just kind of browse around. Everything on the site 0:15:08.320 --> 0:15:11.560 was engineered to be something that would show up in search, 0:15:12.320 --> 0:15:16.840 and that's how they would get their traffic. Now, I 0:15:16.840 --> 0:15:18.760 want to also say this, when I work for How 0:15:18.840 --> 0:15:21.760 Stuff Works, a lot of our traffic came in through search. 0:15:22.120 --> 0:15:24.240 It turned out that a lot of people were finding 0:15:24.280 --> 0:15:28.640 our articles through search, so we were benefiting from the 0:15:28.680 --> 0:15:32.560 search stuff just like content farms were. We weren't operating 0:15:32.560 --> 0:15:36.720 like a content farm. Heck, I would write when I started, 0:15:36.760 --> 0:15:40.720 I think I wrote one article every two weeks because 0:15:40.720 --> 0:15:44.680 I would have one full week to research and right 0:15:44.960 --> 0:15:46.880 a draft of the article, and I would turn it 0:15:46.880 --> 0:15:48.720 in on a Friday, and I would have the following 0:15:48.720 --> 0:15:51.320 week to revise that article, while I would start a 0:15:51.360 --> 0:15:54.840 second article like the next new one. Uh and on 0:15:54.880 --> 0:15:57.920 the second Friday that's when the article I had been 0:15:57.960 --> 0:16:02.040 working on would go live on the site. So that's 0:16:02.040 --> 0:16:04.920 not a content farm. Like a content farm is churning 0:16:04.920 --> 0:16:09.320 out articles way faster with very little regard to the 0:16:09.440 --> 0:16:14.480 quality of the work. This was great in the short 0:16:14.560 --> 0:16:17.320 term for content farms that you know they were able 0:16:17.360 --> 0:16:21.360 to to get this much traffic, like the fact that 0:16:21.360 --> 0:16:24.520 they were able to gamify the system and to get 0:16:24.560 --> 0:16:27.880 a bunch of writers to create hundreds of articles in 0:16:27.880 --> 0:16:30.560 a short amount of time. It was a great way 0:16:30.560 --> 0:16:33.720 to make money. Uh, it wasn't great, but it could 0:16:33.760 --> 0:16:37.440 be good for the writers, depending upon you know which 0:16:37.480 --> 0:16:40.440 outlets they were working for and what their pay rates 0:16:40.440 --> 0:16:43.560 were for those are outlets. Uh. And it was not 0:16:43.680 --> 0:16:46.880 great for everybody else because it would mean that you know, 0:16:46.920 --> 0:16:48.840 you would be searching for something and you might land 0:16:48.880 --> 0:16:51.000 on a page that, more likely than not, isn't a 0:16:51.080 --> 0:16:53.200 very good quality for whatever it was that you were 0:16:53.200 --> 0:16:58.400 searching for. And it was really really not great for 0:16:58.480 --> 0:17:01.160 Google because Google was having to deal with the fact 0:17:01.360 --> 0:17:05.720 the users were getting disenchanted after encountering so many garbage 0:17:05.800 --> 0:17:09.240 articles that were ranking in Google Search. It was it 0:17:09.320 --> 0:17:13.040 was making Google Search appeared to be unreliable because the 0:17:13.080 --> 0:17:18.080 destinations you were going to we're pretty crappy. So in fact, 0:17:18.280 --> 0:17:20.760 I guess I can talk about this now. Um way 0:17:20.840 --> 0:17:23.440 back in the day, who I was still a writer 0:17:23.520 --> 0:17:26.320 for how stuff works dot com, there was a point 0:17:26.320 --> 0:17:30.240 where Google representatives actually reached out to me asking if 0:17:30.280 --> 0:17:34.359 how Stuff Works might produce articles in specific areas because 0:17:34.440 --> 0:17:38.040 the search engine needed to direct people to higher quality articles. 0:17:38.640 --> 0:17:42.760 So they actually handed me a list of topics that 0:17:43.000 --> 0:17:46.280 they said we need we need better version articles out 0:17:46.280 --> 0:17:48.600 there because the ones that people are finding are terrible. 0:17:49.400 --> 0:17:52.080 While the articles on how stuff works dot Com were 0:17:52.119 --> 0:17:55.560 and are heavily researched, and the writing staff, like I 0:17:55.600 --> 0:17:59.520 said that, you know, we mainly came from English degrees, right, 0:17:59.680 --> 0:18:03.639 We all studied English lit or or something along those lines, 0:18:03.720 --> 0:18:06.639 you know, and we all had backgrounds in research and 0:18:06.680 --> 0:18:09.600 writing papers with citations and all that kind of fun stuff. 0:18:10.080 --> 0:18:12.320 So Google is trying to push back a bit against 0:18:12.320 --> 0:18:16.439 content farms and to touch base with more respected sites 0:18:16.800 --> 0:18:19.600 to provide higher quality articles that wouldn't be such a 0:18:19.680 --> 0:18:23.120 dragged land on when someone searched for those terms. Now, 0:18:23.160 --> 0:18:26.240 that was potentially an incredibly valuable thing for me to 0:18:26.320 --> 0:18:29.760 receive as someone who produces content. Uh, I mean for 0:18:29.800 --> 0:18:32.400 a search engine to actually say, hey, just so you know, 0:18:32.800 --> 0:18:35.760 folks are really looking for articles about this stuff, but 0:18:35.840 --> 0:18:38.760 they're finding trash. That meant that there was this huge 0:18:38.800 --> 0:18:41.920 opportunity to write better stuff. However, I have to say 0:18:41.920 --> 0:18:44.000 a lot of the topics Google handed to us just 0:18:44.080 --> 0:18:47.199 weren't really how stuff works material. I don't mean they 0:18:47.200 --> 0:18:50.160 were like salacious or anything like that, just that they 0:18:50.160 --> 0:18:53.240 were a bit too niche and mundane and like, there'd 0:18:53.280 --> 0:18:55.479 be no reason to write a how stuff works style 0:18:55.640 --> 0:18:59.960 article on most of those topics. So while it represents 0:19:00.000 --> 0:19:04.680 it an opportunity, we didn't actually really take advantage of it. Anyway. 0:19:04.800 --> 0:19:08.240 Google would later revise its search algorithm to really deal 0:19:08.280 --> 0:19:11.520 with this issue of junk articles more directly. Uh, this 0:19:11.600 --> 0:19:13.840 was more than a decade ago. Like, in my mind 0:19:13.880 --> 0:19:16.280 this happened maybe five years ago, but it's because I 0:19:16.320 --> 0:19:18.840 have lost all concept of time. But no, it happened 0:19:18.840 --> 0:19:22.439 in two thousand eleven when Google launched the Panda algorithm, 0:19:22.520 --> 0:19:26.080 actually named after one of the Google engineers. Uh. The 0:19:26.160 --> 0:19:29.840 purpose of the Panda algorithm was to promote high quality 0:19:29.920 --> 0:19:34.439 sites over junk sites. So if you did a search 0:19:35.000 --> 0:19:38.440 and results were coming up, the search algorithm would now 0:19:39.240 --> 0:19:43.239 UH promote the higher quality sites over the lower quality ones. 0:19:43.280 --> 0:19:46.480 They would rank higher in search. So if you look 0:19:46.560 --> 0:19:49.720 for an article about I don't know chicken salad, whichever 0:19:49.960 --> 0:19:53.560 site Google considered to be the most high quality would 0:19:53.600 --> 0:19:57.399 rank highest. Sites Google identified as hosting thousands of low 0:19:57.480 --> 0:20:01.280 quality articles would get punished by the algorithm UM, often 0:20:01.520 --> 0:20:05.639 totally site wide. So even if that site hosted a 0:20:05.680 --> 0:20:08.439 few really good articles and a lot of content farms 0:20:08.480 --> 0:20:12.440 had really good articles. Even if it had really good articles, 0:20:13.040 --> 0:20:16.840 if the site was mostly filled up with junk articles, 0:20:17.200 --> 0:20:20.320 it was gonna get dinged across the board. So this 0:20:20.400 --> 0:20:24.800 was a huge blow to content farms. Google also released 0:20:24.840 --> 0:20:27.800 a blog post about the algorithm, explaining the criteria that 0:20:27.840 --> 0:20:31.320 they used to determine if a site merits the designation 0:20:31.320 --> 0:20:34.000 of high quality, and it was stuff like, if you 0:20:34.040 --> 0:20:36.920 went to the site and you read the article, would 0:20:37.000 --> 0:20:39.520 you feel like you could trust what the article had 0:20:39.560 --> 0:20:42.919 to say or would the content and presentation of the 0:20:42.960 --> 0:20:47.480 information make you distrust the article. It also looked into 0:20:47.520 --> 0:20:51.480 stuff like whether or not experts or highly qualified writers 0:20:51.520 --> 0:20:54.280 were contributing to the piece. A lot of content farms 0:20:54.680 --> 0:20:57.159 gave little to no information about the people who are 0:20:57.160 --> 0:20:59.520 actually writing the articles, so that would be a blow 0:20:59.560 --> 0:21:03.040 against them. If the site contained a lot of duplicate 0:21:03.200 --> 0:21:07.320 or overlapping article topics where you know, you're just blasting 0:21:08.040 --> 0:21:12.320 maybe a hundred articles about towing, uh, that could ding 0:21:12.440 --> 0:21:17.359 you pretty bad. Now. The Penguin algorithm would follow in 0:21:17.440 --> 0:21:20.199 two thousand twelve, and that algorithm aimed at sites that 0:21:20.320 --> 0:21:24.399 created what we're called unnatural back links. Now, I'm not 0:21:24.400 --> 0:21:26.280 going to get into all of that, except to say 0:21:26.480 --> 0:21:30.520 one of the factors that Google's search algorithm would take 0:21:30.520 --> 0:21:34.880 into account back in the day was how many links 0:21:35.080 --> 0:21:38.840 are aiming at a particular web page that pops up 0:21:38.920 --> 0:21:42.639 for a particular search query. So again, let's say the 0:21:42.640 --> 0:21:47.960 search queries chicken salad, and the Google algorithm starts crawling 0:21:47.960 --> 0:21:51.000 the web and pulling all the different hits that relate 0:21:51.040 --> 0:21:53.640 to chicken salad. One of the things that would look 0:21:53.680 --> 0:21:56.479 at is say, how many other sites linked to this 0:21:56.520 --> 0:21:59.080 page about chicken salad. If a lot of sites are 0:21:59.119 --> 0:22:01.840 linking to this page age, then that seems to indicate 0:22:01.880 --> 0:22:04.360 that it's a good page, that it's it's good enough 0:22:04.359 --> 0:22:06.720 to convince other people, Hey, I'm gonna link to this 0:22:07.280 --> 0:22:11.280 because it's worthwhile. And thus Google would draw the conclusion, 0:22:11.400 --> 0:22:13.600 or rather the algorithm would draw the conclusion that this 0:22:13.720 --> 0:22:18.200 must be a better result because a lot of people 0:22:18.200 --> 0:22:20.840 are linking to it. But you could gamify that. You 0:22:20.840 --> 0:22:25.160 can just create tons of back links to your individual pages, 0:22:25.800 --> 0:22:30.520 and by linking to everything, you would appear to boost 0:22:30.680 --> 0:22:35.160 this metric, and Google Search would then say, oh, this 0:22:35.240 --> 0:22:37.520 must be a good article because look at how many 0:22:37.560 --> 0:22:41.040 links are aiming into it. Penguin was meant to fight 0:22:41.080 --> 0:22:43.960 against that. Penguin, as far as I know, was not 0:22:44.400 --> 0:22:48.240 named after the Google engineer like Panda was, and eventually 0:22:48.520 --> 0:22:52.199 both Panda and Penguin were mostly made moot when Google 0:22:52.280 --> 0:22:57.400 launched Hummingbird. Now Penguin and Panda were kind of like 0:22:58.240 --> 0:23:03.040 patching the search algorithm. Hummingbird was a total overhaul to 0:23:03.200 --> 0:23:07.040 Google's search algorithm, and this was also the era where 0:23:07.119 --> 0:23:10.560 you would hear about sites really taking a big hit 0:23:11.000 --> 0:23:14.000 because they had been so dependent upon search traffic, and 0:23:14.040 --> 0:23:19.760 when Google changed the way it handled search results, even 0:23:19.800 --> 0:23:24.439 sites that were considered respectable and high quality ended up 0:23:24.480 --> 0:23:28.359 seeing an enormous change in their traffic from search. And 0:23:28.920 --> 0:23:33.119 when that's how you've based your entire mode of operations 0:23:33.640 --> 0:23:37.960