Google: Closing the Loop on Content, Advertising, & Commerce

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Google: Closing the Loop on Content, Advertising, & Commerce

Every listing site or review site has to start off from scratch at some point. Over the past 3 or 4 years it has got much harder to rank thin affiliate database sites, and now that is only going to get harder, with Matt Cutts asking for spam reports on empty review sites.

Of course if Amazon.com or TripAdvisor or Craigslist open new sections they can probably get away with using duplicate or thin content based on the strength of their brands. Branded networks can always throw out a new related niche site and have it be seen as being above board:

The internet is fast becoming a “cesspool” where false information thrives, Google CEO Eric Schmidt said yesterday. “Brands are how you sort out the cesspool.”

But new competitors are going to have a hard time building the budget and funding the brand exposure needed to rank because SEO is getting more complex, and if you don’t have enough brand or enough AdWords spend you pretty-much are not going to get the exposure needed to get consumer reviews and rank organically, unless you license/steal/borrow/mix/re-mix content to build an opening “reviews” database. Some software tools, like Web Data Parser, make the process easier, but you still need to wrap everything in some time of value add (good design, mash ups, etc.). Or have great public relations. Or start your site off as an editorial only play, where you review what interests you, and then move the brand into the reviews space after you get some momentum and an organic traffic flow.

Matt Cutts explained how thin listing pages may be against their guidelines

Use robots.txt to prevent crawling of search results pages or other auto-generated pages that don

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