mikeatl

recommend reading this article to get the backstory for him writing this article: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/foremski/googles-highly-profitable... .

I agree that he goes a bit sideways in the post. However it prompted me to start paying more attention to the results I was seeing in various Google searches and I was sincerely shocked by how little "real" organic results were being returned for many searches. The top of the results page are now taken up by 3 ads, many of which now feature rich snippets and the +1 button (which make them take up more screen real estate then before). The Rich Snippets that I saw were largely review stars that would show up for product specific searches. However the ratings/links were not for the products searched for.

After that you would either see a large Google Products Display or 1-2 organic results, followed by an even bigger Google Products Display.

I'm not a SEO so have no stake in their industry's success of failure. What bothers me is the level of hipocracy in them doing this. Since Panda was introduced earlier this year their search algo penalize sites for doing this, supposedly because the practice creates a poor user experience. They have basically cut out small businesses using this rationale and replaced them with an even more deceptive form of the same thing. Look at their earnings for the past year - that's what really caught my attention.

Thank you very much for the clarification. While I don't have tens of thousands of pages like that (my site has under 10,000 pages in all and lots of those pages are very informative, rich resources), your point is well taken. It prompted me to look back over my last couple of years worth of content in a whole new light. Thus far I've deleted several hundred old news articles with no residual value, and repurposed several dozen news stories into evergreen reference articles that present lasting value to readers. And I have only gone through about 1/3 of my site's articles thus far. The end result is going to be a much better, more useful site for my readers - which is really exciting.

So thank you for your insight, and thanks to everyone else for their feedback as it has been extremely helpful.

Excellent feedback. Thank you!

Thanks for all the suggestions. In terms of content, that is exactly what I'm going for with the majority of my site - to be an objective resource for people looking for information on cards. The industry has been plagued with a lot of backroom dealing and unethical partnerships, so being an unbiased source has been one of my strongest selling points.

I've used a few market research services to randomly survey visitors to my site. The content itself was always gotten exceedingly positive marks from collectors, but non-collectors have given it mixed marks. That seems to substantiate the feedback I've also gotten on some Webmaster forums. The vast majority of collectors and people in the sports collectibles industry (and to a lesser extent people in the mainstream sports industry) regard my content as high quality and those outside of it give more of a mixed response.

What did you mean by http://www.cardboardconnection.com/2011-topps-tier-one-baseb... being an empty page though? Did it not show up correctly for you?

Wow, I'm a bit perplexed by your assertion that my site is a content farm. Could you maybe provide some specifics and/or insight into what led you to that conclusion? I appreciate your candor, but personal feelings aside, my site doesn't meet the criteria for being content farm based on Wikipedia's definition (or any other definition that I'm familiar with). And I'm not sure why you keep making the assumption that people aren't visiting my site directly as I never said that. At least half my traffic is from direct / referral sources. I also have one of the more active user forums in my niche.

My site is cited by numerous museums, libraries, and reference sites as being an authoritative source for information related to my industry. And after reading your comment I looked through Wikipedia for several hours and my site is one of the most commonly referenced and cited resources for my subject matter. For example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baseball_cards http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Topps http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upper_Deck_Company http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rookie_cards

With all that said, since we cover niche news stories the length / depth of the content is dependent on the stories themselves. For instance, if a company releases an updated checklist for one of their sets, it may only give me enough information to create a 200 word article. But since its information that is both helpful and relevant to my readers, I publish it anyway. Maybe its time to cut that portion of my business out though and double down on other types of content so that I don't have news stories pulling the rest of my site's content down.

Thanks you very much for the insight. That is something I've struggled with because it seems like from a user useability perspective having those types of 2nd level sub-index pages would be necessary in order to find and navigate through all my content. I have 6,000 some odd various articles with new content published daily. Do you have some examples of online news / magazine sites that do a good job of placing real content on high level pages without sacrificing useability? Again, thanks for the comment.

I get about 2000 searches or so per month of people looking specifically for my brand.For my particular niche that's actually really good though. Other then the manufacturers ( and one other big site, no one has enough brand recognition to generate the searches necessary to be graphed on Google Trends.

I didn't say it dropped out of existence by any means. There is enough of a user base and word of mouth to sustain it and I'm by no means deindexed. I don't feel that Google "owes" me anything. The content that is often times outranking me is just flat out bad and my content is much better. It feels like something I'm doing / done is causing me to rank in spite of, rather then because of, my quality content. But I haven't done anything black hat and have always focused on user experience first, SEO second.

As for Adsense, I have tried it in the past but the payoff per click for my niche is really low. I prefer eBay for this site because I can incorporate it in a way that actually adds value to the user experience.

Just out of curiosity, where did you go after leaving the content publishing arena?

Thanks for the response. It doesn't seem like Google fully "gets" my site. It appears they often times try to rank me as if I'm a mainstream sports site but then overlook me for my area of specialty (sports collectibles). For instance, I may rank for the term "Lou Gehrig" or "Hope Solo" but not for "Lou Gehrig cards" or "baseball cards". Its bizarre since mainstream sports is so much more competitive an area. However a mainstream sports fan is going to bounce after reading an article unless they also happen to be a collector. That kind of traffic is better directed to mainstream sports sites.

I already have links from all the main industry sites and think I've done a good job of onsite SEO. What else can I do to help Google more appropriately "theme" my site and understand its specific area of authority?

Thanks a lot for the feedback. I've tried to silo the news / information content (http://goo.gl/uSDfm) away from the product / transactional related content (http://goo.gl/X3M8d) by assigning them to different categories. Do you think I should go further then that? I've considered subdomains but have held off because of the subsequent need to 301 so many urls.Maybe there's another option?

Product wise I have a bigger database then any other website. Each product profile features a mix of product info, reviews, price comparisons, and checklists. So they are a combination of both types of content in a way.

I second the importance of reading Jason Gregory's Game Engine Architecture.