Several days ago, I wrote a post titled “I am no longer an affiliate“. I got called lots of things ranging from pathetic to spot-on for that post.
Please let me be clear. I wasn’t selling out, or decrying the industry in which I have made a nice living, and which has been good to me. I love what I do.
The point I was making is this: “Affiliates” are getting defined by our most visible behavior — the marketers who seem to be able to, or at least try to, get top rankings with low quality stuff to insert themselves into every monetary transaction on the Internet without providing incremental value. Essentially, moving the user one click further away from what they’re ultimately looking for. And if that’s an “affiliate”, that is not me.
This shouldn’t only be a criticism of the smaller one-man-show affiliates. I’ve seen some REALLY crappy results from big company sites, like the big price comparison engines who have somehow earned a bye on the “add value” check in very specific cases. In my opinion, they are some of the biggest search engine polluters out there, showing up in paid and natural search results where they don’t have any products for terms they’re ranking for.
When this stuff somehow manages to make it’s way up in some search engine results, it is yet another “bad experience”. These things make the search engines look bad. Nobody likes to be played. And while you may be excited about the great traffic that you’re getting for nothing, it’s like lead poisoning. It builds up in the system until the system either dies or does something drastic to get rid of the problem. While this technique seems easy, it’s very short-sighted, and is contributing to a larger crisis.
It’s a free world, and you can put up any website that you want. That’s cool. There’s a big difference between something that someone’s doing for the fun or interest of it, or working toward future goals and someone who is putting up something quick with the intention that it’ll rank well for some search term and make some easy money. Just because you can do it doesn’t mean you should do it.
Mark Wielgus at 45n5 coined the term “the 2010 seo rule” based on something that Jason Calacanis said in the Affiliate Summit keynote address. Basically, Jason said, “if you cannot make a web page that’s 20% better than the top 10 pages that are already out there on a topic, then don’t bother.”
How can you possibly measure “percent better” and why stop at 10? Surely there’s room on the Net for more than 10 angles on the same subject. And of course, you never know if your idea will be better until you try it.
Just the same, the point is a good one, and is simply this: Try to be better.
It’s a tough pill to swallow to look at what you do and admit that it doesn’t add to the user experience, especially if it’s making money. Sure you can justify it and tell yourself that you’re providing a service (if I had a nickel), catching a wayward searcher and directing them on the path to the product they want, but you’re probably just kidding yourself. The search engines will catch up and the traffic won’t last.
Be Different
This is no holier-than-thou post. I’ve done a lot of the things that fall squarely into the pollution category. I’ve created a lot of crap over the years as I got to where I am today. I shudder to think that some of it is still out there on some forgotten server. Getting kicked out of search results is a tiring game, and in the end there’s nothing left to show of it or be proud of.
We made a decision a few years ago to take a different approach than what we and many other affiliates were doing. We try to build useful and fun stuff. Build for the long-term.
The “build for users” thing has been beaten to death, and frankly it’s annoying advice when it comes from the search engines. Of course it’s obvious, but we all know what the search engines like, and it’s not always the same as what users like.
And since search engines are a fact of life, and we DO want their traffic, we’ve got our own take on this. Everything we do now is done with one basic sanity check in mind:
If a Google (or Yahoo or Mahalo) employee, a real person, were to visit any page on our sites for the purpose of evaluating it, are we confident that they’d feel good offering up to their users? The answer to this question must be “yes” or we don’t do it.
If the answer is “no”, we hide the page with “no index” meta data to keep it out of the search engines until we can fix it.
That pretty much covers everything — the search engine and the user.
My 2010 rule is different: Build something in 2008 that’s going to be around in the year 2010.
That’s long enough for us to make it one of the top sites of its kind.
