Google Sued Over Drop in SERPs - Where’s the Content?
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I may not be a mother of young children, but I do have an interest in search engine optimization. I also know that Google isn’t that prone to out-and-out mistakes, so if the search engine had done damage to the rankings of a quality website, I wanted to see it. So I fired up my browser and went directly to KinderStart's website.
KinderStart bills itself as a search engine. Scroll down past the search box and the ads at the top, and you’ll see sixteen categories in two columns which would be of interest to parents of young children: child development, learning activities & crafts, education/daycare/childcare, and so on. Just below that is a link to KinderToday.com, “news that burps,” and some headlines.
Figuring I’d reached a site where I could find some great content, I started clicking links. The main category links led to subcategory links. And these links led…to more links. Specifically, they led to a page full of links to websites, with a one-sentence description of each site. In some cases, the descriptions looked a little like advertising text to my web-trained eyes. Some of the links had stars next to them, which must be a rating system of some sort.
In short, KinderStart doesn’t have content. It isn’t even a content aggregator; it’s a link aggregator! Hungry for content, I clicked on the link for KinderToday. I landed on a page set up very similar to SlashDot’s home page. Rather than describing stories and including links to them, the page included the actual opening paragraph or two of each story, then provided the link. Many of the pieces were quite short, often no more than a page. I guess the company figures that parents of young children have limited time (or limited attention spans). Ah, was this content at last?
Alas, not really. While the four most recent articles carried dates in mid-to-late March, the fifth one was dated January 24th. January 24th?! The website actually went for almost two months with no significant new content?! Do you suppose that Google’s spiders got bored and stopped coming back?
From my point of view, another problem with the content on these pages is that there is no real way to tell whether these articles have been written by experts in the field, an educated layman, a quack, or a clueless newbie, short of actually reading the article. So the only thing that really counts as content on KinderStart’s web page is not even on the home page, and of indeterminate quality. I was discussing this with my colleague Mike McEwan, whose work you’ve probably read on this site. Like me, he doesn’t do SEO for a living, but he knows a thing or two about the right practices. His analysis, as usual, was right on target: “It’s like a kid tracing a cartoon character and trying to sell it to an art gallery.”
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