Wikipedia, eHow and Long Tail Content Factories

Everybody already knows about Wikipedia which has come to dominate the search results for reference information queries, and with good reason. I probably visit Wikipedia more often than any other website, and I've found it to be highly reliable for the subjects I research. Years ago, I worried that Wikipedia would end up stealing all of my how-to web traffic, but Wikipedia is primarily a reference work which steers clear of procedures and doling out advice.

In the past few weeks, it seems like every day there are a couple new articles on eHow.com that link one of my pages in their references. Normally, organic links would be a cause for celebration, but eHow nofollow's their reference links (I just returned the favor) so that search engines ignore the links and don't give the referenced site credit. eHow is the largest property of the Demand Media Network, drawing over 60 million global visitors a month, about two thirds of the Demand Media Network traffic.

If you've never heard of eHow or the Demand Media Network, you might be surprised to see me mentioning them in the same context as Wikipedia. But according to Yahoo! site explorer, eHow.com has published 58,862,418 pages as of the moment, compared to 83,235,428 for Wikipedia.org, and guess who's growing faster. While Wikipedia is way out front for inbound links, they have over 213 million compared to 12 million for eHow, eHow has a special link generating mechanism which should continue to boost them over time. Quantcast ranks eHow the 21st most popular site on the Internet, and Wikipedia in the 9th spot. Alexa shows very different rankings, but the picture captures the trend very well:



eHow is a community based site, where most of the content is written by members who stand to earn a share of the advertising revenue from their articles if they get traffic. I think eHow's own writing guidelines describe the mission of the site best when they state, "The ideal article has from 400 to 600 words including the title, introduction, steps and tips and warnings." The main thrust of their writing advice is search engine optimization. Most of the eHow articles I've seen follow the formula quite closely, and leave me wondering, "Where's the beef?" I wrote last year that there may be a special place in Hell for Internet article writers who paint by numbers with words.

eHow's advice to writers on how to drive more traffic to their eHow articles includes: linking them from the blogs and websites of friends and family, from any social networking site that allows you to create a profile, from question and answer sites, like Yahoo! Answers, from Wiki's and from your school and business. The advice says nothing about following the guidelines of these sites for responsible behavior or whether or not the links would be relevant for readers. They also suggest blogging about eHow, and somehow, I didn't see them suggesting the use of "NOFOLLOW" tags:-)



I think at some point, Google and the other search engines will face what they will call, "The eHow / Answers Question." Answers.com is very similar to eHow in their search profile, though they take a different approach to content generation. It's interesting to note that according to Yahoo! Site Explorer, Answers.com attracts their traffic with "just" 8,320,896 pages and 3 million incoming links. I think it speaks to Answer.com's content being generated around what are apparently real user submitted questions, as opposed to articles in search of a query. The main downside with Q&A sites is they tend to fill the Long Tail of search with results for which there is a question, but no answer. It's reasonable to assume that search engine users are normally looking for answers, rather than questions to have a go at.

Even though both content generation systems are down in the basement with blogging for building website traffic, they could simply overwhelm the current quality control mechanisms for search by covering the Long Tail with hundreds of millions of uniquely titled pages built around key phrases. While a search on a short phrase like "Self Publishing" will rarely lead you to such content factory pages, a search on a phrase like "How to self publish a book for $99" will eventually be covered, along with $98, and $100, ad infinitum. As people use longer and longer phrases in search, the ability of content factories to jump the line will increase until Google is forced to penalize them by name in their basic search algo.

When I shot the video below talking about the Long Tail of search for publishing websites, I didn't envision human content factories. The main issue for the Long Tail at that time, and one Google seemed capable of dealing with, was program generated spam. Other than establishing "Jordan Rules" for particular websites, it's possible the search engines may overcome the content factory problem by increasing the value of synonyms, something I believe I've seen signs of in the search phrases bringing visitors to my site, though I could be confusing it with the anchor text effect of links.