News and Guides » 2009 » November

I am writing this post at 3 a.m., drinking my cup of coffee, a little nervous on big players out there. I will now talk about a punctual case which is representative for a lot of search queries in SE, especially Google. Let’s discuss the query “hemorrhoids treatment“.

Now, looking at the results, we have:

1. Webmd’s 2 pages: “Treatment Overview” and “Home treatment”

2. Goarticles article named “Natural Hemorrhoids Treatment”

3. Emedicine section on Hemorrhoids

4. hemmorhoidstreatment .com

I will stop here as the next site which I consider very appropriate and highly representative for this search term is indeed on the 5th position. This site offers a forum, a newsletter, reviews of the main treatments online and so on. It’s age is more than 3 years and as you can see, all hemorrhoids topics are fully covered.

So let’s take these results that are in front of my representative site one by one.

Webmd’s articles on hemorrhoids.
Webmd’s content is provided by a company named Healthwise. Although the articles are appropriate for the keyterms “hemorrhoids treatment”, I strongly believe there are not worthy for the first and second place. Although the content is indeed written by professionals, it was last updated in 2006. Webmd is not specialized on this niche term, it has a general site on all sorts of diseases. The information is not enough for people that are for example looking to buy an immediate cure or that need advice from real persons. And why 2 pages from Webmd?? It almost seems like a Google favor to this company. It is clear that the 500 words on this disease can not compete with a real niche site specialized in offering information strictly on this health problem. Moreover, the content is served as over-optimized for search engine ranking. I see no value in this kind of content, and I would certainly NOT give this a first+second place.

Goarticles on hemorrhoids

This looks almost like a joke. A 500 words article written mostly for advertising purposes on a low quality article directory site is ranking right after Webmd. WOW. And more incredible, is ranking even though it was removed by the editors. The page is a customized 404, and still is ranking in front of credible sites which have something real to show to visitors.

Emedicine section on Hemorrhoids
WebMd must be a good money cow as Google gives the next position to another WebMd site. Same optimized for searches content, short and with huge lack of real helping information. One might as well type hemorrhoids on wiki and get much more information than what this site offers. Incredibly, this site offers though 4 (four) comments from “real” people. Comments like this one:
“I have been using the Preparation H wipes for my hemorrhoids and still the bleeding occurs, so I have an appointment with a specialist coming up soon.”
Helpful, huh?

hemmorhoidstreatment .com
Now this is a joke! Misspelling “hemorrhoids” and linking the site from 2 other low quality sites, hemroids .ws and hemoroids .info with identical content seems to be enough to jump in front of real sites. Again, I am amazed.

Examples like this, I can give a thousand. Overall, I am disappointed on what results are becoming today. Google should put more accent on niche sites that handle subjects better that big general sites, and also Google should reward hard work, age and quality instead of new questionable content from questionable sources.

I haven’t written for quite a while to MGC blog. Most of the time, I’ve been very busy with my research. Right now, I am involved in a project at Percro Laboratory which is based in Pisa and belongs to Scuola Superiore Sant’Anna, Italy. My assignment is to compute the inverse kinematics for a virtual hand in XVR. Pretty cool, huh?

Anyway, lets move down to our business. Things are moving very fast these days in web industry, though. I always take 2-3 hours/day to manage my sites. Over the last couple of years, I’ve learn a lot in web marketing. I will now give 5 tips that I always have in my mind when optimizing my sites:

1. Be special. Don’t do the same thing that has been done by other 100 people. Maybe at the beginning it was a good idea, but at the moment you are trying it, it’s most probably just a waste of time. Instead, do something different. Try something new. Be prepared to try original things and be flexible so that you can deal with them.

2. Be fast. That means you have to put speed not only into your application, but into your marketing efforts. Otherwise, someone better will steal your idea place it on the market in front of you.

3. Work. Nothing comes out without good hard working. If you are not prepared to put time and nerves in your site, it will most probably fail.

4. Invest. Don’t be afraid to invest some of your profit back into your production tool. If you are keeping your site intact, you will be outplayed. Look at this guy. Imagine that a few years ago, he was one of the leaders in his market. Now he is resting in peace at 3-4%. He didn’t invest.

5. Be good. When you are good and you know in your soul that you are good, you gain more work power and feel much better overall. You have self-respect and you respect others. It may seem nonsense words to you, but on internet, a lot of crap is spreading from tenebrous webmasters which have no shame. Various tricks and schemes that in the end help visitors to loose their money are invented each day. But good webmasters that prove ambition and honesty will always be rewarded in long term.

I hope these advices help someone, somewhere.