Train Thoughts

It looks like more and more search engines are trying to create rich search engine results pages by re-purposing and aggregating content, but instead of building query volume via their own destination site, they are trying to drive traffic via search engine optimization.

AOL has launched Love with about 117,000 pages now indexed by Google.  SEO wise, they’ve done it a bit differently where each page appears to be getting its own subdomain, so Google thinks of each page from Love as a separate site.  Love has some decent links to it already and is getting some traffic via search engines.

Kosmix recently had some press about it’s growth, but I’m interested in how much of its growth is people navigating to the site vs clicking on SERPs from Google.  Compete shows about 10% of traffic coming from Yahoo which is high, but less coming from Google, which is not normal - so maybe they are building direct traffic or Google just kicked in for them.

Mahalo, which is mostly links and handbuily SERPs has about 144,000 pages in Googles index and Compete shows 43% coming from Google.  This isn’t as high as About.com (48%), but it does show that a significant portion of the sites traffic comes from search engines.

SEO Book points out how Brands are using their equity to get low quality pages traffic from Google.   While this may grow traffic in the short term, I think it’s a highly suspect tactic for showing growth in search - Google frowns on other people’s SERPs in their SERPs.  At the end of the day, these are content sites.  Which is fine.  Great content should be found in SERPs.  However, regurgited content that is mashed up to create something “unique” is not great.  Why not invest in high quality unique content?  Or build platforms like we did with HubPages or WordPress to allow others to create content.  In the long run, you’re more likely to have an asset that reliably drives traffic from search engines by taking the unique content path then going after the highly scalable, but dangerous way of auto generating pages.