After playing with ehow for a couple of weeks, I have found there is ZERO quality control while Google just loves the content, it’s a complete joke. As an SEO, we love to find strong trusted domains which we use to rank content and get links from, but there is a trade off. We don’t want the internet to become one large cesspool.
My ‘How to link build’ was written in under 10 minutes and is ranking on page 1 for the phrase, this kind of domain trust just encourages spammers (like me :)) to produce crap.
Looking at Google’s predictive search results on ‘how to’ is entertaining in itself. But I started looking for ehow pages and they do very well, usually on the first 3 pages. They may not all be page one, but these results are here without any promotion, purely from ehow’s domain trust and authority.
So where are the ehow pages then?
#25 in Google.co.uk
To get these types of ehows on page 1 of the search engine results pages (SERPs), you just need some internal links, add a couple of cheap external links and you’re there.
Though these ehows may be of reasonable quality, there are thousands of them that are complete shite. But it’s a clever content farm strategy used my ehow to flood the SERPs and make money through ads…
The name “Content Farm” kind of describes it perfectly. What a strange concept, isn’t it? Or maybe not. Spammers and BlackHat SEOs have been auto generating low quality content for long tail search engine rankings for a while now. The content farm technique arguably takes this a few steps further by creating better quality (note – still questionable quality), user friendly content for the exact same reason Source: Rishil on Content Farms
But why does Google trust the ehow domain so much? Because they get their cut of the profits to the detriment of their own index? Along with polluting Google’s index with nonsense, ehow is getting more criticism about their evil doings on how badly they treat their authors. The only people really making money here are ehow and Google.
For the average internet user I believe ehow pollutes the index with crap, but it does highlight the SEO tactic of using strong domains to hijack SERP positions through ‘piggybacking’.