wisegeek - your thoughts

[Kyle]

The site wisegeek.com is such a piece of crap in my opinion.
Most of their quick, to the point articles are fine... but the manner in which this site was created, their goals, layout, and excessive advertising really piss me off. I feel it is content sites like these that hurt the higher quality sites who focus on a niche, or truly care about the content outside of the profits they could generate.

Here is one of their category pages...
http://www.wisegeek.com/health.htm

2800 links on one page to their articles.

Here is one of their articles...
http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-pku.htm

Look at all the adsense units...
They designed their navigation at the bottom to match the google ad units, in which they are using TWO ad units.

Plus the horribly annoying Vibrant Ads...

The number of ad units. There is a difference between smartly blending in adsense units and doing what wisegeek is doing.

The purpose of the content. It is disgusting how obvious the reason this site was created, purely for adsense. It isn't even a borderline judgment against them.. Think to yourselves how many people would give wisegeek a return visit to look for information on a given subject.... At least with a site like HowStuffWorks (whose article quality is FAR better than wisegeek) visitors instantly realize this is a good site to learn 'how stuff works!' Plus howstuffworks has many other quality features (like pictures! wisegeek doesn't even have images!)

Sure, it is cool how many people the creator Denis can employ, and that they all have fields of expertise. It is the dream success referenced in the 'get rich from adsense guides' that tout how you can make money by writing about topics you love...

Felt like ranting, obviously wisegeek can begin to reform over time and be a quality site... but to have 2800 articles in the health category with no real pictures or anything interesting... blah, what do you think?

[Chris]

looks to me like typical grey hat stuff.

I would guess they'd probably end up penalized eventually

[ddeuced]

I am new to the world of posting so please pardon my naivety.

I agree with the majority of your comments with the exception that the ads did not seem to bother me as greatly as I thought based on reading your post.

I was more interested in reading the information which I thought was fairly well presented, regardless of the lack-luster layout.

I am curious to know how a site like that is created. Is it actually 18,200+ “original” articles or was it a cut and paste project?

I am an advocate of having great and/or informative images on a site and I thought their repetition of the same image in many links showed a lack of creativity.

I would love to know more about how to “smartly blend” ads.
Hal

[ZigE]

I don't think there's anything particularly wrong (however you define that)

If the way the site is setup annoys people, it will hurt the growth in the long term, but at the moment, I would imagine they are making a killing.

If it's delivering leads, and google is happy, Well who am I to tell them any different. Visitors will make the decision if they want to return or not.

[Kyle]

It isn't "wrong" to have 2800 links on one unorganized category page (see here: http://www.wisegeek.com/health.htm)

The point here ZigE, is this site uses many content organization strategies for the sole purpose of generating better search engine results and indexing. And this is a big no no to Google. Having hundreds to thousands of links on multiple category pages is no benefit to the user, only to the search engine. There's a difference between having a sitemap, and having a site which is just one big sitemap.

I'm sure they will reform this as the paranoia sets in, but these strategies show the fundamental organizational choices they made...add in the complete lack of pictures/images and saturation of advertising, it is icing on their graycake.

[Nico]

It isn't "wrong" to have 2800 links on one unorganized category page)

Well, according to Google guidelines ( http://www.google.com/support/webmas...y?answer=35769 ) we should try keep the amount of links on a page to less than a 100...both for a sitemap and for normal pages.

Im sure it's just a suggestion, and it won't be a problem if you have 300 links...but 2800???

I have 150 in one page and im already getting paranoid and started to split it up!

[Kyle]

Well, according to Google guidelines ( http://www.google.com/support/webmas...y?answer=35769 ) we should try keep the amount of links on a page to less than a 100...both for a sitemap and for normal pages.

Im sure it's just a suggestion, and it won't be a problem if you have 300 links...but 2800???

I have 150 in one page and im already getting paranoid and started to split it up!

Exactly, that is only a suggestion. Many great sites have hundreds these days, unintentionally. This happens through in content links and their navigation. Think of blogs which could easily have 5-10 links per post... not counting the navigation/archive/category/friend links.

But... what I'm really trying to point out here is how their category page is not designed for users when it has 2800 links, organized by the length of title??!?

Don't be paranoid Nico, it really isn't about the quantity, it is about the purpose. For example, shoemoney's blog has a little under 300 links on the front page, but it is no big deal.

[Nico]

Yes, i agree that they are doing something pretty weird in that site.

I think you are right about the purpose being important. There is a real difference between having 300 links (even 1000) in a blog and in having them in a non-useful listing, like this site.

I wonder why Google suggest keeping the links below 100 anyway...it's more of a "user friendly" issue, or is a technical issue with the spider?

[Chris]

It is a PR issue Nico.

Google is trying to help newbies out by suggesting they keep links down so as to not overly dilute their PR to the point where none of their pages rank well.

[agua]

It looks like a supercharged arbitrage project to me

[Nico]

It is a PR issue Nico.

oh right, thanks!

[Kyle]

It looks like a supercharged arbitrage project to me

...with a legit face http://www.wisegeek.com/who-is-wisegeek.htm.

[agua]

I don't think arbitrage was confined to small scale publishers... I'm pretty sure some of the much larger well known companies use/used the method... I can't remember of hand which ones...

Arbitrage is a viable business practice... it just got abused by publishers using adsense, devalued the traffic potential to adwords advertisers, so Google banned it.