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As late as 2010 there were a plethora of sites where people could write online and be paid. Some paid more than others, some demanded more than others, but for the writer, there was so much opportunity.
Google, deciding to lauch it’s unpaying site; Knol, did what it does best; be evil. Just like this sachet of ‘almond milk’ which has no almonds, Google is not the friend it pretends to be.
As it had no intention of paying for work it had to get rid of the sites that did.
It introduced the ‘Panda’.
The ‘Panda’ was touted as the bane of ‘Content Farms’. These were defined by Google as writing sites which published what you stepped in if you walked through a cow pasture.
At first people were not alarmed, thinking if many of the crap writers were removed the sites would be better.
Sure, we all have encountered those who plagiarise, who write a 500 word article made of two sentences that make sense and lots of verbs, adverbs and adjectives to fill the space.
We know of those who fill their prose with ‘key words’.
We thought that Google would deal with these writers, (term used loosely), but that is not what it did.
What it did was create an algorithm in which anything posted on a paying writing site began with a minus rating.
Google works like this.. let us suppose I want to look up; “How To Make The Perfect Cup of Coffee”.
Google will search to match as many of the words as possible.
If that is the title of an article that article is supposed to be first on the list as it matches all the words. But if that article is written on a ‘Content Farm’ it starts with a ‘minus’.
So How to Make Coffee, How to Brew Coffee, Making Coffee, Coffee Beans, will all come before that item, that perfect fit, which is on a site Google and Google alone has determine to be a Content Farm.
That means, no one will find an item published on a ‘Content Farm’ but find lots of stuff on their cousin’s site; Wikipedia, and all the possible advertisers it has.
The effect of being labelled a Content Farm caused hits to drop; for example; Hubpages used to get 12 Million hits a month. That instantly dropped to 6 Million.
Other sites which would usually receive 2 Million wound up with 300k.
This was a cut in revenue.
A site, like Triond which used to pay 1c for every six views was forced to change to 1c per every sixty, and just before it died it was 1c for every 600.
The people who suffered were the writers. People who had often made $50+ U.S. a month writing on line. People who now made $5 and then nothing, as site after site went down or stopped paying.
Once there was Hubpages, Wikinut, Triond, Bukisa, Squidoo, Helium… on and on which paid writers. Today, only Hubpages is left and it pays very very badly.
Online writing sites that pay has become an endangered species.
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Your blog took me down to a place I never knew existed. So Google plays games just as any other. So keywords is the name of the game. I shall play it well from now on atleast.
@bestwriter Yet the latest google Algorithms might even detect "over-use" of certain keywords!
It was shocking because what they made one believe is that they were going after spam, so no one protested until it was done.
You'll find the item which repeats a term as is, over and again, (something we were taught NOT to do in writing classes... y'know find 'new ways' to say something?)score higher than actual creative writing. I'm sure if one put a number of the best written books through a SEO they'd score very low.
There was a writer on Hubpages who used to be the top one... every article was like this;
"All over the world people are interested in *. You have probably thought about *. There is really no mystery to *....."
On and on.
She'd check "What's trending..." and each day she'd pop in a new word in a typical find and replace. So Monday * could be bicycles, Tuesday * could be diet, Wednesday it could be electric cars... every day she'd have this article of 1000 words saying nothing.
If you do a search about knol (you can use Bing, dogpile, duckduckgo, instead of google) you'll find out when it was launched, and how cleverly it ties into the Panda.
That's the downside in writing. I have some sentiments in Triond because most of my good writing are embedded there. I don't have the chance to retrieved it. I had wasted my time and they didn't pay that much.
There was a time that making $50 a month on Triond was no biggie. Many writers made more than that every month. I am talking from 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010; making more than $50 a month just from one site...
Once it was slapped down by Google it died.
I think all the online writers can relate well to this article. We all have seen a steady decline in online payments...thanks to google!
It is Google and Google alone which caused this in their evil. What was once an open info highway, where you could read the views of people all over the world is now limited, for why write if you aren't being paid?
Oh, but why didn't the site owners share these details with the users? And where did you get all this information?
So does everybody go out and start writing on one's own blog, where hardly one in Thousands makes money by SEO??
This did happen. Google announced that it was introducing its rolling panda. Those who owned sites responded. We did not realise that every article on Triond, Wikinut, Hubpages, etc would start with a minus... every article because it was on one of those sites.
Not because it was a poor item, but to destroy the online writing community was Google's choice.
Knol was discontinued in 2010
https://blogjob.com/cyberworld/tag/ixquick/
http://www.dailyblogtips.com/is-google-crossing-the-line-with-knol/
are just two items with info
Yes, that is true. Ezinearticles nearly close down too, but somehow they manage to stay afloat.
I think the intention of Google Panda is good, but it sure makes a lot of writers go hungry.
It was a trick. Google wanted to introduce a writing site which didn't pay. No one would join if it didn't pay... so it destroyed other sites.
Google fooled the public as it always does.
Google is like margarine. In the 1950s it was claimed to be a health food. Everyone pushed the public to use this product. It never was healthy.
Panda was not created to protect writing sites but to destroy them.
Yes, Google Panda is one of the best software that makes minus to the scammers in the world of internet. I like it most because it catches the scammers every year. I think it is thief and scammers catchers.
First of all, let's start by discussing the Google algorithm. It's immensely complicated and continues to get more complicated as Google tries its best to provide searchers with the information that they need. When search engines were first created, early search marketers were able to easily find ways to make the search engine think that their client's site was the one that should rank well.
In some cases it was as simple as putting in some code on the website called a meta keywords tag. The meta keywords tag would tell search engines what the page was about.
As Google evolved, its engineers, who were primarily focused on making the search engine results as relevant to users as possible, continued to work on ways to stop people from cheating, and looked at other ways to show the most relevant pages at the top of their searches. The algorithm now looks at hundreds of different factors.
Panda first launched on February 23, 2011. It was a big deal. The purpose of Panda was to try to show high-quality sites higher in search results and demote sites that may be of lower quality. This algorithm change was unnamed when it first came out, and many of us called it the "Farmer" update as it seemed to affect content farms. (Content farms are sites that aggregate information from many sources, often stealing that information from other sites,
in order to create large numbers of pages with the sole purpose of ranking well in Google for many different keywords.) However, it affected a very large number of sites. The algorithm change was eventually officially named after one of its creators, Navneet Panda.
The Panda DESTROYED paying online writing sites. That is What it did. It slapped down a whole site. So if there were 49,000 writers on Hubpages and only 9 were crap writers, it slapped everyone the same by giving the SITE a minus score. It wasn't that there was a search and specific items were targeted... NO. Panda went after Online Writing Sites that Paid. This was to introduce its NON PAYING Knol.