“Google loves quality content”. Bull Crap!
You might have heard many webmasters saying that if you have quality content and quality links pointing to your site google will rank you high. This true until a webpage is created on the subject by an authority website. Google’s illicit love to authority site is notorious. Few years back there was thread on a busy webmaster forum on this subject. At that time if you search for the term guitar software, the first position on the search result page was an internal page of about.com The page contained one heading with keyword and just one sentence which said something like, “There are some guitar software available online”. That’s all. Hundreds of other websites with high quality content related to the topic were not to be seen on first few pages of SERPS. And many of them had decent backlinks.
Recently I was thinking of promoting some clickback products and wanted to check the competition on google. I was surprised to see that google has not changed. Most of the top results were occupied by web2.0 authority sites. You know, the sites where you can create a web pages freely. I am not talking about social bookmarking sites or Digg here. These are sites similar to blogger. But they had literally no content. Example I was searching for Pip Mavens Review, a new forex mentor program. I found that the first page is full of web 2.0 sites like Scribd, Zimbio etc. (This could change depending upon, when you are reading this post.
None of those search results had any quality content. In fact I couldn’t find a half-decent review page on the first 3 search result pages. Then a found on forth page at Pip Mavens, but the page was not even listed on google. I found it since the main page of this forex site was listed on google for the search term Pip Mavens review. May be google is yet to index that page though it seems to me that the page is online long enough for google to index.
Anyway, my point is google is giving too much importance on Authority sites as a result all the spammers are creating one page crap and exploiting google while honest affiliates go in the WhiteHat direction and fail. To test this I have created a similar page on a web2.0 site and sure enough it is ranking on first page while my pure white hat site with excellent quality content is on 48th position. It makes me wonder what is the point in creating a good site with quality content and trying to get few affiliate sales here and there when you can simple churn out crappy one page web2.0 pages and make 1000 of dollars every month.
No wonder more and more people are going to Black hat world.