For a Goldilocks Rethink of the Mega Content Hub — It’s Time

Modest sites and big sites both have drawbacks for search traffic.

It’s been a rough couple months for web publishers with massive content libraries.

Google’s “Panda” update put a huge dent in these sites’ traffic metrics. With lost traffic comes lost ad revenue. With that layoffs will follow.

And it’s not just the “evil content farms” that got hit. I’ve spoken to many brand name publishers with solid, well-sourced, professionally-written articles that have been dinged (albeit not as hard).

So what does this mean for publishers that want stability in the future?

They ought to take the Goldilocks approach: not too modest…not too sizable…just right.

Let’s start with too modest. A lot of domainers fall into this category. They develop minisites with 5-10 pages of content. They have to do SEO work for each and every one of these sites. The work required to get some inbound links doesn’t justify the amount of traffic possible on the modest sites.

These sites are too modest.

Then there’s the mega content hub, like Demand Media’s eHow. These span hundreds of thousands of pages (I think that’s the number. I tried Googling “how many pages does eHow have?”. There was no eHow article regarding it.) Mega hubs like this attract a lot of search engine juice and newly published articles get indexed with authority quickly.

Or at least they did.

The problem is they span such a sizable topic base that they start to flood the search engines. Any bad content on the hub gets ridiculed. People start to hate the site. Then the uproar becomes big enough that people complain to Google. Google creates a tool for people to block sites, and then that blocking data is used in future algorithm changes. Poof.

These sites are too big.

So what sites are just right? That’s a tough question. Like Goldilocks and the Three Bears, this is a case where you need to try out all three sizes to find the one that’s just right.