Comments

1. byebye says

   April 17, 2011 at 10:05 pm

   it’s about time they dropped ehow.
   taking out the garbage.
   let’s hope it stays out.

2. Aaron says

   April 18, 2011 at 12:58 am

   I’m no stock analyst, but I’m surprised their stock price hasn’t dropped more.

   Some interesting statistics and commentary from DMD’s latest 10-k, in the ‘risk factors’ section:

   “If Internet search engines’ methodologies are modified, traffic to our owned and operated websites and to our customers’ websites and corresponding consumer origination volumes could decline.

   We depend in part on various Internet search engines, such as Google, Bing, Yahoo!, and other search engines to direct a significant amount of traffic to our owned and operated websites. For the quarter ended December 31, 2010, approximately 43% of the page view traffic directed to our owned and operated websites came directly from these Internet search engines (and a majority of the traffic from search engines came from Google), according to our internal data. Our ability to maintain the number of visitors directed to our owned and operated websites and to our customers’ websites through which we distribute our content by search engines is not entirely within our control. For example, search engines frequently revise their algorithms in an attempt to optimize their search result listings. Recently, Google announced an algorithm change that affected nearly 12% of their U.S. query results. Although to date we have not experienced a material net impact on our content and media business as a result of this change, there cannot be any assurance as to whether these or any future changes that may be made by Google or any other search engines might impact our business in the long term. Changes in the methodologies used by search engines to display results could cause our owned and operated websites or our customer websites to receive less favorable placements, which could reduce the number of users who link to our owned and operated websites and to our customers’ websites from these search engines. Some of our owned and operated websites and our customers’ websites have experienced fluctuations in search result rankings and we anticipate similar fluctuations in the future. Internet search engines could decide that content on our owned and operated websites and on our customers’ websites, including content that is created by our freelance content creators, is unacceptable or violates their corporate policies. Any reduction in the number of users directed to our owned and operated websites and to our customers’ websites would negatively affect our ability to earn revenue. If traffic on our owned and operated websites and on our customers’ websites declines, we may need to resort to more costly sources to replace lost traffic, and such increased expense could adversely affect our business, revenue, financial condition and results of operations. “

3. Francois says

   April 18, 2011 at 2:16 am

   From France eHow has allways acheived bad rankings for english keywords so I never felt the site was jeopardizing SERPS as most comments from American people let imagine.
   Now if this is the kind of articles that can be found in this site:
   http://www.ehow.com/how_2076051_be-a-domainer.html
   Then it’s sure, it’s pure garbage and eHow.com needs to be get out of Google SERPS asap (example from Aaron blog – good found).

4. Dickie Chikago says

   April 18, 2011 at 5:57 am

   Its about time they dropped about.com

5. Louise says

   April 18, 2011 at 6:39 am

   Flight-to-Miami.com, a Noomle site, is a winner, jumping from #55 on March 3th to #14. It serves high-quality articles. It was mentioned on EmergingDomains.

   That’s impressive for a Noomle site!

   Where did I read the Google algo includes ads/content percentage, the fewer the better?

6. TheOn.it says

   April 18, 2011 at 6:50 am

   just PAY and PAY then Google pushes your site up and up! 😐

7. Michael Marcovici says

   April 18, 2011 at 7:56 am

   siteslike.com ? a site run by the worst people and monetizing only on porn…

8. Michael says

   April 18, 2011 at 8:03 am

   Not sure how compete.com would reconcile all these reports I’ve been seeing about eHow’s traffic getting hit hard. According to compete, eHow’s traffic went up substantially in the last month.

   http://siteanalytics.compete.com/ehow.com/

9. MHB says

   April 18, 2011 at 12:10 pm

   Compete is a month behind for one.

10. adios says

    April 18, 2011 at 3:17 pm

    ehow is just a bad business model. if you want a laugh look at their patents. creating your own seo type system and fooling users into clicking is (alas) widespread and (sadly) generally accepted, but to fool the patent office and then investors is really pushing it.

    it’s one thing to disclose factors outside your control that could affect the business, as the law requires and as cited above. but they’ve based the entire “ehow” business unit around a search engine owned by another company. a company that is evolving.

    investors, who were duly warned on this site and others, have been defrauded with respect to ehow (enom is another matter). it was only a matter of time before this happened. google is known to change their algorithm several times *a day*.

    dmd will buy traffic and may be able to cover themselves in the short term. and the 50% may only be temporary. but the fundamental flaw in “ehow” has been exposed.

11. MHB says

    April 18, 2011 at 3:26 pm

    UPDATE

    Thefool.com just published some thoughts on Demand

    BYW Stock is down over 10% today

    http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2011/04/18/demand-media-isnt-the-devil.aspx

12. bytheby says

    April 18, 2011 at 4:55 pm

    the fool author says content farms are not evil. then at the conclusion of the article he asks readers if content farms are evil. well, which one is it? thanks fool for the guidance.

    the question is not whether something is “evil” (that’s for google employees to joke about), the question is whether the stuff being published is garbage and a complete waste of the reader’s time. by and large, ehow’s “content” is garbage. anyone who disagrees just hasn’t seen better content… and that’s because because the quality stuff has been pushed out of page 1 by seo crap like ehow.

    google has a responsibility to users not to feed them garbage. whether you believe their communications dept and ceo or not, “google exists for users”. there has to be *some* truth to it because if they do alienate users, they could take a hard fall.

    not suggesting google is a saint, but dmd has no such responsibility and zero integrity.

    for ehow it’s just about being on page 1. how many users type ehow.com in their browser address bar?
    if the “content” ehow creates is so relevant, then surely users would head straight to ehow as they do for myriad other user submitted content sites, and changes to google’s algorithm would not be a major issue.

    the fog is lifting.

13. Google Class Action Lawsuit for Panda says

    April 26, 2011 at 3:37 am

    The fact that YOUTUBE and BLOGGER are both on the top 20 winners basically proves Google is Evil and needs to be attacked with the full extent of the law in a class action lawsuit.

14. MHB says

    April 26, 2011 at 7:15 am

    UPDATE

    Another story on Demand and Panda:

    http://blogs.forbes.com/jeffbercovici/2011/04/25/google-traffic-to-demand-media-sites-down-40-percent/?partner=yahootix

15. Thomas says

    August 17, 2011 at 11:36 am

    Loving Google Panda….I have always played by the rules. But unfortunately I have used some of the website that are losers for link building. But I do not produce JUNK content at least.

    So I am seeing many of my sites get a nice boost.

16. Thomas says

    August 17, 2011 at 11:41 am

    Im sitting pretty after the Panda updates. BUmmer is I use many of the websites that were negatively affected as link building resources. Guess I will have to look to other sites for this now!