An Interview with Oliver Whitham of ThisIsFreelance.com
In the aftermath of Google Panda there were plenty of online marketers, freelance writers, and probably unscrupulous spammers, looking for somewhere new to publish online. With major multi-user sites losing tonnes of authority and incomes being obliterated, there seemed to be a mad flurry of activity from many who rushed out to buy their own domains, whilst others sat around twiddling their thumbs waiting for things to get better. A popular destination in the wake of Panda seemed to be a new wave of smaller, typically WordPress based, indie sites.
Many of these sites were brand new and set up as a reaction to market change, primarily by people hoping to benefit from the shoals of disillusioned contributors looking for somewhere new to write their sales pages or let of steam. The concept of small one-man WordPress based revenue sharing sites wasn’t in any way new however, in fact one of my very close contacts was busy building and launching one almost a year before Panda struck. That contact is Oliver Whitham, an Internet Marketing consultant, who added the invitation only article directory ThisIsFreelance.com to his stable of web properties at some stage in 2010.
I’m slightly jealous of Oli, mainly because he is a fellow Englishman who fluked an American passport by virtue of his marriage, but also because he seems to find interesting clients who pay him money to sit around chatting to people all day. This is what he had to say….
To start us off can you tell everybody what ThisIsFreelance.com is and perhaps what the vision was?
This is Freelance is a site that has evolved rapidly over the last year. Initially it was intended to be a spam free backlinks site for other writers, focusing on quality content. It quickly turned in to a great place to earn a few extra dollars, and in the interests of beating Panda it will soon be the starting point for writers looking to write on niche sites. In the future I want to keep This is Freelance as a great place to build backlinks and test out new writers for my other revenue sharing sites which occupy specific niches.
You seemed to almost envisage Google Panda by implementing some pretty stringent quality controls upon launch, this has ensured that the quality of content remains pretty high in relation to other article directories, did you sense that something big was going to happen or did this just fit in with your general ethos?
It was more to do with my general ethos. I have always held that original quality content is a part of SEO. Though I did not forsee just how quickly Google would crack down on poor quality content, I had expected a more gradual focus on quality as Google’s algorithms picked up on an increasing number of quality ‘tells’.
Have you made much money? I know that I haven’t with Excerptz.com (a similar site), but the doors are a lot more open to just about anybody on there, how much content do you think you need to make it work?
The earnings on This is Freelance have not been huge. For the most part I think it is because a lot of writers use it for its original intended purpose, a source for backlinks. I am hoping to see earnings increase as the site ages, simply because when writers see a small income from their work, they are more likely to come back and write some articles designed to generate those clicks and sales.
Where do you go from here? I know that you are currently completely custom building a new WordPress based site right now, which should be with us in a few months, but do you try and build the brand or do you keep it super small?
I am hoping to make things big, but manageable. By focusing on quality content and stringent applications I will be able to create an umbrella of sites which will become, if all goes to plan, high quality safe havens for writers looking for backlinks in a specific niche.
The custom built theme is taking longer than anticipated, mainly because I am not just putting in what I need the site to do, but I am also taking out the things that the site does not need to do. My hope is for it to create a quick, streamlined environment for my writers.
Do you have any tips for others who want to pursue this business model? I know that mine would probably be “don’t bother”, but multi-author sites do appear to be a viable method of building up site authority in a short space of time, as opposed to say a single author blog which is going to struggle to build up organic backlinks.
I think if you are new to the game it may be too late, there is simply too much competition out there for multi-author sites now. If however you have something unique, an idea that has not already been done, or you simply want to get a few more regular writers for an already established site, multi-author may be something worth investigating.
Do you think that there is a future for major open platforms such as Hubpages and Squidoo, or does Google really have it in for them? The return of traffic to one or two of those platforms may suggest a relaxing of the algorithm, but I myself can envisage a bit of calm before another major storm, or do you think we will see more sites move towards the Hubpages sub domain model?
I think there is a future with these platforms, but I don’t think it is the same prosperous future I would have predicted before Panda hit. I think the sites that are slowly going to fold are going to be the sites which had absolutely no quality controls or moderation.
The sub-domain model was something I, and several other prominent ex-hubbers mentioned before Hubpages went on an ill-advised unpublishing spree. (Something that I escaped, but felt the repercussions of, as thousands of hubs were removed for the rankings for very minor reasons). Although the sub-domain switch seems to have worked temporarily, I don’t think it addresses what Google really look for, which is specialization. I believe that sub-domains based on categories would have been much more effective, especially when paired with the valid removal of duplicate and badly spun content.
Talking about sub-domains, any reason why smaller sites should use these? It’s a big undertaking, really not an easy job, but it can perhaps be assumed that smaller sites should manage a firmer grasp on moderation?
There are several reasons a smaller site may like to use sub-domains. Starting with the fact that if your site covers several topics, you may want to split them up. The big problem with sub-domains is that each sub-domain is in essence a separate website, which means backlinking needs to be done to a multiple of the sub-domains you create.
That’s actually all I have for you, I know that your eternally busy. Actually, I do have one more question, does this exposure and the nice backlink give me right to crash on your sofa in Austin if I ever get round to visiting Elvis in Memphis?
Yes, you should probably visit Austin before Memphis though, as my wife went on a ladies vacation down there, and could point you in the direction of a man who gives tours in a Cadillac, an ex pimp with a great bar, and other tit bits of information!
Awesome I’m going to call that favor in one day!
If you want to stalk Oli or generally leech off of his SEO knowledge you can find him on the website SEOchemist.com, one day I will convince him that I know enough about SEO myself to guest blog. If you have any questions for Oli then please post them on SEOchemist, there is no guarantee that he will read them on here!
I have enjoyed reading your interview with Oliver Whitham. I found the discussion of quality content to be the point that I find most confusing. I’m pretty sure that lower quality writing has always done better than higher quality writing with Google, and that Panda is not designed to weed out bad writing.
Let me give you the example of my own site: PubWages. We have many excellent writers, some with PhDs in subjects such as mathematics and linguistics. We also have articles by school teachers and professional homemakers, each writing in their own area of expertise. But do you know which articles get the most traffic — and the most organic traffic from Google? Those written by someone with a sixth grade education. And they really are the least polished of the pieces that we have. But they are popular and this popularity is self-sustaining with no backlinks to speak of.
Unlike Oliver, I don’t have a by-invitation only policy on PubWages, but because I have been afraid of having the site hacked, I have been cautious and have not approved potential contributors who were unwilling or unable to respond to an email asking to tell me a little about themselves.
Two of the contributors who did not get my approval to be authors did nevertheless leave a draft article on my site. The articles are in good English. They are written on an adult level, but they are merely advertisements for a product with a link to a site where you can buy the product. Should I approve them? I figure that these people are spammers, but they probably have much better SEO than my quality contributors. So in the interest of my site’s success, shouldn’t I allow the lower quality contributors to help those of us who write highbrow articles to get a little more visibility?
Aya Katz, if they are unique articles and not simply copies circulated around various sites, then I can’t see why not. I personally don’t believe that marketing content has any negative effects whatsoever, unless they are written about taboo products which may be considered spammy by virtue of the subject matter. For example, promoting weight loss products or Viagra, etc.
Is “credit repair service” considered a taboo topic?
Have you googled a sentence or two of the content Aya? I would bet that you are dealing with content which is going to be published in more than one place. Do you have a decent captcha on the registration page? A lot of this stuff is submitted to WordPress sites via software programs, I had a huge problem with it on my own site which didn’t really go away until I put some restrictions in place. If you find that it is unique non-duplicated content, and is readable, then I can’t see the problem. If on the other hand it is spun or duplicated, then keep it well away. Credit Repair Service is a topic which is typical to spammers, yes, but then any high value subject area is (a lot of money in credit and debt related terms). Give it a read, I would bet that it is poorly spun or duplicate.
Aya, there are a wide range of factors in the SEO formula, While high quality writing is a factor, there are other factors in getting a page to rank than just quality. However, I do believe that low quality content can drag down high quality content, which is why I place so much emphasis on it.
By focusing on higher quality in the beginning it is easier to rank articles with other SEO techniques.
How Google judges quality is of course a matter of debate. Personally I think Duplicate content and heavily spun articles are a good starting point, but with a team of 200+ engineers working on ranking quality, you can be sure that Google have picked up on other indicators too.
A good starting point is to look at the list on Google Webmaster blog at the ‘quality’ indicators that the focus groups were asked to look at when they designed the Panda upgrade, it was from these questions that they developed the Panda algorithm .
Oli, since quality was never a problem on PubWages, any improvement will have to come from other aspects of SEO. But I do think that writing on popular topics probably helps.
I don’t necessarily believe that the 200+ engineers at Google are working on ranking “quality”. I think that they might be trying to figure out what the majority of searchers are looking for when they use a particular search term and trying to give it to them. And that’s without even considering the angle that Google needs to please advertisers. ;-> On the list of priorities, the quality of the content can’t rank very high. Lots of high quality sites were damaged by Panda.
Which high quality sites were damaged by Panda? Hubpages for instance has always been a relatively low quality site. There are plenty of high quality writers on there, but they tend to be overshadowed by teh large amounts of trash.
The 200+ engineers are in the search quality group, they work to improve the relevance and teh quality of results that searchers receive. Personally I am not too happy with their performance, but I don’t have much say in the matter.
When it comes to what Panda looks for, the focus group had to judge sites based on this list http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2011/05/more-guidance-on-building-high-quality.html
The Panda Algorithm looks for signals based on how the focus group responded to sites on these points.
Oli, when I spoke of quality sites, I was thinking of Dani Horowitz. She has a niche site with high quality content, DaniWeb. Panda hit it, and some of her pages that included high quality expert information were plunged in the rankings, while garbage came to the top.
I can’t really tell why their site was hit because whatever was wrong, they fixed it
A big part of what it may be is that daniweb is of course a glorified forum, which means there will be a lot of bad content, as wel as good.
She did fix a lot of things to bring her site back up, but the things she fixed were not the quality of writing. She gave an interview about it on WebProNews, and I summarized what I learned from her there in an article on Excerptz entitled “article-directories-no-rules-many-rules-or-few-rules”.
Some of the things that she discovered were: many of her backlinks were devalued because they featured RSS feeds of her content. These were people who were following her blog and were giving credit to the author of the content by providing a back-link. Pre-Panda, that was considered perfectly legitimate. Post-panda the RSS feed had to go, or the backlink did not count. She also discovered that domain structure made a difference.
Robot.txt has to be used in the page anytime search results are featured on a page. A forum post with no reponses has to be completely de-indexed, or it counts against the site.
Those are just examples of the many, many things she had to say. What struck me was that all of the changes she made were superficial techy things that a webmaster can do, without changing the content on the site. So basically there was nothing wrong with her content, and the fix was to play with the non-content aspects. Google gamed her and then she gamed right back.
If those are the changes she made then it’s interesting to see how they affected her. Maybe these were not a reaction to panda though, but fixing underlying problems. For instance the removal of RSS feeds, that was something that probably should have been done prior to Panda. (It is very easy to do RSS feeds the wrong way, very hard to do them the right way).
Oli, as I understood it, it’s not that she had RSS feeds on her site and needed to remove them. Her fans and followers had RSS feeds of her content on their sites, and so their backlinks to her were devalued. I don’t know how she dealt with that exactly. I suppose she must have had to ask them to summarize what she said in their own words and then give a backlink, although that was not made clear.
RSS feeds are generally considered ‘useless’ rather than ‘bad’ so having people remove RSS feeds to her site should not have made much of an impact. If the RSS feed allowed them to post copies of her entire posts on their own site however that could have caused problems.
I very much enjoyed reading this interview and the feedback it is generating.
Thank you for the helpful facts on revenue sharing sites, back links, content and the quality of such, plus the many interesting facts regarding Oliver Witham of This Is Freelance and his adventures in Internet Survival.