Paul Allen says that content is king on the internet. Or, he who has the most content is the king of the search engines. It’s really true and here’s another example to demonstrate.
Recently I’ve been doing this experiment/business (really business/experiment) with ebay. I built a system that pulls ebay auctions and lists them on my site. I made it so google would index as much as possible and so the pages were very optimized. Why? because ebay content is unique. There are so many different listings about so many different yet similar things that pages created from it become very keyword specific pages. Plus, the listings contain words that people are searching for on google but that you won’t find on any other site on the internet (weird huh?).
So here’s what’s happened. I had about 30 pages indexed with google and was getting probably 1 hit / day. Not that good…except that my pages don’t have any pagerank and no incoming links. Then google indexed about 50 pages and I was getting like 3-5 hits/day. Still not great. Then, last saturday, I added amazon content to my pages and on sunday google indexed about 100 pages. All of a sudden I’m getting more than 30 hits/day. Still not great, but pretty good. Good enough to demonstrate that content is king. I have almost 700,000 keyword combinations in my database each of which corresponds to a page that google can index, each of which will have unique ebay/amazon content on it that no other page on the internet has.
Why does this demonstrate that content is king? Here’s a sample of some of the search terms people used on google that they found my site with:
malibu-vintage mesh-cap
1920’s fashion
vl-325 mp3 reviews
von dutch checkered hats
samantha
fdny caps wholesale bulk
milwaukee brewers throwback dojo hat
unc tarheels bar hat
where can i buy dvds of friends season #3 for $20
britanis memorabilia
redhatsociety wallet
cicada mesh hats
sale kangol tropic ventair 504 cap hot pink
newton di100fr
stetson stratoliner
burtlaw
confit pot antiques
Yeah, totally random! Nothing in common, except that my pages are the closest matches to these search terms on the internet.
The lesson to be learned is: build a site with tons of unique content. If your content is unique, people will find it through their unique searches.