Upworthy To Go Clickbait Free...

RomesFall

RomesFall

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Saw this yesterday...

http://digiday.com/publishers/upworthy-goes-clickbait-free-never-headlines/

What do you guys think? Good choice, bad choice? Why?

Seems to me like they're trying to get more toward their original mission statement, maybe pivoting their USP would be too strong of a word, but certainly seems like they're trying to further differentiate themselves from other 'viral' sites...

Not sure how well it will work for them. Will be interesting to see how it winds up.
 
I haven't read all, but this "Upworthy is making a pivot away from curation and toward quality original fare." is a case of duplicated content. I have noticed that on some of sites weekssss... ago. What's the most funny about it? Punishment will be taken by ANY website. Be it original source, first copy or second copy or third one... whatever. Even more funny is fact that having only around 25% of original content copied into our curated one, still may cause the same damage.

I remember when @built (I think) was traffic leaking his website with curated/copied content. And EMP was one of not many to tell him that it's not the best way to go :smile: Copying someone else is always just a short term solution :D

They have to create their own intrigues etc. to make people bite and get Google love. I know, Built wasn't after Google traffic, but who knows... Maybe social networks are working simultaneously with Google via "data partners"? Maybe it should all go hand in hand? (if we are talking long term business).

My thoughts are (and always were like this), original content is a base for anything else. Not only original, but most importantly interesting and engaging. If it's like that than one can go more tactical to squeeze some juice out of G and get away with it (and G will even kiss his ass for that :wink:
 
@Adrewkar I would disagree that it's for SEO reasons, but for the backlash clickbait has on social sites and YouTube putting a stance on no more clickbait headlines. I personally own and help manage other viral sites that use a marketing strategy like this and while organic traffic happened, it was never the leader (if we're thinking of the same kind of sites). A high amount of the organic traffic they do get is going to be brand related. For these guys SEO is more of an afterthought and their goal is just social and converting that.

Unlike journalism where they have to care about SEO to show up first quickly for whatever event someone is checking out on search. I'll be the first person to say that just reposting other people's shit does work well in SEO too, autoblogging never died people just got better at it and changed the name.
 
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Andrewkar said:
I remember when @built (I think) was traffic leaking his website with curated/copied content. And EMP was one of not many to tell him that it's not the best way to go :smile: Copying someone else is always just a short term solution :D
Click to expand...

This is wrong, curated content brings in links. If you going to just copy paste then its not going to work, but what I was doing is copy and then improve upon it. Or write my own articles. For example, I'd see "10 ways to do x" I'd copy, then write "30 ways to do x" Its mainly about trying to create a brand, so you need to add your own "flavour" to everything.

Thats how to do it IMO.
 
A good headline is clickbait and makes the audience want to click. If nobody wants to click their headlines they'll fail. That's the whole point of marketing.

The only part of the article that said they were abandoning clickbait was the title. How ironic.

The article doesn't say they won't write clickable headlines but that they are moving away from curation.

You can get Google traffic with curated content because curated content doesn't have to be plagiarized. It just has to be re-reported and with a little bit of on page seo you'll get Google traffic if you're patient.
 
juliantrueflynn said:
@Adrewkar I would disagree that it's for SEO reasons, but for the backlash clickbait has on social sites and YouTube putting a stance on no more clickbait headlines. I personally own and help manage other viral sites that use a marketing strategy like this and while organic traffic happened, it was never the leader (if we're thinking of the same kind of sites). A high amount of the organic traffic they do get is going to be brand related. For these guys SEO is more of an afterthought and their goal is just social and converting that.

Unlike journalism where they have to care about SEO to show up first quickly for whatever event someone is checking out on search. I'll be the first person to say that just reposting other people's shit does work well in SEO too, autoblogging never died people just got better at it and changed the name.
Click to expand...
That's some good points. You are right, the sites I have seen losing traffic are not viral sites, these are ecommerce mostly (but not only). I thought that organic traffic is a large part of viral sites also, but to be honest never got into those kind of sites.

As for reposting, I know it works but only with some adjustments to content curated, good content and adequate domain authority. The sites that were kicked were simply copying and publishing content from others, just pieces of content while the rest was fine. They got kicked anyway. Another thing, not every niche is equal so it depends...
 
built said:
This is wrong, curated content brings in links. If you going to just copy paste then its not going to work, but what I was doing is copy and then improve upon it. Or write my own articles. For example, I'd see "10 ways to do x" I'd copy, then write "30 ways to do x" Its mainly about trying to create a brand, so you need to add your own "flavour" to everything.

Thats how to do it IMO.
Click to expand...
Agreed. I thought you were incorporating pieces of content into your own articles without any change. That probably works to some degree also, but ratio of original and curated must be right. As I have said, some sites took a dive with only 25% of curated content that wasn't changed at all. That's quite interesting...
 
Andrewkar said:
As for reposting, I know it works but only with some adjustments to content curated, good content and adequate domain authority. The sites that were kicked were simply copying and publishing content from others, just pieces of content while the rest was fine. They got kicked anyway. Another thing, not every niche is equal so it depends...
Click to expand...
Again, I disagree here. A big part of my SEO strategy is 100% duplicate content without even an attempt to spin/curate a thing, and Google doesn't hate it. A lot of that duplicate content drama was more for reposting the same stuff on your site and (like same article) or targeting the same kw repetitively which (ex. having 150 articles going after the same kw phrase) is a big no-no with SEO.

This strategy isn't just on old authoritative sites either I do it on new ones as well.
 
juliantrueflynn said:
Again, I disagree here. A big part of my SEO strategy is 100% duplicate content without even an attempt to spin/curate a thing, and Google doesn't hate it. A lot of that duplicate content drama was more for reposting the same stuff on your site and (like same article) or targeting the same kw repetitively which (ex. having 150 articles going after the same kw phrase) is a big no-no with SEO.

This strategy isn't just on old authoritative sites either I do it on new ones as well.
Click to expand...

I can confirm that I also do this... I couldn't tell you the exact ratio but if I was to take a rough guess I'd say 40% is pure duplicate content, 10% is duplicate with some minor edits and 50% is unique. There's no reason for this other than I'd rather publish something than nothing, ideally I'd go with 100% unique and I'm in the process of going back through the duplicate stuff and gradually making it more unique... All of the duplicate stuff gets unique headlines / permalinks though, not sure if this helps, probably not - I'm just making it more 'clickable'.

In the meantime though the wheels keep turning and Google hasn't even given me a warning.
 
juliantrueflynn said:
Again, I disagree here. A big part of my SEO strategy is 100% duplicate content without even an attempt to spin/curate a thing, and Google doesn't hate it. A lot of that duplicate content drama was more for reposting the same stuff on your site and (like same article) or targeting the same kw repetitively which (ex. having 150 articles going after the same kw phrase) is a big no-no with SEO.

This strategy isn't just on old authoritative sites either I do it on new ones as well.
Click to expand...
Sure I get that. Personally, I would never go that way again. Obviously I don't know details of your sites etc. but to me it's a short term strategy at best.I have seen already kicks becosue of that kind of content ,and it is not a way to go.
 
Andrewkar said:
Obviously I don't know details of your sites etc. but to me it's a short term strategy at best.I have seen already kicks becosue of that kind of content ,and it is not a way to go.
Click to expand...
I agree with you on where you're coming from on this, but majority of people just suck, they won't even choose a target demographic. That aside it just comes down to if you make more than your total investment (in thsi case: time + money), and that goes for any decisions really.

Let's say you do a network and after awhile Google wipes out a lot of them with an update. I would say it's worth it if you got email subscriptions, all the traffic/promotion, and enough sales initially or at least overtime from the user list you built. There's absolutely ways to structure this so you're not ruining your main project's SEO efforts from linking them together, and that's back to my main point, people just suck. They don't research this before investing in the strategy and don't think long-term on how to structure everything.

It's not like you can't still leverage the autoblogs that were wiped out by an SEO update either. There's a lot of options there.
 
Sure, if we talk about all the other stuff (all but pure SEO) than blogs like that can be helpful, to people who know how to use them (get subscribers, traffic etc.).
 
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