Blurring the lines between spam and niche targeting

So I’m looking to generate content sites with custom-written news in key verticals. I’m looking at “businessdaily.com” as a potential domain name for the general business vertical.

The domain is registered, so I visit it to see if it’s for sale - and stumble into the biggest niche targeted networks I’ve ever seen.

Run by World News Network, the basics are simple - set up a website, then run a news aggregator on it, publishing links to news items from media sites. Archive each day as a page.

The clever part is that they’ve set up a multi-tiered approach to targeting - general category verticals lead to smaller niche verticals, which split into even more niche vertical, which leads to even narrower keyword verticals. And then do it again at another level.

Let’s explore, shall we?

• Start at www.wn.com
• Look for the “Regional” section on the left, then click on WN Middle East.
• Now you’re in a general Middle East vertical. But - wait - what’s that at the bottom of the page? Yes, links to 56 other domains doing the same thing - but in different niche verticals within the Middle East vertical.
• Let’s click on one - scroll down the page to the “Cities” list of graphics, and click on the first - Dubai Times.
• That’s the end of the niche marketing? Not a chance - there are 11 aggregator websites simply for different keywords based around niche keyword “Dubai”.

The size of the network is staggering - visit the WN Sitemap and you find yourself with a list of 3,941 different domains, with little else than an aggregator script behind each.

Machine generated sites, one and all, all built to do one thing - exploit a comprehensive set of keyword niches for news and current affairs searches.

Simply stating the above, and we’re obviously looking at a spam network - albeit, a very well executed one. Matt Cutts has stated before that he doesn’t like machine-generated sites.

BUT…when we look at the network, it’s so well presented that most users would only think it’s useful human-user focused content.

After all, compare their pages to other syndication services such as Yahoo! news, and the basics are little different - it’s syndicated news content all the way.

And because there are so many niche verticals, you can see human users actually getting real benefit from bookmarking the vertical that works best for themselves, and using them as their guide to news stories on that topic.

The network is obviously old and well-established - and with domains under its belt such as oil.com, cartoons.com, broadcasting.com, astronomer.com, and pollution.com, this is obivously a heavy-hitting advertising infrastructure.

The question is - is this search engine spam, or is it simply niche targeting? Where do the lines get drawn in this instance?

Obviously, in some ways it’s spam - machine generated syndicated content, all set up on keyword domains? Spam!

BUT before you jump into condemning it as so, let’s remind ourselves that setting up aggregators based on keywords, then selling ads on them, is a methodology more than familiar to search engines. It’s their own.

The difference is simply that rather than a single point of entry, all the different keywords targeted for are spread over a multitude of domains.

Contentions aside, I’m not interested in making a judgement - the set-up challenges the boundaries of spam vs human user content. I imagine that it’s useful for some people and not for others.

I can only stand back and admire the way in which such an infrastructure has been build.