"Database sites" - people are still basically getting away with it (and earning a mint)?

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The "mugshot site" thread round here reminded me of this: I notice although they are less prevalent in the SERPS these days (Panda knocked a lot of them out), so-called "database sites" are still very common, and there must be people making a killing with these.

What is a database site? It is basically where you leverage a massive dataset that you have got, scraped, downloaded from somewhere (they can be bought on certain IM forums), like a list of all the cities of the world, or a list of all the world's hotels, to basically generate a database-driven site which doesn't really provide that much in terms of extra value or functionality but has a huge number of pages.

For example, the cities sites typically create a page for each city, add a Google map, add a weather forecast for the city, latitude and longitude information and, er, that's about it. And in the absence of any other content to rank for "Crmničko Polje, Montenegro", these kinds of pages are still ranking, and probably cumulatively (these sites can have MILLIONS of pages) bringing in a great deal of traffic.

So come on, come clean you people, who is doing this, and are you or are you not banking all the way to the Seychelles with it? And also how are you getting away with putting Adsense on these sites which are basically thinner than a wet piece of tissue paper?
#“database #basically #people #sites”
  • Profile picture of the author PhilipSEO
    I know some people doing exactly this, and they are not doing great. (One of them is a veteran Yahoo programmer, to give you an idea of their caliber.) Google treats such sites as "directories" and it has recently demoted most of them.

    Such site may add value, the DB may be valuable, but they are essnetially competing with Google itself, provide information that Google itself wants to provide directly. It wants to be THE Web directory, so people search directly on Google without having to go to other sites. So you can see the logic.

    What Google does like is a manually edited site with inclusions decided on by humans, and uniquely written text content on all important pages (something that automated directory sites with their millions of pages don't have).

    So, my 2 cents is, it's not worth it (unless your DB is unique and valuable and can provide information no one else has).
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    • Profile picture of the author webby0031
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      • Profile picture of the author PhilipSEO
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        • Profile picture of the author paulgl
          You can put adsense on "thin" sites. That part has nothing to
          do with it. Google itself is a database site, as is yahoo,
          gasbuddy, kayak, amazon, the weather channel, etc.

          Paul
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          If you were disappointed in your results today, lower your standards tomorrow.

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          • Profile picture of the author PhilipSEO
            Originally Posted by paulgl View Post

            You can put adsense on "thin" sites. That part has nothing to
            do with it. Google itself is a database site, as is yahoo,
            gasbuddy, kayak, amazon, the weather channel, etc.

            Paul
            PERSONAL adsense. At any rate, the guy that I know was denied a business adsense account, and his site is not worse than others like it.

            Good to see you here again Paul, I was away for a while.
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  • Profile picture of the author linkbuildr
    I have a site like this and we had to add a lot of value to the pages via social media content mashed up.

    It does well and that's all I'll say....add a lot of value and hope real users start interacting with the pages.
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  • Profile picture of the author brettb
    My forum finding site has lots of duplicate data from elsewhere. But I've added value by allowing you to search for particular forums, and I've written algorithms to find related forums. So I guess I've added enough value to be worthwhile.

    Plus I now have an enormous database of niche data, and I'm finding all kinds of niches where it's easy to rank for.
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