Projects:Common Answers

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(Ray, Ward, Chris, Julia, Blake, Asad Butt, Obed Suhail, Tanwir Shah, Asma Khan, Salihawaqar,User:Mariaw)

Why are we doing this?

We want to be a visible search result for all search terms.

Done When

Never: this will be an ongoing focus of content creation. From another perspective, we could be done when there are pages for the top AboutUs searches and the top Google searches as well as all of our categories with 10-100 articles.

Tasks

Description

Common Answers is designed to organize our content efforts under one uniform directive. The idea is to refine our content creation to both 1) meet demand for information (as it is perceived on the web and on our site, respectively), and 2) leverage the domain directory resource we've already built (mostly). In either case, the

The project centers on these two areas in the follow respects:


Common Search Terms - derived from 1) top search terms on our site, and 2) top search terms on the web (from SearchEngineGuide.com).

  • Use: focuses our content creation to align with demand

Useful Categories - derived from list of categories containing 10-100 articles

  • Use: leverages the unique category information we have on the long tail


These two resources will coalesce into the overall CommonAnswersQueue which will then be organized into tasks in our bi-monthly schema.

General Strategy

  • Generate CommonAnswersQueue; update on bi-monthly schedule.
    • Track frequent questions (searches) on AboutUs and the web (through SearchEngineGuide.com)
    • Compile a separate list from categories with 10-100 articles.
  • Create content for search terms in the queue.
  • Track how our content efforts effect the rankings of individual pages in google and other search engines.

Tools/questions that will help in doing this project

Concerns / Discussion

Redundancy in CommonAnswersQueue

How to eliminate redundancy and work already done. We will need a bot for this later that will check to see if an article is present (# of bites combined with # of edits?).

  • Why should pages not be edited if they have been in the past? It seems like if it's a hot topic there's something to be written about it.
    • In my opinion, the idea would be to eliminate multiple workings on a page by AboutUsStaff. The work wouldn't necessarily be redundant, but it wouldn't maximize this effort. You're point is well taken though - if demand remains high, perhaps we should take another look at a page. I think our tracking system here will help as it will allow us to connect the work we do with the visibility it creates. If we're already ranking high, we may not need to spend extra resources making us rank higher when we don't appear for many other terms. This perspective belies an underlying attitude on my part - that it is more important to have a large number of 'touched' pages given our size than it is to have a small amount of extremely good pages.

New Name for Project

We should rethink the name common answers and come up with something more obvious and catchy.

  • I'm definitely open to this, since the name only seems to apply to the top search terms side of the list. All of the 'answers' we provide on category pages with 10-100 articles seem outside of this box. Suggestions? ChrisBabson

Top Search Terms Discussion

After looking through the top 500 search engine keywords of the week, the results are mainly

  • Popular Websites: myspace, youtube, yahoo, and ebay in all their spelling variations
  • Popular Culture: names of models, actresses, and artists with the occasional song
  • Service-related searches such as maps, e-cards, game cheats, etc.

It would be very difficult to compete with service-related searches because those pages are very specialized: people are not going to come to AboutUs to send an ecard or look up song-lyrics. We could provide a directory of good ecard and song-lyrics pages, but these don't seem to be at the top of Google's search-results. The portals are also hard to crack because the first 5 pages of search results for Yahoo are all Yahoo pages, same for MSN.

In the big companies and the websites, we could create amazing pages about the company. Wikipedia is a top entry for Ebay, YouTube, Mapquest, and Craigslist (4/12 top searches). Part of working our way up google's results is continually updating the page so it appears fresh and adding additional content. It would take a decent amount of work.
The other possibility is less noble, but could be lucrative. We could create pop culture portals dedicated to the likes of Britney Spears (27th most popular search), Emma Watson (30th), Lindsay Lohan (9th), Paris Hilton (19th), Jessica Biel (35th). It would certainly be a departure from our more family-friendly portals like Health and Fitness, but it could steer some traffic our way. The advantage of pop-culture portals is that our competition isn't as tough as cracking the front page for Yahoo or MSN. The disadvantage is that pop culture is dynamic by nature so we can assume Paris and Lohan will not be sitting on top of web-traffic once the scandals die down. However, Paris is never far from headlines and even without a scandal these celebs generate a decent amount of traffic.

Its a brilliant idea to generate traffic and after filtering the searches we can focus on the query requirement, compelling the users to a path where they can find their exact information. We can also create portals related to:

  • 'top rated movies' of Hollywood
  • Current News, by relating to popular news sites
  • Business Updates
  • News about Latest Electronic Devices, as now a days people are interested in inquiring about getting new models of mobiles or other electronic stuff.

We may put some funny stuff, some glowing colorful stuff, which in turns interests the user, on answering page which is being created for the query.User:Asma Khan

I think we need to focus content creation on building a different type of resource. I agree that it would be a mistake to compete directly in areas where other sites are clearly established, but we can compete as an overall information provider. This figures into the new style and format ideas for article creation. The process should be viewed less as a wikipedia-esque writing procedure, and rather as a combination of this and Mahalo, Yahoo, or Google search results. Our articles represent human organized information on a given search term, and in doing so will reference all of these other resources. Still, we will need to have good pages on top search terms to be taken seriously, so I'm not sure how much this changes the queue itself. Also, do note that at the opposite end of things we have part of the queue generated from AboutUs categories with 10-100 articles in them. This information is necessarily long tail and unique, and will provide a good counter balance to the top search terms component. In some ways, this latter element should be our focus. The only problem is there are too many categories like this! The long tail is almost too big to make a sensible and non-arbitrary queue. We will have to determine the value of a given article to the company and adjust our content work accordingly. See the section below on 'Balancing Content Effort With Ultimate Value' for more on this. ChrisBabson

Balancing Content Effort with Ultimate Value

The problem here is twofold and has been mentioned above: for top search terms there are many other good resources, and for our category-derived terms the value of article creation may not outweigh its cost. We need a way to determine the value of having an article to the company, and then calibrate the time someone should spend on it accordingly.

Sorting Through the List of Categories with 10-100 articles

This list will be long; very long. Perhaps we could sort this based on the popularity of the given keyword.

Other Possible Sources for the Queue


Meeting Results

Scott and Tak: The Plan

First step is to onboard people in Pakistan and train them to build out basic wiki pages. We will populate the list of basic wiki pages to build by examining the list of common searches (dev card). Pop culture and game portals will be built after we have a larger trained staff. We also brought up the role of page-rank for Google's search-results and questioned if Google looks at how many people have edited a page.

Tak points out that we could be a decent portal for service related searches (eg. e-cards, online games, etc.), by linking to valuable, popular websites.

Scott, Chris, Ray, Ward

We should avoid creating a redundant resource and/or competing in areas where other sites already are completely dominant. Scott/Chris think top search term work is necessary to have done. Ray thinks we should focus on categories with 10-100 articles. The group agreed that the latter is where our unique value will be, but that our strategy must be to cover both for the near future. At some point these two lists will meet.



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