What to do about paddling niche websites…
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I’ve devoted much of my life to paddling. Started when I was a kid, guided sea kayaking, had a sea kayak guiding business, sold paddlesports equipment at the retail level, was an ACA L4 Open Water Coastal Kayaking Instructor, been a columnist for print paddling magazines, published my photos in a canoe load of magazines and calendars, and have been blogging on this website for over 15 years (it used to be called Nesmuking). During my time blogging, I’ve witnessed the death of great paddling websites and blogs and the rise of crappy affiliate marketing niche websites. And crappy niche sites are getting top results in searches and giving people bad advice.
If you’ve never heard of a niche website here’s the primer. These websites are built by internet affiliate marketers and designed to get Google traffic. Once they get enough traffic, they generate revenue through affiliate links. Most of the time, the information they provide is thin and if the marketers have any paddling experience it’s minimal. PaddlingLight does use affiliate links to make money, but the website isn’t designed like a niche site specifically to make money, otherwise I’d be writing articles with titles like “Best Kayaking Accessories” and “Best Kayak Anchors” or other simple titles based on what people search for. This article would never be on an affiliate marketing niche site because it would dilute the marketing potential.
The problem isn’t that people want to make money. The problem is that people want to make money using paddling as a topic when they know little or nothing about paddling. The stuff they write is terrible and sometimes deadly and mostly wrong. Take this as an example of how bad the writing can be:
The stroke depends on multiple factors. Your strength is one of them, but the blade construction and design are just as important.
This model comes with asymmetrical blades. They are high angle, so they’ll provide a solid stroke. They measure 18 inches in length and just over 7 inches in width.
Moreover, the blades are slightly spooned, so you have to hold the paddle accordingly.
Basically, the writer is just throwing in terms like “high angle” and “spooned” and “stroke.” It’s obvious to anyone who has experience with learning or teaching strokes that blade construction and design have nothing to do with how good your stroke is. Blade style and design might have something to do with what type of stroke you use. A high-angle blade has nothing to do with how solid a stroke is and you don’t have to paddle any differently with a spooned blade than you would with a flat blade. It’s complete gibberish. But, if you are a beginner, it might sound authentic. Even if it doesn’t sound good to a beginner, it gamed Google and got the beginner to click. If that beginner clicks any of the links and buys something, the crappy website made money. All they have to do is get on the front page of Google and they win.
PaddlingLight gets pinged by these websites often. We’re also get lots of comments with links back to these niche websites and we’re getting lots of requests from internet marketers to write paid articles for PaddlingLight. The key to affiliate marketers is to get links back to their websites, and because PaddlingLight has been on the internet for a long time and has lots of links back to it, Google views it an important. These niche sites want PaddlingLight to link back to them, because then Google will look at them as more important. On volume of requests, this website could pull in $500 to $1000 a month in paid posts if I wanted to lower the quality of this website. I could write more niche-style articles and boost the income significantly as well. Back when I was trying to make more money from the website, we were on pace to bring in $30,000 a year. But, I’m more concerned about quality and don’t have the time lately to build quality articles about gear to compete with the niche websites.
I could start trying to counter these niche sites by writing more articles targeting searches, but I also don’t want long-time readers to get turned off and sometimes on good searches I wouldn’t have much to say. For example on kayak deck bags, I could write an article called “Best Kayak Deck Bags.” That would be a good article as far as searches. Here’s what it would look like if I wrote it:
Kayak deck bags suck! Don’t buy one. They get in the way. In waves, they throw water into your face. During rescues, whatever is in them gets smashed. Seriously, why do you need to carry that much stuff? Just put a map and spare paddle on your front deck and call it good.
And then I’d be like, go buy NRS’s Taj M’Haul Deck Bag if you want one. It’s sweet cause it’s name is “M’Haul” and your high-angle stroke depends on it. Seriously, if I was going to clutter my deck it would be with Watershed’s Aleutian Deck Bag.
I sort of feel like PaddlingLight has an obligation to the paddling community to fight these niche sites by providing real info while targeting the titles they use. I used to write for content farms, so I know how to do the SEO targeting that would work to get ranked above them on Google.
What do you think? Should I go full-on anti-niche website by targeting the titles in an attempt to get real information out to people searching for information and getting only crappy affiliate marketing niche websites? What are your thoughts?
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13 Comments
Dan Faust
Brian, you asked for our thoughts, so here’s mine. Niche websites and affiliate links are NOT the problem. The whole thing with Google and rankings and links back to a website; it just a big game. There’s money to be made of you can play the game well. I really can’t find fault with people who have the knowledge and skill to play the game well and make some money, even if they don’t know much about paddling. I can’t really blame Google either. They do their job really well.
In my opinion, the problem lies within the Paddlesports community/industry. If there were more people/businesses with the knowledge and skills to play the game well while providing good information based on actual knowledge, skills, and experience, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. In short, the problem isn’t crappy websites giving out bad information ( although, that’s never good ), the problem is the lack of good websites giving out excellent information and playing the game better than the crappy websites. It makes me a bit sad that Paddlesports in general isn’t doing a better job of getting good information out there and doing what needs to be done to win the search engine games.
I’ve been reading your blog for a long time. I respect your Paddlesports knowledge and experience. Bad writing, crappy articles, people just in it for the money; these things are always going to happen. There’s really nothing that anyone can do about that. It’s easy to complain about the situation. It’s not so easy to do something about it. What you can do is to keep on writing the best articles possible and producing a blog/website that you are proud of and that provides good information. If you want to compete with the crappy niche sites and beat them at their own game, I say go for it. If not, that’s fine too. Either way, just continue to do the best job you can possibly do and all the rest of this stuff will sort itself out.
Bryan Hansel
I mostly agree with you, except I think Google has a problem. It’s getting gamed in all industries by these niche sites to the point where many searches are completely worthless now. Sometime, I don’t bother searching because I know the results will suck. They’ve tried to fix the problem in the past.
I find it interesting that the falloff of good websites and blogs happened as paddling conversations moved off individual websites and onto Facebook. There used to be great bloggers that I know are still hardcore paddlers, but as comments disappeared on blogs, the blogs died off.
Chrisitne DeMerchant
I was interested in your article and read all of it! You’ve nailed it.
I have a somewhat rambling website mainly about boat building, but I sail and kayak and throw in the odd page about this. Most of my pages come from notes I take while researching topics that interest me or describing projects I have undertaken.
Lately I’ve been running into these “niche” sites. I did not know what they were called, but they are annoying, repetitive and don’t present any useful information. Many of them quote Wikipedia with great authority, and the same phrases appear with annoying regularity. I’m starting to recognize and avoid “the 7 best _ _ _ _ _ _ ” type of article. Avoiding any article that sports such a title might be the answer, recognize it as simply click bait. Worse still I’ve increasingly seen promising links that bring you to an unrelated commercial site with not even a poorly written article to support it. I hope it’s not a new trend.
Another trend that I don’t really understand but I expect is related is the increasingly large number of people who contact me and offer to write articles for free, in exchange for links. Many have foreign emails, am I seeding “click bait writing farms” from India?” I am also seeing an increase in odd websites linking to my site, I presume as an effort to legitimize a dodgy site. A writer should not have to give away their stories for free, what gives?
These niche sites hurt my website. I’ve seen an increase in hot linking to my photos and an unexplained reduction in traffic to some of my useful and more popular articles.
I include Amazon links because I need to pay for my website, but the ads have never been the reason for the website.
Lately I’ve registered for an online course thinking I would get information on Search Engine Optimization and pointers on writing better articles but what it turned out to be, was a “How To” on building a Niche Site and profiting from it.
This situation puts legitimate websites such as mine and Paddling Light in a difficult position. In order to maintain search position, we must conform to Google’s SEO preferences or loose readership. I’d rather be paddling and writing about that rather than having to worry about all the junk out there. Harrumpth I say!
Christine DeMerchant
Randy Echtinaw
I am a new kayaker along with my wife, we just built our Guillemont’s this winter. We don’t know what we don’t know and don’t know what questions to ask. Getting trustworthy advice and product reviews would be priceless to us. My answer is your statement below – –
” go full-on anti-niche website by targeting the titles in an attempt to get real information out to people searching for information – – – ”
Thank you,
Randy and Jane
Bryan Hansel
Make sure you check out past articles on this website. There’s a series on packing kayaks, accessories and safety gear, etc…
Tommy Cheshire
I absolutely trust your ideas and reviews and comments of products that you have either used or have seen in action. Please do not do anything which changes this output. I love your email offering. Thank you for your time and efforts.
Tommy
Charlotte, NC
Bryan Hansel
There would still be good info, but it would be more targeted to search terms that beginners are looking for. For example, “Best Kayak Pumps” might be an article. Would that be too much of a change?
Trevor Paetkau
Good morning Bryan,
Interesting … I’ve read in a number of places recently that Google rewards good content and downgrades duplicate content. It would appear that the algorithms struggle to define either.
Our experience is a bit different. Over the previous 12 months we’ve watched our traffic increase by approximately 50% along with an increase in our conversion rate indicating that the quality of the traffic has also gotten better. At the same time, visitors viewing our content on mobile devices are less engaged, but make up an increasing amount of percentage of those who find us. So in some ways good, and in some ways bad.
These changes coincided with a move to a new service provider, a complete site restructure, and a rebuild on an https (secure) platform. The good news is that sales are up threefold. Causative? Correlative?
Regardless, our provider has suggested that even more technical changes will be required if we want to keep up (structured data, mobile first pages, virtual servers etc etc … ). My guess is that some of this sites with cheap content are built over fairly sophisticated back-ends of the sort that the search engines like.
Apart from technical considerations, content is obviously an important part of the algorithms … I’d like to think we provide good plans and tools and that’s the reason we show up in the top results for “canoe-plans” for instance … and I rarely see the fly-by-night plans providers show up in searches relevant to our business, but that could be because it is 100% differentiated. It would be extremely discouraging to see our revenues being siphoned off by sites scraping content from elsewhere on the internet. So far we’re not …
That said, if we were linking to affiliate products it may very well be different. It would be an interesting experiment to write similar articles with different out-linking strategies (similar pages with links/no-links – affiliate links/no-affiliate links?)
And your case, Christine (thank you for sharing btw), I wonder if Google isn’t giving less priority to sites that aggregate links, and prioritize the sites that they might be linking to. For instance, it wasn’t uncommon for us to get in excess of 100 visitors a month from you to our paddle page and now we get almost none. Even so, traffic and conversions have increased. In that respect, I’d rather have Google send visitors directly to me, than through a third party … and I suppose you could make the argument that Google would rather be the “aggregator” of choice,
Finally, I would observe that our more generic pages (of the “How-To” variety let’s say) sit much lower in the search results. The truth is, there is very little original left to say. In these cases, it seems like Google will prioritize pages that have high authority, good content, and have been around for a long time. Whilst the “Best 7 …. ” type of sites show up, they often rise and then fall quickly but the oldies and goodies always show up in the top 10.
Bryan Hansel
As far as this website, I haven’t noticed a drop in traffic, etc… It’s doing it’s normal seasonal rise, and traffic is normal, ad revenue is up, etc…
I’m noticing more niche websites on all searches though. Today, I had to search for something unrelated to paddling and ended up getting results filled with about 70% niche sites, one long-time authoritative (although not without its problems) website and no links from universities, which I would have expected. For fun, I click some of the websites that came up and the info was terrible, poorly written and in every case outdated.
Here’s a paragraph from a website that is ranking highly in many kayak-related searches:
If this happens, a bilge pump isn’t going to do anything to help you and it was an article about pumps. Then it lists electric pumps. Never once does the page mention a capsize or a spray skirt to keep waves out of a cockpit and it basically implies that a damaged hull or waves or drips from your paddle are the reasons why you want a pump. The primary reason is a capsize and it doesn’t even mention that. BTW, PaddlingLight ranks 15 on average for this search and there isn’t a specific page targeting it.
My thoughts are to target that search term and others that show terrible results and get real info out there.
Don Stewart
Hey Brian Love your site, it’s one of the best sites I visit to get a real opinion about outdoor products and trips.
Giving your views about other articles once in a while shouldn’t be a problem but I’d suggest you just keep on doin it the way you have been.
I understand ya gotta make a buck so sponsors are necessary as long as it’s divulged.
Happy Paddling!
Don.
P.S. Come to Canada more eh.
Paulo Ouellet
Could you have a separate segment for the anti crappy information site? That way you keep the same style for those who value your articles as they are.
You could have an affiliate link in case you still want to buy the deck bag, but you could also say save your money and spend it on something like this, and suggest something better. It could become the place to go to save yourself from wasting you money.
The bigger question I would ask is would this be worth your time. How many people would benefit from this, and how valuable would it be for them? I would say focus on where you are adding the most value.
Paulo
Bryan Hansel
I could probably separate it out. The quality and style would be similar to what people expect from the site.
As far as would it be worth my time? That’s a tough question, because I’ve always viewed this website as a place to get out good info. If it does that, it would be. But, that said, I have a hard time finding time to write for Ocean Paddler and do all my other projects. This would be another on the list.
Dan Faust
Looking at this article again and reading the other replies, I noticed that you have a photo of Jerry Vandiver paddling a Northstar Canoe in the header. Nice! The only thing better is listening to Jerry’s music.