SEOs Say AOL’s Love.com Feels More Like A One-Night Stand

Apr 27, 2009 at 2:22pm ET by Matt McGee

AOL recently soft-launched Love.com, which it advertises as a collection of “topic blogs” that “provide a central view into what the world is loving now.”

But it’s really an SEO play. Give the site any subdomain under the sun, and Love.com will make a new site on-the-fly with content scraped from news sites, blogs, YouTube videos, Twitter messages and more. Like this:

Everybody loves cold sores, right?

Well, not everybody loves Love.com. Says Dave Naylor:

“Approximately 1 bazillion keyword specific subdomains filled with scraped content and ads? Are AOL so desperate that they’re resorting to five year old spamming tricks?”

Aaron Wall shifts some of the blame to Google and Eric Schmidt’s recent statements about brands being the way to clean up the Internet “cesspool”:

“Google’s original strategy with the authority-centric algorithm was a false belief that the emphasis on authority would make the web a deeper and richer experience. New content would need to be better than older established content to outrank it. But as media companies face sharp losses Google is quickly finding out that their authority emphasis is creating a shallower web, where most of the big networks have 2 primary roles: create garbage and recycle garbage.”

Aaron also points out on Twitter that Love.com has more than 100,000 pages in Google’s index and is offering a free month of SEO training to whomever guesses how long it’ll stay above 100k.

For now, Love.com has 350,000 of these “topic blogs” and gets 100,000 unique visitors a week, according to TechCrunch. TC also says a full launch of Love.com is coming later this year.

Matt McGee is the Search Engine Land Assignment Editor, and offers search marketing consulting and training to businesses of all sizes. He blogs at Small Business Search Marketing and HyperlocalBlogger.com.

See more articles by Matt McGee >

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