All your base are belonging to Google Base

So this weekend I have been completing the user sign in functionality for my cocktail making website. Am not too nervous before adding it since it is stuff I would want and I will use so I hope other people will enjoy it too but if not, I'll use it :) so it's worth it. In the process of making all the current revisions traffic has been growing to the site esp. through natural search from Google. I have made some tweaks in the interlinking of the pages in particularly to make the site more palatable to google and I have more to come.

I have been monitoring the SEO results for key terms for my site such as "cocktail recipes". The results have really frustrated me, a competitor has uploaded 10k cocktail recipes to google base and as such google has added a cocktail search box to the top of the search results page for anyone who searches for the keyword cocktail recipe or cocktail recipes so they can dig into the cocktail recipes in Google Base. This is leading to an escalation, to retain traffic I am going to have to start adding content to Google base. I don't blame my competitor, he's got a short term boost in his share of cocktail related traffic and if he hadn't done it someone else would but where does this end?

As a publisher I want traffic from google badly and to get that traffic it looks like I am going to have to gift them some content... in fact not just some content but all the content I have taken 5yrs to get hold of through kind additions by my users. At what stage will google say thanks for the content, give me an attribution and then not refer the users to my site 100% of the time (as they do now)? If I were google that's where I would be going since webmasters are always going to need the traffic google can send (even if it's a % of what it is today something is better than nothing) and so will be incentivized to put content into base and google can monetize more effectively by just taking the base content and attaching ads to your hard work without giving you a share.

Then you come to Yahoo! who I prefer since at least they are asking users directly to give them answers and they aren't asking webmasters to give away their hard work. At some stage Yahoo! will have a huge list of answers to most of the big questions being asked and then why should anyone ever leave Yahoo? Of course microsoft has their own Base type product on the roadmap at the moment too. In all of this I see a threat to the small content publisher like me... although I am confident that I can stay ahead of the big boy's search technology and user features in my specific area, I cannot continue to rely on search (in 2-5yrs time) as the main driver of users to my site... I need word of mouth, I need links, I need gorilla and viral marketing but am I moving too late?

Should the search engines be competing with every niche webmaster at the same time for content while being their lifeblood for traffic? Right now I simply don't know but I'll tell you what I am scared they will kill my little sites with their own content within the next few years.

Comments

[valnur]

We are in a similar market as Google Base but our product gives structure (while still not imposing any set of predefined categories) to our index and therefore makes it possible for users to not only perform keyword search but also browse hierarchically with the ability to specify unlimited number of filters to refine their search.

Valnur
http://www.valnur.com

[Keith Mander]

Interesting view. Google's success is bourne through not creating content but rather pointing the user to the right place as quickly as possible. I can't see that formula changing, so would encourage webmasters to aid such efforts rather than be concerned about them competing to provide content.

(this is my opinion, and not that of my employer ;)