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I’m asked about Compendium Blogware on a regular basis. The questions come from friends, associates, clients and prospective clients. They’ve all heard about Compendium and want to know my take. This is what I tell them…
First off, I am not eager to critique a local company, especially one that is doing well, which is why I have waited months to post this blog. But I feel I need to post my concerns in a public venue since others might benefit from it as well as Compendium since I think there is definitely a market for business blogging services and I think there are some fairly simple things they can do to fix the issues I identify. Also, I don’t think it’s fair to Compendium to not give them a forum to respond to my feedback and I hope they do on their own blog or using the comments below.
What is Compendium? They are an Indianapolis company founded by Chris Baggott, of Exact Target fame. Their service is providing customized business blogs on their proprietary blogging platform. The primary “twist” that gives them an advantage over free services like Blogger and WordPress is that they provide keyword research and create “compended” URLs based around targeted keyword phrases. Here’s a couple examples from a blog for Monon Coffee here in Broad Ripple (great place btw!)
http://mononcoffee.compendiumblog.com/blog/broad-ripple-cafe
http://mononcoffee.compendiumblog.com/blog/broad-ripple-coffee-shop
See how the content is almost the same but the URLs are different. They are set up to show up as different pages in Google and target their respective searches- “Broad Ripple Cafe” and “Broad Ripple Coffee Shop“. And they do show up right at the top of their respective searches.
So what’s wrong with that? Well the real problem is that Google doesn’t like intentional duplicate content meant to manipulate search results and this is exactly what Compendium’s software does. It “compends” the same blog (content) under different static, keyword rich URLs as I demonstrated above.
Right now Compendium is essentially gaming Google’s algorithm but it may not last forever. They run the real risk of Google changing their algorithm to punish the Compendium blogs essentially pushing them down in Google’s listings. Google tweaks their algorthim about 400 times a year, so every day they run the risk of being “tweaked”. Since many of Compendium clients are on sub-domains of compendiumblog.com this could mean a big loss of traffic for their clients from Google. Not good.
In my experience Google will eventually eliminate any inefficiencies from their algorithm as they become exploited. The more successful Compendium is, ironically, the more they are at risk. While I think what Compendium is doing is novel it is essentially a Grey Hat trick. They are gaming a system for clients and it’s pretty clear from my conversations with some of their clients that most of them do not realize the risk Compendium is taking on their behalf. Compendium, however, does not see this as a risk.
Another reason their clients’ blogs get indexed quickly for relevant searches probably has something to do with the fact that many of the blogs are all a sub-domain of compendiumblog.com- i.e. clientname.compendiumblog.com- which essentially gives the blog a big push into the search engine waters. This pro could easily become a con should that main URL get blacklisted by search engines for duplicate content.
Compendium will argue that their compended blog pages are actually the best result for the related search even if there is duplicate content on them. I would disagree. Who goes to Google to make two different searches to pull up two different pages to find the same content? That is not what I use Google for- I want new, different information when I modify my search. (note: Chris’ response below does address this concern satisfactorily in my opinion).
How can Compendium fix this problem? First off, stop duplicating content under static URLs. Secondly provide content writing services for clients so they have real, relevant, not duplicate, content under every static URL. There are already other companies popping up to provide this valuable service of interviewing clients and ghost writing their blogs (not this one!). Some clients will self motivate, some really need help, provide this help and charge for it. This is potentially a huge market, go after that along with making the Compendium platform SEO friendly in a very White Hat (no tricks) way.
(note: another idea I had after posting this blog was to have their software only allow blog content to be compended in 10-25% of the static category/keyword URLs).
Chris, Ali and their team at Compendium have done a fantastic job of identifying their market and promoting their platform. I am really impressed with their sales strategy. I’ve met Chris a couple times and he is a genuinely nice guy with good ideas. This is not personal in any way, in fact, I have avoided posting this blog since I have conflicted feelings about critiquing a local company. But my main concern is that their service may be putting their clients at risk and is potentially a house of cards built on an ever changing algorthim. Maybe they will get lucky but I wouldn’t bet on it.
About Duplicate Content- here is a link to a blog on Google Webmaster addressing this issue. Not all duplicate content is bad but if it appears “intentional” with the aim of manipulating search results then Google can punish the site for this. Another Webmaster blog addresses this issue and includes this quote- “In the rare cases in which we perceive that duplicate content may be shown with intent to manipulate our rankings and deceive our users, we’ll also make appropriate adjustments in the indexing and ranking of the sites involved.”
Jeb, love the blog. I often wondered about this myself. Chris has told me personally that he is good with Google. If so, I need that personal commitment or warranty from both Compendium Blogware and Google that they won’t kill their software. Imagine if you had spent a couple of years blogging and then bam! it was all blacklisted and gone from Googleland. I can’t afford that risk with my client. Blogging is a great tool and good for SEO but to take down your site because of it – not good.
thanks Don! I have no doubt that Chris is confident in not getting into trouble with Google but I just don’t share that confidence. Only time will tell.
Since those are “categories” seems as if they should have a URL taxonomy like domain.com/category/gaming-google-words/
and then add /category/ to the robot.txt
Are they wanting all those URLs to show up in Google as different listings? That’s sad.
My impression of Compendium is that *done right*, there may be a LITTLE overlapping content but not really a lot of duplicated content. Each compendium section should have it’s own content.
However, many clients take shortcuts and post to multiple sections. Done occasionally this is fine and most blogs post in multiple categories often, but if this is done consistently, the sections should definitely lose their SEO effectiveness.
Compendium, regardless of Chris’ Google relationships, enjoys no special treatment from Google. That’s a crazy notion.
One problem I’ve always had is that all the content gets credited to the ‘compendiumblog.com’ domain. Blogging adds lots of pages to your domain for google to index. This is a good thing. If I’m a business owner I want my website AND my blog to be loved by google. Having both on one domain gives you an edge.
I think it comes down to intent, Google is looking for intent. Is the blog, or software, intending to game the system? In the case of Compendium it is pretty explicit- creating static, keyword urls to target specific searches and compending the same content in different configurations under those urls. This is pretty clear intent to game the system.
I have no doubt they get no special treatment. I don’t think anyone does. It would destroy Google to do that.
Colin- that’s a great point. All these blogs should be focused on building the page rank and traffic of the company’s website not Compendium. I always thought that was a little weird too. If you are paying for this then it should be on your own url, building your own cred.
I think you’re overreacting a bit there Jed. Compendium is doing nothing different than any standard WordPress installation with an SEO plugin installed. It’s the exact same thing from an SEO perspective. (Compendium offers much more than WP…but solely from a technical SEO perspective it’s essentially the same).
From Compendium’s website, a major benefit of their product is:
Compendium Blogware is a Sofware-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution, meaning you won???t have to involve the IT department.
My feeling is that if you can’t get your IT department to spend five minutes to set up a blog on your corporate website, you may have bigger problems than not having a blog.
James- maybe, and I note that they might continue to get away with it. The WordPress SEO plug in could meet a similar fate if Google makes a tweak. Reality is that the intent here is to game the system, WordPress with SEO plug in or Compendium, that is what concerns me when I discuss this with my clients.
Jeb, thanks for the interesting post. As a business coach and consultant in Indianapolis, I root for local companies as well. However, I am not sure you’ve nailed the technicality here. Being unfamiliar with the Compendium back-end, its difficult for me to say exactly what is happening – but it appears to be one post that is associated to multiple categories. Not as you suggest multiple posting of the same content under different URLs. The original URL is linked at the title (which Google recognizes). It seems that it is more referenced than duplicated (much like feedburner). Additionally, your search result example (Monon Coffee) are not blog content but category titles – if you search phrases from within each post, that post appears on Google search results. Interested to hear your reponse, and your take on google’s appetite on blogs in general.
Tom- if you look at the two pages I linked to you will see that this is not a Feedburner thing where it is simply linking to the other posts or even feeding in part of a post. The software actually posts the entire blog entries on multiple static URLs. This is considerably different than RSS simply pulling in syndicated content. RSS is referencing and linking to other content, this is clearly duplicate content.
If you look at the keyword links (i.e. categories that aren’t really categories but targeted keyword URLs) you will see that the same blogs are on almost every page. This is a big no-no from everything I know about search engines.
@James – If I’m developing a site for a customer in wordpress I’m definitely going to implement SEO and XML Sitemap plugins. The thing to remember is that there’s a right way and a wrong way to set them up. You want to make sure that everything is indexed, but also that it’s only indexed once. It is definitely possible to achieve compendium-like results with these plugins. I guess whether you choose to go that route or not depends on whether you agree with Jeb.
As long as you are not abusing the SEO plug in I think you can get away with it. We’ve used it for clients successfully without being excessive. It becomes an issue when there is blatant abuse which is what I see on many Compendium blogs. This thread inspired me to write a more general blog about SEO and usability which is really at the heart of what I’m critiquing here. Compending content in the way Compendium does is not user friendly.
As I read the article and comments, there appeared to be a voice missing from the discussion — someone who has actually used Compendium.
I am that voice. MediaTile is a Compendium customer and we have enjoyed the experience thus far. As one of the commenters suggested, it might only take an IT department “5 minutes” to set up a blog. But not all companies have this luxury (or curse). As a company we provide an SaaS product so we have an appreciation for the hosted solution.
With Compendium, we know that we have someone looking after the nuts and bolts of our blog. I read horror stories all the time on Twitter about people trying to upgrade their WordPress or Typepad blog. I don’t have to worry about it. Compendium has provided us a reliable solution that’s extremely easy to use and professional looking. Plus, they provide fantastic webinars and tutorials to help customers make the most of the solution.
And with regards to SEO, I see Compendium as just giving us a boost. It’s up to the bloggers (or blogger in my case) and the content written. Ultimately, this is where success or failure will be determined. When my customers visit the blog, they don’t care who’s hosting it — just that it’s up and the content is fresh and relevant. I’m certainly not just relying on Compendium to make my blog a success.
Thanks for the open forum here to make our case Jeb. Lot's of ground to cover in all this and we do have a webinar next week which we encourage anyone with Compendium questions to join.
http://compendiumblogware.com/landingpages/blogs_best_search_marketing_tool_webinar_blogs.html
I'm going to start at the end…meaning the last comment:
"Compending content in the way Compendium does is not user friendly."
How would you measure this? We measure very closely bounce rates, read times and ultimately conversions. The presumption being that if a searcher lands on an "un-friendly" page you would see bounce rates in the 90%+ range, short read times and low conversions.
The realty is that we average across our hundreds of clients and millions of visitors bounce rates in the 60's with many companies experiencing <30% bounce rates. Our average read time is a little under 1.5 minutes and our average conversion is around 3% Lots of room for improvement, but compared to an average website of <2% according to WebTrends not bad…I presented a case this week in Phoenix with a client that had a 13% conversion on their blogs from organic traffic.
The fact is that organizing your content around the search terms your customers and prospects use is actually a good thing…it makes it easier for the searcher to find what they are looking for, and that makes them happy….it also makes the search engines happy.
Ultimately search is like TV. Organic search results are like NBC giving us "The Office" so they can sell ads around it. No programming, no ad revenue.
Search engines are the same way. No relevant free results…no traffic and no ad revenue.
So if Compendium clients make searchers happy then that's a good thing.
On the duplicate content issue, it's just not true. Google has some guidelines and rules about canonical versions and all that, but trust Compendium is fully compliant.
The duplicate content problem that they are trying to combat is plagiarism…and more specifically people or businesses that take content created by other entities and use it to drive their own advertising revenue. Within established parameters, the search engines have no problem how you use or organize your own content as long as you are sure to make clear the canonical version. Here's a video from a post I made back in June of 08 of Adam talking about this very issue:
http://tinyurl.com/67ef9h
What else?…. Oh yeah the domain thing. Nearly all of our clients go on their own domain. We have a couple of barters or freebees like the coffee example or Greenfield Liquors (good barter btw) but 99% are on their own domain:
http://blog.brownies.com/blog/brownies-online
http://blog.exacttarget.com/blog/triggered-email-marketing
http://blog.rotorooter.com/blog/plumber-philadelphia
As far as the idea of services, etc… keep in mind we are a software (Saas) company. Like Salesforce.com or ExactTarget, Our clients are either self service through our easy to use tools or they engage one of our agency partners. Frankly we'd love to have you as part of our family.
I'm not sure if there is more or not, please feel free to reach out to me directly.
I'm sure a lot of folks don't remember the beginning of ExactTarget. There was lots of skepticism. AOL controlled 65% of all inboxes. Objections like "isn't all commercial email spam" to "we have our own in house system, why would we buy from you?" sounds really familiar.
AOL didn't have a white list until late 2003 and ExactTarget was the very first approved sender. Relationships matter in this industry, but not nearly as much as happy email recipients or searchers. We watch the data intensely.
Manipulate implies something unethical, sneaky: "..to control or play upon by artful, unfair, or insidious means especially to one's own advantage."
Google is looking for manipulation yes. Compendium is about organization of content..content drives search and it drives engagement. If by organizing content differently based on keywords (which the searcher is saying they want) that drives higher search results, it's because that's what the search engines deem most relevant. Just because it's good for the organization that creates the content doesn't mean that it's bad for the searcher or that Google would consider it manipulation.
Can the Compendium clients abuse? sure just like spammers can spam or people can do bad powerpoint, but that's our job…just like with ExactTarget where we constantly police against spammers on our system, we have to have the same vigilance with Compendium.
But bottom line, this is ethical, simple and most importantly…solves a big problem.
Thanks for the venue.
Sincerely,
Chris Baggott
CEO/Co-founder
Compendium Blogware
chris@compendiumblogware.com
Thanks Chris, I really appreciate your taking the time to come post on this thread. My intent here is to have a conversation where we can all get a better understanding since there are many of us in the web business that feel uneasy with the way Compendium blogs work.
I think we will have to agree to disagree on some points.
Currently Google is not punishing your sites for duplicate content. You make the argument that Google is looking for plagiarism above all else. Perhaps, but from my experience they are also looking for people gaming the system by re-purposing the same content across multiple URLS.
If you were only referencing the content- a blurb, a link- I wouldn’t take issue or be that worried. But having the same full blog entry appear under multiple static URLS, it makes me nervous.
Usability- I disagree on this. As a user if I go to a site and I click on a category and find the same content posted over and over under different URLs I will get pretty frustrated and give up. Sure you might get some page views from me but I will eventually bail. I want to find something different when I modify my search or click on a link, not the same thing I was already looking at. I am interested in knowing more about your conversion numbers and I also know of others who question them. I have no opinion without more information.
Maybe the real issue here is that it seems like a number of your clients aren’t using your system correctly. Maybe they are intentionally abusing your system. I can’t say but I see a lot of your blogs with this same issue.
I love blogs and social media. There is no doubt that they are transforming the way we communicate/do business etc. I also have no doubt that your company will continue to evaluate and change their software. My blog is meant as an open exchange of ideas on possible problems how to address them before them become real problems.
As you know I’ve expressed these concerns to you directly before in a public forum.
If I wasn’t being asked about your company on an almost daily basis I would have never written this! But since you have done such a great job of promoting your company I am constantly asked for my opinion. I didn’t feel right being critical in private and I felt I had to post my thoughts in a place where I could get public feedback from you and others. This way my clients could see both sides of the story and make up their own minds. As you may know we have worked with Compendium with a couple clients already.
I have great respect for you and your companies. I hope you find my feedback constructive.
Best wishes, Jeb
As a new client of Compendium, and one who initially had many of the same hesitations as you Jeb, I highly respect your post. So, speaking as someone who???s been on both sides of the fence, I???d like to share how I overcame the issues you raise. Please forgive the length of this comment???
Firstly, it’s important to point out, Compendium is not trying to “game” the system. Their aim is the same as Google’s, and that’s to allow the most relevant content to win search. If they were trying to game the system I highly doubt they would still be around. It’s this fact that helped me get past the commonly held belief by our colleagues that they are simply going to fall under the Google ax someday.
That said I’ll have to defer to them if they would care to enlighten us with a glimpse into the inner workings of their software. However, as I’m sure that won’t happen I would like to weigh in on the duplicate content issue raised in your post, as this seems to be the crux of your argument.
Although Compendium does not hesitate to acknowledge that the value of their software arises from the compending of various posts that are relevant to specific keywords, it???s important to point out that Google states that they will only penalize duplicate content…” when there are signals pointing to deliberate and malicious intent“. Simply stated, this condition does not exist when you’re using Compendium’s software. Therefore, in the instance if or when duplicate content exists on your site and it’s not penalized, Google states “ in the majority of cases, having duplicate content does not have negative effects on your site’s presence in the Google index.” Additionally??? duplicate content isn???t a new phenomenon among blogging software. Whether you have a blogger, WordPress, Moveable Type, duplicate content is all over the place and Google, Yahoo! and MSN have all devised their own ways to index the content appropriately on their own. Here???s a great post by SEOmoz, that addresses the duplicate content issue specifically as it relates to blogs, that offers legitimate white hat solutions that any blogger can implement to reduce the effects of potential duplicate content or indexing issues.
Humbly acknowledging that SEO is a moving target and we all have much to learn, this interpretation of the duplicate content issue addressed my concerns. Combine this data with Compendium???s relative longevity (I challenge you to find any black hat SEO practice that???s endured for more than 20 months) and nearly all arguments fail. So, although I don’t know exactly what’s going on behind the scenes over at Compendium, what I do know is that their solution works and at the end of the day, it???s about results. Compendium delivers results.
Thanks Chip, I agree with your main point- Compendium delivers results, at least for most of their clients otherwise they wouldn’t be in business. But I think you need to remember there is a big difference between categories/tagging which are usually dynamic and static urls. Google really expects static urls to behave differently than dynamic ones. It expects them to have unique content. With dynamic urls they know it is from a database so they expect overlap.
My concern is that a small tweak in the Google algorithm, which happens all the time, could really hurt some of Compendium’s clients. Many of their clients appear to have almost every blog associated with every url. I really think that is dangerous. It may be no fault of Compendium, but I would think they are aware of it since their software facilitates it.
All of us in online marketing have to be careful of this trap:
"Usability- I disagree on this. As a user if I go to a site and I click on a category and find the same content posted over and over under different URLs I will get pretty frustrated and give up."
Trust me, I do this all the time…put my own thinking in front of what the data tell us.
Print guys have to worry about assumptions. We on the web have the advantage of data. You have to keep in mind that the vast majority of this traffic is first time visitors. For most of our clients, it's >90% which of course is perfect since this is an acquisition strategy. So many people think of business blogging as some kind of journalism. You don't need to worry about people clicking and seeing the same content if you are doing a good job on your template navigation, the goal is traffic, engagement (which comes from great, relevant content) and conversion. The gap between whats-a-blog and whats-a-website is evaporating. Consider the two following quotes:
???Most Web surfers don???t even realize they are reading blogs. The distinction between blogs and mainstream media is blurring rapidly.??
??? David L. Sifry, founder and chairman, Technorati
or
???-it is not always clear or relevant to the end user whether a particular destination is a blog???.?? eMarketer 2008
So in spite of what any of us think, it's critical we focus on what the visitors actually do. This gets me to our overall metrics as discussed in my previous comment. Our clients for the most part experience low bounce rates, high read times and higher conversion rates than their 'traditional' sites.
Here is some data from a quick case:
Fairytale Brownies. One store in Arizona and an online presence. Their employees blog along with soliciting customer feedback.
try searching on: 'brownies for valentine's day' or 'Brownies for Delivery'
These are their January Compendium numbers:
7272 Total blog visits
939 Conversions 13%
Avg of 6.41 pages viewed
Avg time on site was 6 minutes
30.3% Bounce Rate
110 Orders
183 sold items
$5600 in sales
AOV of $54.00
130 Total catalog requests
From an ROI standpoint, they spend about $5,550 a year with Compendium so this month alone paid for their software. Additionally, their average order size is $55 so for the blogs to get to $54 is pretty strong.
Ultimately, any Compendium user needs to look at their traffic and the overall experience of that traffic by measurement. There is always room for improvement and that's usually where our agency and SEO partners come in. If you are generating the right traffic volume from the right keywords then the problem is usually in the template and CTA's. But of course that's true with every website right? This is why constant measurement and testing is the key responsibility for every web marketer.
Best,
Chris Baggott
CEO/Co-founder
Compendium Blogware
chris@compendiumblogware.com
Chris, thanks for the additional information.
I think you make a great point about how we so often assume our experience is the same as anothers. If I take anything from this conversation it may be that reminder/insight. I have been obsessing over user behavior recently for clients so that really hits home.
And you are right, numbers don’t lie. The numbers you present are impressive even though I’m sure that is a one of your top success stories I can appreciate how that company, and I’m sure others, are seeing a good return on their investment with you.
I remain nervous about the methods and skeptical about the overall benefits. I have seen some Compendium blogs do really well in the rankings and others don’t seem to get the same “bounce”.
But I appreciate your making the effort to give real time to this conversation. This speaks well of you and your company. I think you have provided an intelligent, thoughtful response that my clients, and others, will appreciate reading as they consider your services.
This is part of the reason I posted this blog- to give my clients outside opinions since there is so much interest in your product.
Best wishes- Jeb
I get asked the very same questions nearly every day as well. That said, I greatly appreciate Compendium getting ???SEO??? as a mainstream word that companies in Indianapolis are talking about regularly.
With that, I want to point out a few errors I???ve seen in the blog and the comments that followed:
Duplicate content is NOT an issue. This was one of my first worries with Compendium, but both Chris and Doug dispelled that issue for me. Each individual blog entry only exists in one spot in its native shape. It is then ???compended??? or set to appear in other results (categories) under different keyword blogs.
Even if duplicate content were in issue, that latest from Google, and explained by SEOMoz http://www.seomoz.org/blog/canonical-url-tag-the-most-important-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemaps , is that they understand the need for potential duplicate content, and have created a way to label such as ???canonical URL tags.??? Issue solved.
The issue of the blog residing on the compendiumblog.com domain has also been resolved, as nearly all clients now have blog.theirdomain.com as the home of their blog. However, even if the blog was on the Compendium site, we all understand the value of link backs and with their domain having a Page Rank of 5 ??? isn???t there some value of hanging links pointing back to their main site?
If you???ve seen the actual backend of the software it is VERY sharp. It has a built in keyword density tool that measures then content you are writing with the blog category that you???re writing for, and scores you accordingly. This in and of itself is great a do-it-yourself marketer or really anyone that doesn???t consider SEO a skill set of theirs. Secondly, the software has the ability to ???control the message,??? meaning an employee can be set up as an author but his/her posts will first go to a manager for approval and or feedback. The manager can ???send back with edits??? or ???publish the post.??? These are VERY strong tools for companies of any size.
Now, with any positives, there is usually room for some critics as well. I have a few of them:
Ask anyone what business they are in and at the core they will tell you they are in the business of selling ________ . Ask them how many they want to sell and the answer is, as many as possible. This is no different for Compendium. They are in the business of selling ???blogs??? and they want to sell as many as possible. The issue herein is that you can???t win the battle for every word either in an organic campaign or a paid campaign, nor would you want to.
I thought the idea of being all things to all people was going to die with the advancements of online marketing, but that doesn???t seem to be the case. We run PPC programs where we target as few as one (1) keyword. We do this because the clients budget AND the correlating conversions deem this as an ideal campaign. Could we go after tons of other words as well? Sure. Would they have the same success, no, and we???ve proved that with data.
That leads to the second issue ??? the (non)ability to exchange keywords or blogs. I???m a data/numbers geek. I want to get my campaigns to show me whether or not they are going to fail as soon as I can so that I can move on to test something else. With the Compendium model, you buy a ???package of x-amount of blogs.??? These blogs correlate with your target keyword selections. The only problem is if after selected a keyword/blog, if you find it is not working for you, you can???t exchange it for another keyword/blog without paying extra for it. In my opinion, if I buy 25 blogs, I should be able to mix and match those 25 as I see fit to optimize my own campaign.
The big question/issue that still doesn???t sit well with me is, what is the intent of the blogs themselves? The ONLY reason people are buying these blogs right now is NOT to create great content, but rather to game the search engines with ???recency and frequency??? so they can obtain higher rankings. When I read a blog, I read it for quality content, and actionable advice. I would never subscribe to the RSS feed of any Compendium client, because they only reason they???re writing is to get me on their page, not to share valuable content with me. Google has the ability to shut this down overnight. Another poster said Compendium???s aim was the same as Google???s, ???allow the most relevant content to win search.?? I disagree wholeheartedly; content for contents sake is NOT relevancy.
My last issue is SERP real estate. Just for a second, let???s put all issues aside and say that the software works, is completely legitimate with Google, and always will be. There are ONLY 10 organic results listed on SERP (search engine results page). What happens if 11 people/companies buy the same search phrase because it is the #1 driver of conversions. At that point, someone CAN???T win. We???ve all seen the heat maps of where people???s eyes go on a SERP page, and we also know that hardly anyone goes past the first page of results. So, what happens at that point?
In Summary, I think the software is great product, but wish it was being sold to it???s true target market. That is, big companies that want to have a voice online (blog), and still be able to control the message. As opposed to anyone and everyone that just wants to game the search engines with ???content.???
Thank you so much Jim for your support of what we are doing from a legitimacy and technology standpoint.
You negatives really reflect business issues. You are absolutely right in that our clients generally are blogging for first time visitors. What often troubles me here with the local blogging community that I don’t see reflected nationally is the premise that blogging for business is somehow not legitimate…like it’s ‘anti-blogging’.
The data just doesn’t support that. Again I refer to my previous comments where I explained our metrics of bounce rates, read times and conversions. We benchmark these very carefully.
The implication you bring up goes out the window if the actual searchers are happy doesn’t it?
At the end of the day, this is about delivering relevant content to a searcher. Only the searcher can determine if they are happy, and the metrics say that they are. I offer FairyTale Brownies as a perfect example of a small business driving positive ROI. Check them out, I think I put a link on the last comment along with their measures. Can anyone argue that searchers are happy when they find them
Trust me, There is not a fiber in their being that is concerned with how many people subscribe to their blog or ever visit them a second time. As you can see, FTB like most companies are looking for that first impression, they have a catalog and a very good email program…so have lots of other channels without having to hope that people are so enamored with brownies to continually visit the blogs.
I had Paula Burg on my panel at Blogworld last year. Paula runs “nuts about southwest” and readily states that the biggest value of their blogging strategy is SEO. 67% of all their vistiors come from search engines. 90% of all blog vistiors are first time visitors.
Kelly Feller, Social Media Manager for Intel had a great quote: “Organic Search Traffic is the most critical metric I track.”
The SERP real estate and the keywords are interesting arguments. We don’t refuse people changing their keywords, but we do discourage it. This is a cumulative excercise. The more the better and the older the better. At the end of the day this is our clients software…they are free to do whatever they like.
Same for the SERP real estate. This is no different than any software application. The real power is in how the tools are used. Just like email fighting for space in your inbox, whoever does the best job of delivering the right content at the right time will prevail. Just like every business on the planet uses powerpoint. Some people are going to be great and some are going to suck. At the end it’s up to the Compendium Clients or their agencies to execute… we can advise, be we are not in the services business any more than ExactTarget creates and sends emails.
I need to chime in here and say that I too was extremely skeptical of Compendium’s approach, and it took them almost a year to win me over. I will not delve into this subject because I think it has been well debated.
I believe Jim Brown’s comment of Compendium’s clients only wanting to blog to receive traffic is narrow-sighted. Although that was a big selling point, our key motivation is to “show off” our knowledge and our consultants. We used to have a traditional newsletter, but it ran its course, and blogs seem to be the perfect avenue to showcase our knowledge and expertise. They also require less marketing resources while allowing the entire company to participate.
We chose Compendium because they are not only local and their software is easy to use, but for their intelligent and knowledgeable staff.
just a quick note that I have added a preface to this blog and made some minor revisions based on the feedback I have received. I remain nervous about the compending aspect to Compendium but feel that many of my other concerns have been addressed by Chris and others. I hope this conversation has been as worthwhile to others as much as it has been for me.
I will have to say that the great thing that Compendium Blogware does is make sure that blogging is taken seriously. It’s so hard to get a client to really understand the power of a blog and to be dedicated to it. Definitely a big thanks to Chris for that one.
A lot has already been said on the subject.
I was on a recent Google conference call that addressed the myths of SEO. One was duplicate content. They basically said it is a myth that you get punished.
The common theme in Google’s message on the call was that they are looking for “fresh content”.
This is the biggest challenge for most companies, their inability to generate content.
Software can’t generate content. It can help manage and organize it. Humans are needed to generate content.
According to Google, content is what they want.
Paul Lorinczi
Vice President
ProBlogService
Jeb, it looks like there has been some comments deleted… that’s not cool.
no, it was just a two duplicate anonymous comments about the blog layout that we fixed immediately. I didn’t delete any comments regarding the conversation itself. If I did then I would agree with you!
Bingo! Content is the missing link to this entire conversation. A big part of the Compendium value proposition is triggering a user interface to everyone in an organization along with API’s to leverage user generated content
Compendium’s interface for the user also includes a targeted keyword list to keep the bloggers focused as well as a live news feed to spark ideas on content topics.
The magic of Compending, simply organizes that content in ways that make it easier for the searcher and therefor the search engines to understand what each page is about.
Yesterday I blogged on a paper McKinsy put out on this topic as well called: Six ways to make Web 2.0 work
http://blogging.compendiumblog.com/blog/compendium-blogware/0/0/mckinsey-report–enterprise-web-20-success-requires-widespread-employee-participation
Good conversation, but I have to ask — who cares?
I did a search on "Smallbox + Compendium" and this came up #4 on the first page of Google. So, obviously, the SEO benefits to blogging aren't exclusive to Compendium.
In my humble opinion, since they haven't and don't do bake-off's to prove their value proposition of blogging for SEO as better then other services– Typepad, WordPress, Blogger, etc. the whole company is built on marketing to an under-informed segment of the market–the small business that doesn't get blogging or SEO, but thinks they need a silver bullet.
For what they charge to get a blog with 25 keywords, you could have a WordPress blog with all of the tags and seo modules, set-up with one of thousands of themes, unlimited categories that you use keywords for AND a maintenance contract with your blog set-up provider to help you service it for the next year.
You can even set-up WordPress so it has an administration layer for approvals.
In my humblest of opinions, this business is all marketing leveraging Chris' reputation in the city and naivete elsewhere.
With ExactTarget's plan to go public on the shelf this was probably a way for them to do R&D without distraction only to later be acquired by ET. Now, Compendium is left in a dry capital market.
The problem I have with Compendium? Who cares? And, I haven't even gone into the company being a very small point solution and no start-up succeeds unless they own their niche as a point solution — clearly Compendium does not and cannot. How are they going to scale when they do the implementations. In the time that its taken me to write this 500 more people are starting to use WordPress, and that exceeds the Compendium customer base after two years.
I think in Compendium’s defense they are offering a service as well as a product. Chris really focuses on the product aspect but really there is a serious service element too. Client consultation, keyword research, reference resources and ongoing support are a few of the ways they are different than WordPress without delving into the software itself. This is outside of my ongoing concerns about the nature of how they “compend” content.
But I agree with your point that WordPress makes more sense for many companies, particularly small service companies.
What does everyone think about people making an Anonymous comment?
I’m inclined to think that if you are going to make mean and untrue comments, you should at least be required to leave your name.
Anyone else have an opinion?
So far in 2009, I’ve keynoted or run panels at 4 national Marketing conferences.
This week I’m in San Francisco for the Pacific Crest Saas event where again we will be one of the featured companies.
We are gaining hundreds of new clients nationwide. Additionally I was named number 63 on the list of the most influential marketers in the United States for 2008….all because of what we are doing with Compendium.
Nationally, the only negative I ever hear about us comes from Indianapolis. Not sure I understand it, but all I can do is address each concern head on, one at a time.
Which gets tough when you don’t know who to reach out to.
Chris, I agree on anonymous comments. I hope to disable that when we move the blog to WordPress in the coming weeks. I think if you are going to be critical then you should associate your name with it. It’s the honorable way to be. I didn’t delete the comment since I didn’t find it to be out of line, I just didn’t appreciate it being anonymous.
Remember “A prophet is without honor only in his hometown, among his relatives, and in his own home.” I think this is because your home town knows you best, is looking at your company more closely and is in a better position to give you honest feedback before others that aren’t as familiar with your company.
We both share the goal of Indianapolis being a midwest tech/web mecca. I think we also agree that in order to get there we need to hold each other to high standards.
I have a couple of questions for Compendium:
1. Someone mentioned something to the effect of the clients content is owned by Compendium, so here’s question #1: If at a point in time, a Compendium client loses their budget for blogging, and they want to move to a Blogger or WordPress blog, is the content theirs or is it Compendium’s?
2. Why Compendium vs. WordPress vs. Blogger vs. Joomla?
3. Compendium blogs appear to be a separate component from the websites that they are displayed on. If the website that it is on has a search engine, is the blog content searchable from that search engine? If not, isn’t this a disadvantage?
Hi Nicki,
I can answer your questions:
1. Not true – content always is created and owned by our clients. We have db replication, backups as well as off-site disaster recovery to ensure data is not lost. We also have an API, so content can be retrieved whenever a client wishes.
2. The list is too long, from service, support, enterprise functionality, cloudbursting, etc. Some of it is detailed in this post: http://is.gd/ltr4
3. We see more advantages to a subdomain than disadvantages. You don’t get penalized for having a subdomain but it does allow you to both ‘latch’ onto the reputation of your domain AND measure the impact of your blogging separately.
You should sign up for a demo to get fully informed!
All blogs have duplicate content and gogole states specifically that having duplicate content within your site is OK as long as its not mailicous.
google specifically states that blogs typically have duplicate content as many blogs are structured with overlapping categories. Specifically, blogs have archives so there are “categories” for each month. There is another one for recent. So most blogs would have july postings under recent and under july 2009 category.
Many blogs also list 20-30 static categories and many of their articles can fit under more than one category.
Additionally, many ecommerce sites can have multiple categories.
We sell appliances. Each dishwasher is available in multiple colors, so each one can have four nearly identical pages.
There is also a lot of duplication in all ecommerce sites, especially when you have thousands of items.
Ecommerce sites create numerous categories to appeal to different people. Many categories overlap or are identical.
Google has concerns when you auto generate thousands of “categories” in order to manipulate google. If compendium was to have 9000 categories, it would be of no use to the user and google would have an issue with it.
check out http://
shop.us-appliance.com/1/3/index1.html
7555 “categories” generated by software (baynote systems) and the “content’ for each category was added, content was also generated programatically to fool google.
This particular blog topic and ensuing discussion has been incredibly enlightening. I am examining both HubSpot and Compendium as blog solutions, but currently use WordPress. While they do completely different things, I’m most interested in how Compendium handles blog content and organizes it on the domain structure as well as if they are black hat or grey hat methodogies. (Wish someone from Google actually posted a comment on this.)
I am continuing to pursue due diligence on Compendium, because…it’s really hard to commit to an annual contract for something you can’t even try out for yourself. Not even for a week or a month! And, to migrate from WordPress which is free to Compendium which charges a alot of money is a BIG step.
As for their results…Brownies in a B2C ecommerce environment is great, but what about the much harder task of demonstrating authority and explaining an intangible online? I would love it if any current Compendium users that work in a B2B service oriented company contacted me with their feedback. (Find it at my url: incitrio dot com)
Nicki brought up the question: “Why Compendium vs. WordPress vs. Blogger vs. Joomla?” and Doug responded with “The list is too long, from service, support, enterprise functionality, cloudbursting, etc. Some of it is detailed in this post: http://is.gd/ltr4”
…After reading that post that he linked to, I would still disagree.
“Anon” put: “For what they charge to get a blog with 25 keywords, you could have a WordPress blog with all of the tags and seo modules, set-up with one of thousands of themes, unlimited categories that you use keywords for AND a maintenance contract with your blog set-up provider to help you service it for the next year. You can even set-up WordPress so it has an administration layer for approvals.”
…From what I have seen, read and heard he is dead on. In the Compendium blog post that Doug links to, some of the main points are: “customization of theme, good hosting, tracking/reporting, installation, interface”.
Well Going back to what “anon” said for what they charge – you could easily get all of that and more with a smaller design firm. Compendium argues that all of there services will not take away time for your team, well you are paying Compendium to do all of that (And from what I heard it is a pretty penny). So regardless, you would be paying someone to do it. So why spend 10X what you could and not just get someone that has WordPress experience to do it.
I just still don’t see the benefits of Compendium verse just WordPress. I would defiantly like to read more somewhere, though.
I’m surprised (and pleased) to see this discussion continuing ten months down the road.
At the end of the day, everyone is engaged in a cat and mouse game with the search engines. We might speculate that potential customers will search for a variety of specific keywords. If we can maintain fresh versions of content that match those keywords, customers will find us. If our content grows stale or doesn’t match the words, we will slip down in the rankings.
The question is how much can you automate the process of building “fresh versions of content.” Certainly, if you try to generate all your content without any human editing, you are trying to game the system. If you only write articles by hand and use no automation, you’re probably never going to make it to the top.
Every blog is somewhere along this spectrum, from 100% human to 100% automated. Somewhere along this line, you cross into black hat territory. I don’t know where Compendium is, but their strategy seems to be based on knowing where the line is and standing closer than others. It will be exciting to see how they grow and where they go next.
My company, Apollo Sales & Marketing Group, licensed Compendium Blogware for 1 year. While the plaform was easy to install and the content authoring was OK, we saw little to no results. Their support staff was friendly and responsive, but did not have any specific answers to assist in getting better results. In fairness, we are not the most prolific bloggers, only a couple per week.
Our own efforts of posting articles on free PR sites and other news outlets and our own social networking did much more to move us up in search rankings than any Compendium posts.
We have since moved to WordPress for a fraction of the cost.
The truly unfortunate part of this review, besides the lack of return on our original investment, is the fact that the sales person for Compendium told us that we could assume the URL and not have to do anything technically to switch to another platform if we choose to do so down the road. This was cerainly not true. In the end, Compendium Blogware exported our content into an XML file that was not WordPress compatible and we are spending a few hundred dollars and 2 weeks to convert it so that we can import our content to the new WordPress blog.
Our company is fairly technical and was able to find the solution and right the ship. Some other businesses may not be in the same position.
In conclusion, think twice before you pull the trigger on a blog platform, especially once that is a bit more expensive such as Compendium. You may be switching later and incurring more cost.
Compendium Blogware’s extremely narrow theory may work for someone, somewhere, but it was a complete waste of time and money for my client. I would not only never do it again, and never recommend it, I’m sorry we ever tried it.
I thought we did due diligence, but it wasn’t until we’d signed the contract that I saw that its success relies entirely on searches for unrealistically narrow and obscure search terms.
Can Compendium increase search rankings for those terms? You betcha. Does that turn into leads, site visits, or sales results by any other measure? Absolutely not.
Anonymous, just because I don’t like having my name on the Internet. (And, I don’t think it would take TOO much guesswork for Chris to figure out who this is…a couple floors, really)
I have my own reservations about how one of the companies (I work for more than one under the same individual owner…dead giveaway on my identity now) is leveraging Compendium as a solution to increase sales. I can also say, being the single IT person for said entity(ies), that I believe that our type of business may be better served using WordPress, given the media capabilities that Compendium’s interface tends to lack in this stage of its development. Make no mistake, Compendium’s blog is a complete and very well-working solution. They will continue to make improvements and may very well come up with a better product that WordPress currently is (cliche: only time will tell…). It just takes time and effort. Please read on…
Some may have already written me off or head that I’ve said things that I really haven’t, but I actually think that Compendium has a great deal to offer businesses that WANT to get their name out there…but don’t know how, and may need a bit of handholding. Deny it all you want, but the sooner people admit when they need help, the greater the things are that they will achieve. There’s no shame in it, it’s called “learning”.
One year, in my opinion, is not a long enough time to determine whether or not a blog will help you. It takes a little while to move up in the page rankings. If you only try it for a year, then you didn’t give it enough time, period. Two years, minimum. After that period, if still nothing, then it’s decision time.
I can also say that they have made GREAT strides in the past two years regarding, especially, sharing through several different social media outlets. That was an issue I took up with them early into our initial contract period a couple years back. Quite possibly the most important aspect of having a blog: interlacing with other methods of communication to “get the word out” across several popular mediums to create a cohesive “meshed” environment of “buzz” on your product/service.
While I may not believe that it’s the best solution for MY company, I WILL respect the final decision of the individual who makes such a choice. And, in my (what?) free time, even write a blog every once in a while. I am not one of the main bloggers. We write at least once a day every week. Having a blog HAS increased visitors, there’s no denying that.
In many situations, a blog may increase site visits but not increase clients/customers/purchases for a business. This could also be because of general product interest or that business’ presentation…or lack thereof. You need to know your market, which is not Compendium’s responsibility. Compendium, as a company, DOES know their market, which is why they have who they do on their client list.
On the topic of using the compendiumblog.com name, most of what was said was untrue, as you can simply configure a CNAME record to forward to them and they take care of the rest. And, as Chris said, most of their client base uses this method, including those that I’ve spoken with. Without any issues, I might add.
As for the export…I’m not sure that it is their responsibility to provide a WordPress-compatible export of your blogs. The content that is “yours” is the blog’s intellectual content, the writing itself, not it’s ability to be transferred to another platform.
If you want to transfer to another blogging platform, that’s fine, but you need to be willing to do the legwork. That’s usually where people like myself come in….yay. We thank you for the, er….opportunity.
Some of the keywords (same as tags, for WP and other blog platform users) that are provided or suggested MAY seem to be relatively useless to some. (Queue Lee Corso: “Not so fast my friend!!!”) Fortunately, those keywords/tags that you don’t initially think will help COULD end up filling the gaps on searchers you may otherwise miss. Not every keyword is going to get the same number of searches. That would be, well, weird….
Just outright bashing someone’s profession/service isn’t the way to have an “open” discussion, You’ll get about as much done as our nation’s capitol does.
For anyone to think of suggesting “grey/black-hat”, purposeful manipulation is simply irresponsible and inaccurate ( I refrained from using other words that might sound more “lawyer-like”, and you also don’t clearly know what “black-hat” means…). While I may have reservations, I would certainly never make such public allegations about someone’s product.
Compendium’s blogs are only meant to use search engines in the manner that they were, honestly, meant to be used in the first place. If Google wants to change their algorithms, they have every right to do so, but it won’t kill someone’s blog/website overnight like you may be led to believe by other posters. Let’s stick to facts.
In most cases, even I can get extremely “passionate” about what I am saying, but I do, at the same time, realize reality. If I had only one thing to say, it would be: if this helps our business in the near future, then I am all for it, as long as the costs are justified.
From what I understand, the decision has been made for us to continue for another year, and I sincerely hope that it all works out, and look forward to the advantages that a hosted blog can add to our business.