Suite101.com

» see suite101.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Suite101.com launched in 1996 in Vancouver, British Columbia, as a knowledge-sharing site where local writers contributed articles on whatever they knew. the model was simple. writers wrote, suite101 hosted, both sides split the ad revenue. through the late 90s and early 2000s the site quietly accumulated tens of thousands of articles across travel, parenting, finance, gardening, software. by 2005 it was at 4 million unique monthly visitors. by november 2009 comscore called it one of the top-10 fastest-growing sites by US traffic growth.

on february 23, '11, google rolled out the panda algorithm update, which targeted content-farm pages with thin or duplicative writing optimized for adsense rather than human readers. suite101 was on the casualty list inside the first 24 hours. seo-visibility services reported a drop of 94 percent in the first week. the company put out an open letter to matt cutts protesting that suite101 was not a content farm in the same sense as demand studios or associated content. google did not adjust the algorithm.

michael kedda took over as CEO in january 2012 and announced a pivot away from the article-and-channel format toward a community-discussion platform. the pivot did not recover the traffic. in march 2013 the team stopped publishing articles. on november 1, '13, the revenue-sharing program with contributors was terminated. the site stayed online as a static archive for a few more years before the domain went dormant.

~ the record ~

~ the early days ~

suite101 predated the content-farm category by a full decade. when it launched in 1996, the term did not exist. the model was closer to early geocities or open diary than to demand media. writers signed up because they liked writing, and the ad-revenue share was a small bonus. the site grew slowly through the early 2000s on a base of legitimate enthusiast contributors who actually knew their subject matter.

the shift came around 2006-2008 when the adsense-arbitrage business model went mainstream. demand studios, ehow, associated content, examiner.com all began paying writers per-piece rates that scaled to industrial output. suite101 had to compete for the same contributor base and the same google-search traffic, which meant tilting toward higher article volume and more keyword-optimized topics. that tilt is what put it on the panda hit list when the algorithm came in 2011.

~ panda day ~

february 23 was the date google publicly announced the algorithm. inside suite101 the traffic graph dropped within hours. the company's open letter to matt cutts laid out the case that suite101 had thousands of long-form articles by legitimate domain-expert contributors, not the bulk thin-content material the algorithm was supposed to target. google's position was that the algorithm operated at the domain level. once enough of a site's pages were classified low-quality, the entire domain took the penalty. there was no manual reclassification path.

the same algorithm cut associated content, ehow, demand studios, mahalo, ezinearticles in the same week. the entire 2006-2010 contributor-written content category was effectively dead within a single algorithm rollout. it remains one of the cleanest examples of an entire web business model being killed by a search-engine update.

~ the long tail ~

i was not a suite101 reader. the site was anglophone north american by content and search audience, and i never typed its URL in the dozen years it was active before panda. but the panda update itself was the kind of event that reached the turkish dev forums of 2011, because the same algorithm cut traffic to a tier of turkish-language content farms that had been gaming google with translated articles. the kill radius of panda was global even when its named casualties were US sites.

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