Amazon's Social Rebirth
Amazon As Cautionary Tale I follow Amazon pagecounts closely. Prior to Google's Panda and Penguin updates Amazon was slouching toward a billion pages inside of Google. At a billion pages in Google's Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) the distinction between Amazon and Google becomes less and less. Then Google's Zoo of change (Panda followed by Penguin) hit. Now Amazon is down to 127M pages. I realize "down to" seems absurd with such a large number of pages in Google, but better than 90% of Amazon's "pages" have been swept away. Amazon was LATE to the social game. Amazon's ability to generate new pages via their own machine code was astounding and robust. In platforms vs. websites I wrote about how if the Brooklyn Bridge fell into the Hudson tomorrow Amazon would have a landing page with fully cooked content up within minutes. And such technical wizardry used to be enough. Amazon's ability to create new pages by combining pieces of old used ...