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This page intentionally left blank

Posted by Michael Martinez on March 11, 2008 in Content Theory

There was a project — which appeared to be a joke, in my opinion — called This Page Intentionally Left Blank. You can still find it by searching for “This page intentionally left blank”. If you study the page closely (it should take the slowest mind only a few seconds) you’ll see that it has one link pointing to an inner page with the anchor text of “This page intentionally left blank”.

Google and Yahoo! return similar results near the top for an EXACT FIND mode query, whereas Microsoft goes off and does its own thing (a quaintness we are bound to lose if Microsoft absorbs Yahoo!). The query results demonstrate some interesting properties in the various search algorithms. Google tends to cluster results more than Yahoo!, for example, and they all take link anchor into consideration but apparently with different weights.

The whole point of the “this page intentionally left blank” phenomenon is that people have devoted years of discussion to wondering why publishers would put something like that into a book (usually into a handbook or manual). In fact, it’s a self-contradicting statement, since the page is obviously not blank. That’s equivalent to walking up to someone and saying, “Hey! I’m telling you a lie right now!”

Is the page blank or is it Memorex? Hm. Maybe you’re not old enough to remember those commercials.

Anyway, blank page thinkology still prevails on the business Web, believe it or not. (If I recall the anecdote correctly) Matt Cutts reporetdly discussed “empty content” at a recent conference, where he asked the audience how many people would want to visit a page that says, “Read reviews of this business!” but then asks visitors to be the first to post a review.

You see this kind of content on Amazon all the time. People are used to it. But Amazon’s site is rich in user-generated content. They were among the first sites to develop the UGC concept and they are well past the shock effect that visitors to such “empty” pages experience.

Nonetheless, every other wannabe etailer, travel resource directory, and Adsense millionaire seems to feel that all he has to do is create a template that invites consumer reviews, populate it with product names and cities, and launch the site. Search engines, on the other hand, seem to feel there are enough such invitations on the Web and don’t want to promote any more.

Blank page optimization thus has had to turn a corner because it’s not easy to present a 100,000 page site to people that really doesn’t offer anything unique, distinct, or of value in any way. It’s just another travel affiliate site, retail affiliate site, whatever. But if you’re launching a real business and you want to follow all the SEO blog, forum, and eBook tutorial advice you’ll quickly conclude that you need user-generated content to distinguish your cookie-cutter content from everyone else’s.

You might as well be putting “This page intentionally left blank” on all your Web pages.

A new site that carries a catalogue similar to the catalogues of 100 other retail sites can still distinguish itself from all those other sites without inviting consumer reviews that may not come for days, weeks, or months. Creating boilerplate text is expensive and time-consuming because it defers the value you’re hoping that a page will accrue over time. The crucial moment in a page’s history is its moment of creation, not the first time a visitor leaves a comment or reveiw.

Product listing pages can provide information, cross-promotional links, and Web site operator perspective. I’ll call it perspective rather than opinion because you can be creative in adding unique marginal commentary to your primary content. That marginal commentary doesn’t have to be faux testimonials, blah statistics, or other marketing mumbo-jumbo. Marginal commentary can be useful, relevant information or it can be something unique and different but still somehow relevant.

Marginal commentary does not have to be algorithmically relevant as long as it’s useful. So when you’re meeting with your team of programmers, figuring out what you can quickly pump into your SQL database so that you can serve 100,000 random product pages to visitors, don’t limit yourself to the usual dogma of Web marketing.

The only way to fight Blank Page Syndrome is to put something on the page. Anything. Just don’t leave it blank.

If everything on your page comes from boilerplate navigation and legalese text or product descriptions you have a blank page. Your page is worthless crap that doesn’t deserve to exist. Your Web site doesn’t deserve to exist because you wasted your time producing cheap cookie-cutter content which brings absolutely nothing of interest or value to the user experience.

It doesn’t take much imagination to put something on a page. It doesn’t take that much more effort to populate 100,000 pages with something different. You begin the process by writing down a list of things that you’ve placed on the page. You then start crossing off items that are replicated across all the pages. When you’ve crossed off everything you add more stuff. You cannot add anything back in but you can always add something new.

As soon as you have five items on your list, start crossing them off if they are template-based, boilerplate-based, product description-based, assumed user generated content, etc. Don’t stop the process until you can list five types of content you can add to your pages that make them look unique, distinctive, and original.

You have to put the content there first, not the user. The user generated content should be your pathway to maturing on-page content, not your means of creating it. User generated content cannot be the foundation of your ranking strategy, your indexing strategy, or your marketing strategy.

User generated content has been done to death and beyond. It’s not a requirement or an option, it’s an obstacle. What makes a Web site good is what the Web site creator directly brings to the content. Everything else is cream.

Force yourself to strip away the template structure, the navigation, the cross-promotional links, the faux testimonials, the assumed user-generated content, the INSERT-CITY-NAME-HERE boilerplate text. Take away everything that you’ve used to cut corners, save time, and avoid making the effort to create a unique, useful page.

When you have nothing left, type in to your database “This page intentionally left blank” until you can think of something useful.