Results tagged “search”

Noticing a pattern here?

Paul Kedrosky, Dishwashers, and How Google Eats Its Own Tail:

Google has become a snake that too readily consumes its own keyword tail. Identify some words that show up in profitable searches -- from appliances, to mesothelioma suits, to kayak lessons -- churn out content cheaply and regularly, and you're done. On the web, no-one knows you're a content-grinder.

The result, however, is awful. Pages and pages of Google results that are just, for practical purposes, advertisements in the loose guise of articles, original or re-purposed. It hearkens back to the dark days of 1999, before Google arrived, when search had become largely useless, with results completely overwhelmed by spam and info-clutter.

Alan Patrick, On the increasing uselessness of Google:

The lead up to the Christmas and New Year holidays required researching a number of consumer goods to buy, which of course meant using Google to search for them and ratings reviews thereof. But this year it really hit home just how badly Google's systems have been spammed, as typically anything on Page 1 of the search results was some form of SEO spam - most typically a site that doesn't actually sell you anything, just points to other sites (often doing the same thing) while slipping you some Ads (no doubt sold as "relevant").

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Google is like a monoculture, and thus parasites have a major impact once they have adapted to it - especially if Google has "lost the war". If search was more heterogenous, spamsites would find it more costly to scam every site. That is a very interesting argument against the level of Google market dominance.

And finally, Jeff Atwood, Trouble in the House of Google:

Throughout my investigation I had nagging doubts that we were seeing serious cracks in the algorithmic search foundations of the house that Google built. But I was afraid to write an article about it for fear I'd be claimed an incompetent kook. I wasn't comfortable sharing that opinion widely, because we might be doing something obviously wrong. Which we tend to do frequently and often. Gravity can't be wrong. We're just clumsy … right?

I can't help noticing that we're not the only site to have serious problems with Google search results in the last few months. In fact, the drum beat of deteriorating Google search quality has been practically deafening of late.

From there, Jeff links to several more examples, including the ones I mentioned above. As Alan alludes to in his post, the threat here is that Google has become a monoculture, a threat I've written about many times.

Now, is all this anecdotal evidence reliable? Perhaps not. What is worth noting now is that, half a decade after so many people began unquestioningly modifying their sites to serve Google's needs better, there may start to be enough critical mass for the pendulum to swing back to earlier days, when Google modified its workings to suit the web's existing behaviors.

Further Reading

• Revisiting the Software Monoculture
• Google's Microsoft Moment
• Life or Death for Web 2.0

A few months ago, two companies in the search optimization space teamed up to start a contest, based on a challenge to see who could be the first result for the gibberish phrase "Nigritude Ultramarine". Winning the contest consisted of being the top result on Google for that search either on June 7 (the "player" prize) or a month later, on July 7 (the "stayer" prize).

I've had a fairly poor impression of the Search Engine Optimization Industry, so I entered the contest on June 4. My site became the number one search result late on June 8, so I missed winning the first round, but I held the position for the rest of the month (and my site is still the first result, as of this writing) and won the Stayer's Prize.

My prize was a beautiful Sony monitor. Michael Robertson and the other folks involved with the contest were cordial and prompt, and the monitor arrived in the middle of last week. In fact, I've been in the middle of moving, and just after we'd settled in, the first ring at our doorbell was from UPS, bearing a big Sony box courtesy of Amazon. Now that's a housewarming gift.

But more interesting to me has been the reaction people have had, first to my entry in the contest, second to my ranking in the search results (the term people seem to favor in email is "dominance" but that doesn't sound very humble) and finally their response to my win of the second-stage prize.

There are a significant number of really supportive emails, of course. People generously linked to my original Nigritude Ultramarine post, and I think they felt a sense of accomplishment in helping me win. There's nothing the blogosphere loves more than angry mob justice, and I probably benefitted from tapping into a bit of angry mob antipathy towards the SEO industry. Though many, perhaps even most, people in the SEO industry behave ethically, the reality is that much of the SEO industry has treated the weblog medium with an attitude ranging from crass opportunism or exploitation to downright abuse, in the form of comment spam, referral spam, and fake, content-free blogs.

Update: The contest is over, and this entry did pretty well but didn't win the initial prize. So the best purpose this page can serve is to direct you to The Hunger Site. Go give it a click.

Update 2:With one day remaining, it looks like this page will will win the contest for July. See more on the contest in my follow-up post.

I've always had a pretty low opinion of the Search Engine Optimization industry. Though there are of course legitimate experts in the field, it seems chock full of people who are barely above spammers, and they taint the image of the whole group.

That being said, I do watch what they do from time to time, especially as they've become enchanted with the power of blogs, both from a comment-spamming perspective as well as their evny of bloggers' PageRank.

But they've been doing something interesting of late that I'm actually curious about. An affiliate network called DarkBlue and a forum called Search Guild have started SEO Challenge, a contest to see who is the first Google result for the (previously unlinked) phrase Nigritude Ultramarine. Everyone from link spammers to legitimate optimizers has popped up to enter the contest, displaying the requisite contest entry image (see below) and crossing their fingers.

I suspect, though, that those of us who've made content even when there weren't bribes involved have an advantage. For all the back-and-forth about how Google is or isn't evil, the end result of PageRank is that it's a hell of a lot more work to fake your way into being a top result than it is to just have high ranking as a fringe benefit of just being a person who loves writing. That's a good thing.

So, in order to prove that real content trumps all the shady optimization tricks that someone can figure out, and because I figure I deserve an iPod at least as much as the Star Wars Kid, I'm entering the contest. Do me a favor: Link to this post with the phrase Nigritude Ultramarine. I'd rather see a real blog win than any of the fake sites that show up on that search result right now.