October 9, 2006 There seems to be a lot of talk on various blogs and forums (check SEO Book) that Yahoo! is giving more consideration to inbound links than before. This would be interesting, as that is also the thing that, in my opinion, is ruining the validity of a Google search. All to often the high ranked sites on Google are those that have more money and time to dedicate to getting links that show them in a better light than they are. Let’s explain a smidgen. Let’s say I’m a website that sells life insurance. Obviously, I want as many clicks to my site as possible from anyone looking for insurance or anything remotely related in hopes of making a sale. Now, let’s say I’m a college student. I have to come up with a great deal of insurance information on my thesis about «how-to’s of insurance.» (please excuse this example. It’s nothing personal, I’m just not very creative.) Now I type «insurance information» in a Google search. Well what pops up other than the insurance company before. I search and search the site and all to no avail as I can not find an ounce on insurance «information.» OK. So maybe I should have looked up something a little more specific. How about «life insurance how to.» CRAP! Same company pops up.
You see, in reference to my post on Link Popularity, said insurance company could dedicate a great deal of time and money getting «relevant» links and seeing the anchor tag as a great deal of other topics. Even if it doesn’t really have any «information» but only sells insurance. And insurance is a very big industry. There are many other industries; website design. iPod, computers. SEO. All topics that have a great deal of competition and overly saturated environments filled with professionals, and professional con artist the like. The idea is to get as many links as one can. You may even get some that you and I would consider relevant. But then Google looks and says «hey, look at all those links. They must be something good.» And thus the ranking. And such is the reason we search on Google and get BLAH, when (and I never thought I would be advocating anything Microsoft) a search on MSN pulls a higher likelihood of what I want. In my opinion, Yahoo! was not far behind MSN when searching for something I want or need. And unlike most of the SEO community, I do believe that Google just got stuck, and will eventually clean up the algo that decides ranking, but with this recent development, there may be some problems.
All to often, when ranking in Yahoo!, we concentrate on proper placement of keywords and the Title tag. If less is given to that, and more to link popularity, who is to say that they won’t become more like Google? There is talk that they are going to try to make the link criteria a little better, meaning that the link would indeed have to be relevant, but I don’t think the crawlers and algorithms are to the point that they will decide that an insurance company with 10,000 links from everywhere will not show when I do my search, when the former professor of a college has a site with exactly what I’m looking for, but no website friends. I want to say, I am not anti-Google. As a matter of fact, for the most of my adolescent and adult life I was anti-Microsoft. (Microsoft. You can’t call the largest software company in the world «micro.» And soft is not the sentiment shared when something is rammed into our computers and overall computing experience, regardless of what I want.) But you have to give credit where it is do, and constructively criticize when it is needed. MSN pulls way more relevant results for me as of late. And I believe it is because they put more weight on the content of a page and site overall.
Google has done, and continues to do, some great things for the online community. Not too long ago, they bought a company that offered some CAD software. This company charged a nice fee for the software. Google bought them, worked with them, and made the software better, and free. We all know of Blogger, right? I hope so. Cus if not you may want to take a small look around this page. Before Google it was «Blogger? What the heck is a Blogger?» You can see the ever increasing number of new developments from Google at their Labs page. Most of this stuff is just really cool, and a good portion of it is something that we would use everyday. So, I love Google. And I likely always will. I just think they need to rethink ranking.
OK. I’m done.
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