The Bots Inside My Head

I had been bemoaning the fact that many search engines seem to rank pages with little content, many ads, lots of paid links, and some obvious to readers, but not to bots, paid ads cleverly disguised as information links were getting great "page rank" while many deserving sites, full of good info, but not as seo savy, went virtually unnoticed, and then, a bit of information popped up in an seo newsletter that cheered me up a little. They are taking notice! There is some sanity in the search engine world after all!

This should really come as no surprise, since most of us think very similarly, either as a result of our Aristotelian thought training, or just a general sense of fair play, which seems to pervade much human thought in an open society. In other words, if I am thinking about it, there must be others doing the same.

Comments made to Rand Fishkin, by Vanesa Fox of Google, seem to indicate that Google is trying to pay more attention to at least one, and it looks like more, of the concerns many of us share. In particular, the issue of paid links. Paid links, seem to be a part of what looks a lot like "paid page rank", and this is not always a cash exchange, it may come in the form of mutual back scratching, or what used to be called the "Old Boy" or "Good Old Boy" network or system.

In the system as it is at the moment, a website may be penalized for linking to it's own, or other informational sites which might share certain key information content, or even appear to be link farms, while pages with little relevant information, might be ranked higher due to having great links. I understand the need to do this in the current "algorithm" structure since a pages importance is ranked by it's perceived popularity, and hence, it's usefulness, but if popularity can be bought, or faked, as it obviously is, then the system needs adjusting.

This seems to be what Google is doing.

Here is another thing that the bots inside my head tell me that there is a need to look into. If someone writes a useful article on a given subject, which is then picked up by other publishers, or is quoted from extensively, in very short order, it may propagate itself throughout the Internet, and become a liability to publishers, and the original writer, because of "duplicate content", and could eventually become a problem, for writers, ezines, and news aggregators as well. This may encourage new content, or newly redesigned content, but not necessarily relevant or important content.

The duplicate content issue needs to be revisited, and revised. It can be skirted by the linguistically clever. Content can be manipulated by being professorial on one hand and doing the old "fatback and grits" routine on the other. True, it may appeal to different audiences, and therefore may be valid in some respects, which only serves to strengthen the above stated opinions. If it is relevant, it is relevant, and it may be relevant to different people, in different ways, so why punish it's author, and publishers for disseminating it widely in it's original form?

If an article on irrigation is relevant to the contractor who does installations, it may also be relevant to the home owner having the system installed, who will look for the information in a different place. Why is it bad for this information to be both in the "Irrigation Contractors Weekly" and in the "Wary Home Owners Corner"? It may be relevant to both, but they will search for it in different ways.

Well, at least, Google seems to be taking some steps to level at least part of the playing field, and the system is always in a state of flux, so there is always hope that the changes will be good ones.