Originally uploaded by JoeDuck.
The happy sno cone dude was dishing up the ice at the Google Party, SES San Jose 2007. This was my third Google Party and I’m always impressed by how clever and fun the Google Party remains after some 8? years of running it in conjunction with SES Conference.
Search Engine Strategies 2007 has wrapped up and I think the hottest topic this year was linking and how links are treated by search engines.
The irony of the link debate is that regardless of your view about *paid linking*, we now see that the paid linking abuses combined with aggressive anti-paid linking policies of the search engines have distorted how *unpaid linking* works, and this is nothing short of tragic because links are the key to the web.
I’m very concerned about how Google’s obsession with paid linking and other linking schemes has dramatically changed – and often poisoned the waters – around legitimate unpaid linking of the type done in the early web. I don’t have a solution other than much greater guidance from Google about what they see as legitimate linking patterns. NOFOLLOW rings hollow to me as anything approaching a solution here.
Hyperlinking was the brilliancy that launched the web. Tim Berners-Lee is sometimes credited with this concept of the hyperlink as the foundation of internet relevance.
Enter Google’s Larry Page who developed pagerank as a measure of a sites general level of community interest. This was a spectacular insight, based on the notion of academic citations. Page realized that ranking sites partly with a measure of the web’s own linking patterns was a great way to enhance the relevancy for a query. In a sense this was a global Web 1.0 social network where user interactions were measured and factored into the ranking mix. In this early web world links flowed fairly freely and without monetary considerations. Links were a vote for other sites or a favor to friends with new websites or just a way to play around with HTML.
Enter the power of the internet as a medium for commerce, leading to loads of cash, from many players who wanted to *rank high at Google* so they could sell more stuff or simply set up sites that would rank high so that highly ranked site could sell ads or use affiliations with others who were selling stuff. This led to an explosion in paid linking, off topic linking, massive reciprocal linking, and other link schemes and scams designed to raise ranking for sites using non-natural linking that would trick the Google algorithm into thinking the site was really more popular (ie more linked to), than otherwise.
Enter Google’s “NO PAID LINKS!” policies and aggressive crackdown on the practice of buying and selling links. This takes many forms including site penalties, “no pass pagerank” penalties, and Google’s recommendation that the “nofollow” tag be applied to any link that is paid as well as many others such as ‘self referencing’ links from comments at blogs. Blog comment NOFOLLOW is a good example of how Google policies may be distorting the logical growth of the web. If somebody leaves an intelligent and extended comment at a blog with a link back to their site they have created legitimate web content and the linking structure of that content should be incorporated into the web linking patterns. As a user *I want* people who actively engage in blog comments to rise to the top and I want them to reference their own blogs! Also, by simply making many forms of blog commenting irrelevant to ranking I think we’ve seen *diminished* tendency for people to comment because as a blogger they want to rank and they know this won’t help them. NOFOLLOW at Wikipedia is another great example of a problem, since in many cases a WIKIPEDIA link is an *excellent* quality signal that is destroyed with NOFOLLOW.
Most significant is the fact that most onliners now understand how valuable links are in a commercial sense and therefore are resistant to linking for this reason. This is the real tragedy. There are exceptions like Robert Scoble or Jeremy Zawodny who go to some length at their blogs to link extensively to new and interesting content. However on balance many bloggers – especially those on the infamous “A list” – now reserve links for their friends or for indirect commercial uses such as helping other sites get a rank boost.
This last point seems lost on Google as well as many A list bloggers when they discuss the implications of paid linking schemes and pay to post blogging. Indirect monetization is still monetization and changing the links game seems to be leading people to change – quite dramatically – the way they publish and link. Or perhaps more importantly changing people so they do not link like they used to do in the good old days. This is my main beef – people don’t link like they would have in the old days because they think they are “giving away big value for nothing”.
Linking, once the very heart of the web, are now the wampum of the web, and this is leading to a lot of undesirable consequences.
The link buying session was extremely intense and interesting. In short, Matt continued to suggest that link buying was distorting the natural patterns of the web and is a bad SEO practice while the SEOs on the panel argued that links do work and Google has no right to police them so severely.
Unfortunately and as I’ve always seen, the debate tends to dwell on extremes on both sides rather than the important middle ground. I have a lot more to say about this but it’s time for the Google Party!
Day one of the four day SES conference is wrapping up although a lot of the conference action takes place at restaurants and bars after hours. I think for most people the highlight of SES is the huge Google Party which will be held tomorrow night at the Googleplex in Mountain View. “Meet the Engineers” is one of only a handful of times each year when you can talk directly to a large number of people on the Google search team – the other is WebmasterWorld’s “PubCon” in Las Vegas.
One thing I learned today is the Google’s Marissa Mayer is an expert in Artificial Intelligence (yikes – ValleyWag says Marissa IS an Artificial Intelligence!), and I’m hoping I’ll get a chance to ask a few questions tomorrow after her keynote about where she sees Google’s AI efforts heading over the next 5-10 years. Larry Page was recently quoted as suggesting that a human-like thinking “algorithm” could well be cracked fairly soon, and Google is one of the places where this type of innovation might actually take place. That said, based on my talk with Matt Cutts a few years back I don’t think AI as a search driver is a Google priority. I was surprised then to hear that Matt felt quality AI driven search was still many years away. Google has to maintain a practical edge to things so they probably can’t put a huge effort behind a “conscious computing” effort, though I get the idea from Kurzweil’s book that a Googley “massively parallel” info architecture may be more likely to bring consicousness to a machine than, for example, the IBM Blue Gene style supercomputer.
Blogs covering or writing about the SES Search Conference
Session coverage roundup from Barry at Search Engine Land
Matt Cutts, of Google fame, recently spoke at WordCamp gathering for WordPress blog enthusiasts (like Matt himself, who blogs with WordPress rather than Google’s excellent blogging product “Blogger”).
This blog post points to Matt’s PowerPoint and several other sources for summaries of this presentation.
Matt’s view on SEO is important because most experts would suggest that he’s probably the most knowlegeable search expert *in the world* and is one of the few search engineers who is privy to basically all of Google’s Algorithmic secrets. Also, in my opinion Matt is honest and straightforward with advice, and therefore if he’s suggesting an SEO approach you are well advised to take it. I should note though that this view is not shared by some of the elite SEO people who seem to think Matt will sometimes “misdirect” people to protect the precious Google Algorithm.
My comment over there was:
Excellent post and links here Matt.
However I have a “beef” with the emphasis on linkbaiting and basic SEO as good ways to rise in the ranks (they ARE, but should not be). I’d argue that in an ideal search environment SEO would have effectively *zero* effect on ranks (because it’s communicating with the bot not the user), and linkbaiting things would have only a minor effect unless they were highly relevant to the query.
We now see a lot of SERPS where you see a bunch of sites, all similar, ranked more according to how their SEO, history, links, structure match Google’s expectations rather than how a user would view them. Google generally argues that these are essentially the same but they are probably only roughly correlated.
The fix for this would be greater transparency in the ranking process combined with greater penalties for being deceptive. If Google is going to aggressively defend the integrity of the algorithm the ranking process should be more accessible, especially to mom and pops who will increasingly flirt with disaster as they try to find ranking advantages.
Computer World says that Google may market an iPhonesque mobile device next year. I bet it’ll be great. I wrote an article over at the TechDirt Insight Community about this a few months ago (before the news from Computerworld – I didn’t realize Google had a phone project in the hopper already).
Here’s what I wrote over there in response to an insight community issue:
Google is in a spectacular position to launch a mobile device for many reasons, here are three:
1) Branding power. Google is already verb “to search online” and could become a noun with the “Google” handheld broadband/phone/pda.
2) Speed of development due to corporate structure.
3) Existing prototype.
Apple’s iPhone already exists as a new standard for this type of device, effectively saving years of prototyping. The Google device will have all this functionality PLUS better web integration (thanks to Google’s greater familiarity with online systems and also will have a LARGER touchscreen, which will ultimately determine the winner in this category because browsing ease is the greatest appeal of these devices.
Apple has hyped and branded this type of device already. However, it will have poor initial adoption due to cost and competition from inferior but similar devices. Google can subsidize the devices in part by letting this device Google’s mobile advertising platforms, undercutting Apple’s cost by hundreds of dollars per device.
Features and functionality: Much like the Apple iPhone, the device would have a relatively large touchscreen interface (but larger than iPhone – a key marketing point for the Google). Flexible web browsing without mobile programming required for sites. The device will provide a quality phone, high quality camera, and have PDA functionality. Pictures, voice, and PDA functions will automatically integrate with an online control panel the user can access from the device or from any computer. Google mail and Calendar online entries would synch with the device to allow offline mailing and calendar access. This feature would also serve to enhance Google’s existing Calendar and mail which suffer from “only available online” challenges.
What would you do to make it a valuable addition to the Google product portfolio?
Mobile advertising is an explosive market, and without hardware control Google may lose market share to companies that have hardware advantages. Also, for reasons stated above Google could create a superior device, thus winning both as a hardware and as an advertising provider.
Good luck Google. As a stockholder in Yahoo I sure wish they would create this type of thing but I fear … they won’t or can’t. Google can.
I really like Matt Cutts. He’s one of the most personable people in the search business while at the same time discussing and blogging complex search topics in an articulate and authoritative way.
Two really interesting issues are in discussion over at Matt’s blog. The first is Lauren’s controversial “official” Google post criticizing the movie Sicko and suggesting that advertising purchases at Google are the best way to win the info wars. Here’s my take on that little episode:
The challenge with big company “official” blogs is that they tend to suck. They are at best basic information outlets and at worst bad PR nightmares. Not because the authors are bad people, but because “official” company blogs reverse the optimal relationship between blogger and reader. For example here, at Jeremy Zawodny, and at Scoble (when he was with MS), the blogger develops a trusted, somewhat personal relationship with the reader. A company blogger can’t really do that. They are generally trustworthy honest people but they are constrained by not being able to bite the hand that feeds them and also contrained by our expectation that they are beholding to the employer.
Ironically Lauren crossed this line in both directions by giving her own personal opinion (good) at a corporate blog (unusual). But her opinion happened to line up very well with Google’s advertising agenda (hmmmm) and her own personal agenda of selling more ads (hmmmm).
The debates over conflict of interest at blogs are really heating up as they should until we can find ways to keep things transparent, honest as we continue to keep the discussions lively and robust.
The second issue is one I need to digest a bit more. Matt is rejecting the idea that Google’s webspam fight is a sham. Certainly Matt’s team works hard to fight search junk but the spam issue is a lot more nuanced than Matt acknowledges. Clearly there are conflicts between maintaining profits and providing users with the optimal experience. Lighter shading of Google advertising is a good example where it is unlikely users benefit from the lighter shading, yet it is certain Google gets a lot more activity from that User Interface “improvement”. Also, the definition of spam itself is very subjective and also very query dependent. If I’m searching for “Hotels” and get a list of Viagra sites the results are clearly “spammy”, but if I’m searching for Viagra those same sites may be exactly what I want.
This post “Googleizing Feedburner” has moved to Technology Report
Google’s increasingly clever and bold initiatives to help people cope with virtual “paperwork” underscore their brilliancy in providing a simple and highly productive computing environment that is *not very dependent* on your own computer or your own computer skills.
Google is by far the most successful of the big players in creating really simple but powerful ways to use computer power *without* messing around much with the computer. Where MS applications sit on your own PC, Google’s site on the internet servers they run and manage. It’s a black box to some extent but it ‘s a box that *works*. Problem solving for the user is simplified to maintaining an internet connection rather than worrying about configuration of programs and hardware.
Perhaps even more important than the applications is that this shifts the perspective of the company in a very powerful way. You can even see this when talking to some of the Google folks who generally are less enamored with *making computers work* as they are with *making systems work*. It’s a bit of a broad generalization but I think it’s true that culturally speaking, Microsoft and MS folks generally talk (and think) in terms of how people need to relate to the computing environment where Google folks talk and think in terms of how they can adapt the environment to meet the needs of the user.
Where MS says “hey, you need to learn to use MS Word” Google says “Hey, we need to make it really easy to do Word Processing”.
Is this obvious? Perhaps, but I think the importance of this distinction is largely lost on MS management despite the fact that most of the new hires probably understand this challenge all too well. Ironically MS is in a better position than Google to leverage the fact everybody is using MS programs now (browser, OS).
Would it be *so hard* to create powerful, socially driven and enhanced software and hardware support sytems? Not really, but I’m guessing MS is very busy trying to protect the profitable paid support systems. Also, it is hard for many people with MS cultural sensibilities to visualize details of the future where they’ll be increasingly challenged by those who want to take the computing out of the computer.
Joe Duck 