Time for a change – From link spam to user data
During a recent in interview with a journalist I was asked to consider the current state of Google, especially in light of link Spam and Google’s efforts to combat something that’s getting a little out of hand.
The last time I felt that Google was this open to abuse was probably ‘just’ before the Florida update of November 2007. Though, I’m sure this isn’t likely to happen anytime soon, the time seems ripe for a major shift in thinking.
Using connectedness to judge reputation and relevance was a revolutionary concept in 1996 but things have to move on. The problem with this approach is that relevance and reputation are defined by the published community.
A few years ago, a Google engineer pointed me to a problem – a Google results page for a search on ‘Table’. The first few organic results were about HTML tables, followed by a premiership football table followed by a periodic table and more html tables. Unlike the paid listings which were entirely dominated by furniture, the natural listings didn’t contain a single result about regular tables.
The reason was obvious, there are no published communities discussing furniture. Looking at the same SERP today, things really haven’t moved on.
A recent post by Dave Naylor considers the possibility of using Google ditching link data and factoring user data instead. I think he’s onto something. There is nowhere left for the algorithm to go other than to consider the user. And that’ll be a hard algorithm to Spam.
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