The subject is covered frequently in the blogosphere. It’s nothing new for many of you. I’ve been bitten by Stopdesign’s Google page rank for specific search queries several times. I just noticed the most recent instance. When John Gruber published “Writing for Google” earlier this month, he provided advice for getting a good rank for one page or article so those seeking its content are likely to find it. Follow his advice for content you want people to find.
There’s a flip side to this issue though. What happens when Google gives a particular page too high a page rank?
Matt Haughey recently found two good examples of sites (written about here and here) that have suffered from the adverse effects of a high page rank for one particular page. To be fair, both of the blog posts Matt mentions do actually discuss the subject for which people are seeking and arriving via a search engine. But other times, titles of blog posts coincidentally make use of search terms that are popular for completely unrelated reasons.
Matt has a theory why so many people blindly believe they’ve found the right place to leave comments, or get in touch with some person or entity. And I agree with him. In fact, I’d take his theory a step further. To many people, the Google search box is synonymous with the browser’s location field. It’s the same thing to them. With the Google Toolbar installed in IE, (or because it pre-exists in other browsers) the search field is almost indistinguishable from the browser’s location field. “I type something into that field, and Google takes me where I want to go.”
Case in Point #1
The most recent post I wrote on Tuesday, 24 May, uses a title consisting of a common, generic phrase meaning “new beginning”. I could have used any phrase I wanted, but chose something short and simple. Over the past few days, there were a couple comments posted to that entry that came out of left field. Both comments mentioned female names of which I have no association, or can even recall knowing someone by those names in the past few years. Both comments expressed frustration and disgust, and did so in a not-so-pleasant manner. Needless to say, they were immediately deleted for being irrelevant and offensive.
Today, I noticed a fair number of people were coming to Stopdesign by way of searching Google for a specific phrase. A phrase which happened to match the post title from Tuesday of this week. After searching Google for the phrase, I saw the problem. Stopdesign was just starting to get hit with the same issues as the sites Matt pointed out. Only my visitors were coming expecting to find some means of contacting (or spewing vitriol toward) the women of a current daytime reality television show. Notice I’m not linking to the show’s site, nor am I mentioning the show’s name. This is intentional, as I really don’t want Stopdesign to be ranked any higher for this query than it already is.
Glancing through the results, I also saw a post from Paul Scrivens which happens to use the exact same title. His post is about learning web design over again. I’m sure Scrivs is no more interested in hearing about the participants in this reality television show than I am.
Case in Point #2
Last year, I switched hosts for Stopdesign to pair Networks, a FreeBSD-based, rock-solid hosting service. One of the services made available to me after the switch was a certain filtering mechanism installed on the server to combat unwanted electronic messages. (Again, I purposely omit the name of such messages or the filtering tool used to combat them.) Once I learned how to enable and configure this tool, I was struck by how well it worked. From ~500 messages per day down to 50. I thought it was something worth writing about. The title of an entry I wrote last year to express my satisfaction with the results used the name of the tool, and nothing else.
(Note that I am not at all an expert on such tools, and my entry contained no exhaustive review of the service. After all, I barely knew what I was doing with it. I wrote about it, but not in any way that would be useful for somone wanting to learn more about the tool.)
Within two weeks, the post on Stopdesign about this tool had become the #3 result on Google for a query containing the service’s exact name. I thought nothing of it until I started getting inundated with messages one morning. This time, 500 per day was a drop in the bucket. Before I could shut down a certain means of contacting Stopdesign via this site, someone managed to write a script that slipped over 3,500 messages to me within the span of about 12 minutes. After I yanked the contact form from Stopdesign, and viewed server logs the next day, I saw that another 12,000 POST attempts had been made to the same URL, before the attack finally ceased an hour later. As it was, I got an inbox full of several thousand messages that morning. Had I woken up any later, many more would have made it through. And who knows if the script would have actually stopped after sending off 15,000 messages.
After thinking about the attack the next day, I began to wonder if it had anything to do with the high page rank for the combatting tool I had written about two weeks prior. I knew that those who proclaimed defiance against attacks were more likely to get attacked by others determined to take them down. Whether or not it was related, I took action. I deleted the post from MT, removed all traces of it from files on my server, then requested that Google remove that result from their cache. After another week, Stopdesign was completely eliminated from results for that query.
More Responsible Title-Writing?
Don’t get me wrong. I’m completely happy with the page rank for terms relevant to the associated names and typical content of this site. However, these odd coincidences keep occurring with blogs where machine-processed algorithms can’t always accurately calculate the relevance of a phrase or a name when it’s used in different contexts.
Sometimes, I’m glad to find a weblog with a review of a product I’m thinking of buying, or with advice about visiting a certain city. These posts provide personal or local views of something I won’t find in mainstream media outlets. But I’m positive that shoppers looking to furnish a dining room get sick of seeing all these pages about eliminating tables and using CSS. What does CSS have to do with their dining room? In Case #1 above, I was unaware that the title I used for my entry precisely matched a temporary blip in pop culture. Am I at fault for writing a short and simple title that accurately described the content of my post?
I understand the value of responsible title-writing for blog posts. Perhaps even more so now. But a single writer can’t always predict (or be responsible for) existing uses of every noun, verb, adjective, and adverb combination. If someone kept a popular personal blog, and wanted to write about the victories of a family member previously inflicted with a terminal illness, does this mean using the word “Survivor” in the title of a post needs to be avoided, lest that someone be inundated with insensitive folk trying to contact Rupert or Jeff Probst. Or worse yet, begging for the opportunity to be the next Survivor?
Update: I decided to open up comments on this entry after getting several positive messages from readers. I’m interested in what others have to say about this.
Posted at 1:18pm in Site, Technology
43 comments (Comments closed)
I’ve wondered about problems like that, say if people wanting to design a room or something using tables, what kind of search results they would get. And how disappointed they would be.
I agree, using (dare I say) more semantic titles for our posts is a good thing, however I imagine the prowess of search engine designers will catch up to and defeat these sorts of problems.
Isn’t this just a symptom that’s popping up because almost all weblogs are written using tools that by default generate valid pages that use
titleand headers correctly? The hope is that the rest of the web will catch up so that the “official” sites for these errant searches will find their correct places in search rankings.Since the Weblogs, Inc. CMS trackback isn’t fully functional yet, I thought I’d post a note to let you know that this post and related posts have been discussed over at The Nanonpublishing Blog.
David, that’s certainly a great point. Most Blogs are Google-Friendly.
David: The hope is that the rest of the web will catch up so that the “official” sites for these errant searches will find their correct places in search rankings.
Yes blogs are Google-friendly. They use semantic markup, proper heirarchy, and are generally heavy on content with lots of juicy keywords strewn about. But I’m not so sure that the “rest” of the web will catch up so quickly — if they ever do. We could be talking years here, depending on how the Web evolves, or what it turns into. It’s not just a simple matter of using the
<title>tag properly, and use of structural headings. Google’s page rank takes a lot more into account than that.One factor is how many other web pages link to the page in question, and in what context. It’s a form of the Web of Trust™. With the viral nature of weblogs, there’s a lot more inter-linking that goes on. This is only increasing as blogging and personal publishing become more popular. The more a page is linked around the web, the more relevant it’s deemed, the higher its page rank is. Especially if all those sites agree on the same keywords to associate with that site. It’s why the concept of Google Bombing actually works right now. Maybe (hopefully) not for long. But it does for now.
Maybe the problem isn’t that blogs or any other site with semantic markup or page ranks or google being friendly to it. Its the the rest of the Internet with way more popular content with less semantic code isn’t showing up when it should. Perhaps better evangelism is required to get these larger sites up to date and return the page ranks to normal. Its happening slowly, but the rate at which new blog content is produced is much faster than more relevant content from “reputable” sources.
Perhaps our little revolution is working a little too well.
This happens to me constantly. Usually I’ll post an entry to my weblog that discusses a problem I’m having with a piece of software, or whatever frustration I’m having at the moment.
After exhausting all possible remedies, I use Google to look for relevant information, and up pops my rant in the first few results.
It’s fun the first few times it happens, but then it gets really old :)
I have to believe that psuedo-semantic validating markup has something more to do with page rank than we tend to give it credit for.
My own site just doesn’t have nearly as many inbound links as any popular blog or content heavy commercial site and yet I sometimes rank in the top 1-5 on certain google searches. ~16 inbound links vs. ~3,460.
Of course once this page is indexed that would soon be 17 links. :)
<off-topic>
I’ve been lurking, learning and in general gaining huge appreciation for your work and shared knowledge since the wired re-design. Thanks.
</off-topic>
<off-topic>Another lurker speaks! ;)</off-topic>
The idea of being more responsible when writing post titles is fundamentally a good one but it also annoyingly restricts creativity: I for one enjoy trying to come up with silly puns or references for some of my post titles. If I had to stop and think, oh wait, Google will misinterpret this, soon all my entry titles would be pretty dull.
I firmly believe that, in general, bloggers have a certain amount of responsibility to prevent Google’s results from becoming clouded and unhelpful.
No-one ever discovers a new weblog from a Google hit; one finds them via the blogrolls of weblogs one already reads, or from a comment someone new has left on another site, or from a personal recommendation. There’s absolutely no need, in my opinion, for all weblog posts to be indexed by Google by default. It’s a waste of resources and, as you have discovered, can lead to false hits from people who don’t “get” what kind of site it is they’ve found. Sure, this may ultimately be a fault with Google’s present algorithms, but perhaps even Google needs a helping hand.
It’s with these points in mind that I decided a while ago to prevent search engines from indexing my archives and recent posts index [or, at least, those that respect
robots.txt—those that don’t soon get banned entirely via.htaccess!]. For a time I enjoyed not getting random hits on posts that included keywords from a person’s search but weren’t actually concerned with whatever it was they were after. But then I realised I could do more that just completely hide from random Googlers: I could selectively allow the indexing of certain posts that I considered “worthy” [and this is in no way an egotistical opinion of the quality of the post!] of being indexed.The way I did this was to allow ‘bots back into my archive directories [still preventing indexing of my ever-changing main weblog page—what’s the point of an immediately-outdated entry in Google’s database?], but make use of the Supplemental Category Tags MT plugin [http://mt-plugins.org/
archives/entry/supplemental_category_tags.php ] so that only posts which I gave the category “Index” were actually spidered. This is what I have in the
<head>section of my individual archive template:<MTIfNotCategory name="Index"><meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow" /></MTIfNotCategory><MTIfCategory name="Index"><meta name="robots"
content="index,nofollow" /></MTIfCategory>
[This is obviously MT-specific and I’m not sure the idea could be put to work in other blogging tools unless they have corresponding
If[Not]Category-like tags.]This allows the vast, vast majority of my posts to go unnoticed by Google et al, but every now and then I write something that I think would be of interest to more than just my small band of regular readers, and so I give that post the category “Index”—the above code snippet does the rest.
Of course this does not solve the problem of false hits on entries that are given the category “Index”; moreover, for a weblog such as this one most of the posts are indeed worthy of being indexed, so I’m not recommending that Douglas should implement this idea at all. It’s really just a way for me to ensure that only those posts “written for Google” [as John Gruber puts it] get indexed, whilst my other ramblings slip by unnoticed by the general population. :)
I guess the only long-term solution is, that we deprecate english (or any other) language and create a new one with namespaces and unique identifiers… ;-)
But seriously: This problem is IMHO not specific to searchengines, natural language is ambiguos and unspecific. The problem can also arise on the street, it doesn’t as often only because there is usually only a handful of people around when talking. Usually what happens is that when you think you hear something familiar you probably either ask to clarify or you keep listening for more information before you decide if it’s really the same topic you though it was. Or wether it only sounded similar.
The problem is not with blogs or with search engines, it’s with
1) thoughtless/uneducated (in terms of the web) people that don’t cross-check before they act
2) The amount of many-to-many communication is where it has never been before in history. And since more and more people start using english (at least as a second language), it is inevitable that the same words will be used in more and more different contexts, and thus have more and more different “deeper” meanings (for lack of a better word).
Google already does something against it: It shows different rankings depending on what part of the world you’re searching from. However this is also something that gets criticized a lot, because it gets in the way often times.
If you use Searchengines or the web in general in an educated way, it works. There is just so many things that those people (responsible for the stray comments) are doing wrong (which could easily be corrected by them), that I really don’t think the web/blogs/searchengines should change its ways to accomodate with them.
So I’ll close my comment with the saying:
“Those who try to build idiot-proof systems always underestimate the persistence and ingenuity of idiots.”
Some thoughts on the issue.
I posted about pizza hut’s online pizza ordering system almost a year ago, mostly making fun of the colors and size of the buttons used on the site. I made the mistake of calling the post “ordering pizza online.”
I now rank pretty high (#2 at last check) for “ordering pizza online” and “papa johns coupons.”
Anyways, I recently got a comment informing me that “I think that ya’lls pizza is the worst pizza I have ever ate in my life.” Nice…
This is a very interesting issue… Duly noted by myself recently as a post at Yellowlane has shot the site extremely high in the rankings (1, 2, or 3 depending on the variation) for the term “Slim Shady.”
Ranting Eminem fans are the last thing I need in my life.
On the flipside, I recently had some troubles with a certain company and a certain service they provided. While normally happy with said service, it utterly failed recently.
The company needs to know about it, but sadly, customer service is a thing of the last century. Perhaps a high ranking page would at least encourage someone internally to pay attention to the issue.
And on that note, perhaps I am the real slim shady.
Since I first learned that Google looks at the words used to make a link, I’ve found that has begun to influence which words, in a sentence, I choose to form a link. If, on my weblog, I write, “Mark Pilgrim has up another post on the history of the evolution of XML semantics and why the standards came out as they did,” I might have once made a link around “history of the evolution of XML” but now I’m more likely to choose “XML semantics” because I don’t want Google getting confused by the use of the word “evolution.”
It seems to me that, having read this, I’ll now be influenced in regards to what Titles I write.
I feel at least partially responsible for the quality of markup generated by default by blog software. Most of the tips from my “30 days to a more accessible weblog” series were incorporated into the default templates of Movable Type. Now complete newbies who know nothing about HTML are pumping out page after page of valid, semantically correct markup. Now that Blogger has redesigned with per-page archives and new templates, this problem will only get worse.
There are other factors too. Weblogs are not only interlinked across the community, but each weblog itself is well intra-linked within its own site, which Google also likes. Archives link to previous/next pages, over to monthly, over to category, up to home page, etc. And of course blogs are mostly accessible text, which Google values above all else. (“Google’s just a blind user with 100 million friends.”)
You’ll never stumble onto a more Google-friendly publishing system than blogging software.
I think that to really solve the problem, blogging software will need to incorporate a solution similar to David’s. When the system is installed, it always stops its index pages being grabbed by search engines, and it also by default blocks Google spidering archive posts unless the weblog user specifically says otherwise.
I wonder how long it’d take to update the major blogging software to incorporate that, and how long it’d be before you saw a significant change in search results.
Of course, the other solution is for the more relevant sites about topics to use proper markup, domain names and somehow encourage people to link to them (which I don’t think counts as much as it used to, so maybe it’s not so important…)
Perhaps it’s the librarian in me, but when I find a post of mine getting a lot of attention, I tend to add comments pointing visitors to other (better) resources or providing additional information which might answer their question without the need to search further.
Blogs are often useful, often have answers or good pointers to where I can get the answers I need, and I like them showing up in my search results. I DO discover new blogs that way, actually, and I like serendipitously stumbling into some interesting site I would never otherwise have found.
In general though, I’d still say Google ranks blogs about 20% heavier than it should.
Hi Doug,
I can understand your concerns. In the second case, it is obvious that the title and the subsequent pagerank in Google resulted in the mailflood pouring onto your desktop.
In the first case, however, I do not think that Google, or your choice of titles are to blame. This is the reality of the web: some people do not stop and think before they crank out their message. After all, these people could have easily noticed that they’re not on the site of the network.
There’s not much you can do if people stop thinking before they act. And maybe (just maybe), this effect will only grow stronger as the web reaches the late majority and laggards. Something with eternal September, iirc. ;-)
Write what you want. Leave it up to the search engines to rank you appropriately.
I think that clean valid markup is worth a lot in google. Before I started using MT I wrote the code by hand, using descriptive headings, alt text and captions after content photos.
I also have the menu content after the page content, which I think boosts the value of the terms on the page in google.
My site doesn’t have lots of links (and it had less back then) but it still ranked very highly for certain terms (#4 for “scottish parliament construction” which I have a couple of pages of photos of from a site visit, and that is all)
If companies get on with writing clean compliant markup now, then they might not fall too far behind blogs. Though the interlinking between blogs may still give them a massive “unfair” advantage.
One useful way of indirectly linking to another site is to use one of the url shortening (or obfuscating) systems described at NotLong.com
Handy when you want to link to someone, but don’t want Google to spot it.
Jim, that doesn’t work. It’s been confirmed by GoogleGuy on webmasterworld.com forums that Google follows through those URL shortening sites automatically. The ones that use server-side HTTP redirects even pass on your PageRank boost to the target site (so they’re not a good way to link to someone you don’t like).
Another case in point spotted this morning: Googling for SBC Park ranks a Stopdesign page higher than the domain (sfgiants.com) of the official site for the San Francisco Giants.
I say “domain” because sfgiants redirects to mlb.com, which is [fortunately] ranked higher than Stopdesign.
An old thread in the Debian GNU/Linux mailing list contained the phrase “dueling banjos” in the subject line, and became a top search result for that term. For years now, the lists have been getting misguided requests for “dueling banjos sheet music” or “dueling banjos mp3s”, and various mis-spellings and variations of those terms. This just increases the number of search phrases that turn up in the list archives, and perpetuates the cycle.
Maybe in addition to meta-keywords there should be something like “negative keywords” in page description. When I look at my site referrers I have very good idea which keyword phrases lead here just by coincidence - would be very nice being able to tell Google about them :-)
“negative keywords”
That’s a great idea. I’ve wanted something like that for quite some time now. But even if it was proposed and standardized, how long would it take to get it into IE and Mozilla?
“negative keywords”
That’s a great idea. I’ve wanted something like that for quite some time now. But even if it was proposed and standardized, how long would it take to get it into IE and Mozilla?
I wonder if simply specifying meta keywords [in the usual, “positive” sense] is taken into account by Google?
By specifying a few keywords which are particularly pertinant to the document, would that force it to appear lower down in the results of a search than it would have done had the keywords not been specified at all, if the search used terms that appear in the page but are not among the keywords? Perhaps the positive keywords—words that say “this document is definitely about these things”—have a negative effect on all other words. Anyone seen any evidence of this?
I thought the whole point of PageRank was how many times and in what context other people linked to your site. Could it be that your RSS and Atom feeds appear on so many sites that you manage to suddenly become relevant? I believe there is a way, on Google, to find who links to a certain page. It would be good, of course, to look at your own referrer logs for trends.
And while there are many ways of trying to protect a blog, the stupidity and/or mean-ness of others always puts a damper on things. Build a better moustrap and they’ll build a bigger idiot.
Interesting article. I actually hadn’t ever thought of the possibility of untargetted traffic coming through pages which contain just the right amount of PR and keywords to make it high enough for a negative result. I think if I ever make an article like “Starting Over Again” I’ll have to keep spiders off of it!
- James
My quotations site shows up pretty high in the search ranking for a few people’s names, so I regularly get email addressed to Andy Rooney or George Carlin or even Malcolm Forbes, who died over ten years ago. It usually amuses me greatly.
The funny thing is, even if I’m not the #1 result, I still get the email - because my site is the first they find that has an obvious email link.
I don’t think bloggers (or other site maintainers) should give this whole issue one bit of thought. It’s either bad search queries or bad search results, and neither is your fault.
Anyone talk about this idea yet: anti-keywords.
Sometimes there are words that you know you want to be disassociated with that could cause some mix ups when paired with other keywords in your pages. Case in point: I’m putting together a blog about my summer internship, but I would really like to make the company name an anti-keyword, so people searching for info about the company don’t happen upon my blog.
Anyone like the idea?
The problem is not just limited to titles, it extends to the entire page content. Trivial example: some time ago, I saw in my server logs I was getting a lot of hits from folks searching on Google for “ann ha***way naykd” [sic], and checking it out I found that my then current blog page ranked highly in that search. I had written a post that mentioned Shakespeare’s wife, Ann Ha***way. In a different post, but at that time on the same page, was the word “naykd” [sic]. I had no idea (though a number of people since wrote to tell me) that there was a young actress named Ann Ha***way whom it seems many people are interested in seeing naykd [sic].
Without thinking I even compounded the error, by writing a blog post on the phenomenon… and now, that post has top ranking on Google for “ann ha***way naykd” [sic]. Perhaps it’s just as well I don’t have comments enabled, or I’d probably be getting enraged searchers asking “Where are the pics of Ann?”
The point is, we can’t foresee all the ways in which internet users — particularly the less savvy — might misunderstand what they are looking at, so I’m not sure it’s even worth trying. My business name is similar to that of a French hotel chain, and I get a lot of enquiries through my business sites about vacancies in this or that hotel, even though it’s blatantly obvious from the sites that they have nothing to do with hotel accommodation. I used to write back to these misguided souls pointing out their error, but I stopped after realising I just don’t have the time. As Sencer said (comment 10), the problem is with unwitting or thoughtless users, rather than bloggers or search engines — even in the Ann Ha***way example, Google is just doing its job. As an engineer, I’m convinced of the value of fault-tolerant design; however I can’t be responsible for anticipating every way in which something I write may be misconstrued.
Note: I’ve intentionally edited Keith’s comment to scramble/obscure the search phrase he mentions several times. I really don’t want Stopdesign to share the problem of showing up with Keith in results for that query. —Douglas
I like David’s idea of anti-keywords, but there are several problems with this.
First, a W3C Specification would be needed. Then Yahoo! MSN and Google would have to embrace the concept, as they are the kings of the Search Engines. Finally, how does one deal with the “Ann Ha***way Naykd” scenario for customized content that is database driven, and delivered customized to the user’s selection.
Just some things to ponder. Sorry Douglas for being slightly off topic.
Note: Same edit here as in Keith’s comment. —Douglas
I find this very ironic, since the webpage for my father’s small manufacturing business - not many links on that “web of trust” - has the darndest time getting any kind of google listing at all for the appropriate product searches even when you search specific for the name of the product in quotes - while offhand comments on totally unrelated pages, sometimes cached and no longer available, regularly make it onto the first google page. Which makes one wonder, just what/how good/use are these search engines anyway? Now please excuse me while I google again.
Interesting post. I had the unfortunate bad taste to write about the movie “Troy”, using the phrase ‘brad p***’s a**”.
Luckily, I’ve dropped to about the third google page on that search.
Never will I be so careless again.
Thankfully, I was more cautious in the title of the post.
I have a personal blog with a very small readership… about a month ago I happened to mention a song (in the first paragraph, not the title), and since then about half the hits on my site come from people looking for that band…
The biggest problem IMO is that it’s a vicious cycle - my blog stays up near the top of the rankings because people keep going to look, and people keep going to look because it’s second or third on the Google or Yahoo or whatever search pages.
Thanks for the thought-provoking post.
I’m always amused by the referrals I get from search engines. My site is a satirical blog about my daily bathing habits. (www.TheDailyShower.com)
Some high lights:
Google #2: 55% of French don’t shower daily
Google #3: miss her kiss her love her that girl is poison
Google Malaysia #1: celebrities shower
Google #1: lever the beaver
Google #1: guinness “oldest virgin”
Google #1: debathification
This is an area of that the Semantic Web hopes will be cured some how. As an IT Architect, one of the greatest tasks I have an most projects is developing a common vocabulary and usage that all of the participants share and use alike (an Ontology). This is very difficult when you have a team of 10 or 12 people from different parts of the same organization. It is almost impossible when you are talking about the world at large. My example when I start up teams is the word “anchor”. Madison WI sits between two lakes and many people boat for recreation. I usually have a couple web application people on the team. I have the team members write down one definition for “anchor”. I always get “an object you use to tie off a boat when at sea”, “to tie down an object” and an “HTML tag”. I ask, which is right and which are we talking about? This is how I open the discussion on the importance of using a set ontology through-out the project.
The issue with search engine rankings is that they have to determine which anchor you are using so they can rank you appropriately. Given enough other data and a smart enough search engine, they might find the right context.
This is an interesting take on the issue of semantics and ontology. Thanks for the new perspective on the problem.
- Jim
I seem to get this problem a lot too. Often times I’ll write a post entitled something like “[something] Sucks” because of some minor problem I’m having with it, and then a couple months later that weblog entry will start getting plastered with people either saying how stupid I am for using that software, agreeing with me for how badly it sucks (when really I don’t agree with them), or debating with me about where and how it sucks; if they’d just read the damn entry instead of responding to the title then they might not actually feel it necessary to post the comment they post.
Then there’s always the people who are bored and search on “i am bored,” “lalalalala,” and “stupid cat” — all which have corresponding entries in my weblog.
Interesting article, thanks Douglas!
I honestly had never thought about the title that I used, except how I used it on my page. Still lots of things to learn!
Nice article. Beyond the correct markup of the blogger tools, and the high interlinking of blogs, I’d like to add other causes.
1. The web is technology biased. It’s still a geek thing. Technology is no doubt the second most common subject. That’s why searching for apple in Google sends you to a technology company, instead of a site about the fruit. Tech sites show better in search engines.
2. Google likes fresh pages. Frequently updated blogs also gain in here.
3. As time goes by, the publications with a lot of general content that were popular in dead trees (aka newspapers) are raising barries to access their content. Almost all newspapers force you to login to see their pages. Google can’t login. The nice side effect is the greater space for personal voices in the public opinion.
BTW, why not forbid comments when the user is comming from Google?
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