URL: http://diveintomark.org/archives/2002/10/03.html#when_an_engineer_flaps_his_wings
Date: 2002-10-03T01:31:51-05:00
Remember that saying from chaos theory about how when a butterfly flap its
wings, it can cause a hurricane a month later halfway around the world? As
several people have already noted, Google has made some major changes in their
most recent update. The weblogging community was hit hard (for instance, I used
to be the #1 "mark"[1]; I am now #6). The changes appear to be the result of an
attempt to stop two phenomena: explicitly selling ads based on PageRank[2], and
Google bombing[3].
Specifically, Google is now apparently cross-checking link text with the linked
site, and discounting or ignoring links whose text does not appear in the
linked site. This all but kills off Google bombing. Searching for "go to hell"
[4] no longer takes you to microsoft.com[5]; searching for "talentless hack"[6]
no longer finds ohmessylife.com[7], although it finds a lot of people who were
previously participating in the Google bombing. No definitive word yet on
whether Google is actively penalizing such sites.
Unfortunately, the algorithm tweaks necessary to stop these two techniques have
caused a wide range of collateral damage, apparently coming down hardest on
medium-to-large sites that had previously been doing everything right (as far
as page structure, link structure, accessibility, and general honest hard work
putting together a usable and useful site). The Webmasterworld forums are alive
with complaints and speculation:
- New update, pagerank death?[8]
- September 2002 Google Update Discussion - part 1[9]
- Let's find out what happened - Sept 2002 Update - pt. 2[10]
(Side note: amongst the confusion, it has been suggested that Google is no
longer indexing ALT text in images. I can confirm that this is absolutely
false. Searching diveintomark.org for "gimli"[11] finds my entry of July 29[12]
, where "Gimli" is mentioned only in the ALT text of an image.)
Regardless, Google's search results in general appear to be significantly
degraded in many key areas. The forums are full of people complaining that spam
sites, doorway pages, and obvious cloaking attempts, which Google used to be so
good at filtering out, are now popping up in top spots with disturbing
frequency. Nobody in the forums wants to talk about which keywords they're
tracking, so I tried to find my own concrete example of crap search results. It
didn't take long.
- Searching for reservation hotel[13] brings up an empty sub-page[14] of a
hotel reservation company in Italy[15] as the first result. This seems
unhelpful, and unlikely to be relevant to the average US-based consumer (and
Google absolutely knows I'm in the US based on my IP address).
- Searching for news observer nc[16] (the News & Observer is a Raleigh, NC
newspaper) does find The News & Observer[17], but it also finds an Internet
betting spam page[18] at #7 and a non-existent page[19] at #9.
- Searching for eminem[20] gives us two generic portal pages, a non-existent
site, and a site that redirects to a site that continuously redirects to itself
(I am not making this up). And this is just on the first page. Good thing I
didn't care that much about Eminem to begin with, because Google just isn't
that helpful.
Many people in the Webmasterworld forums are now suggesting that AllTheWeb.com
[21] has better search results overall. Just as a single comparison, their
results for "eminem"[22] do appear to be much more relevant. Is this the
beginning of the end of Google's reign?
[1]  http://www.google.com/search?q=mark
[2]  http://www.pradnetwork.com/affiliate.htm
[3]  http://uber.nu/2001/04/06/
[4]  http://www.google.com/search?q=%22go+to+hell%22
[5]  http://www.microsoft.com/
[6]  http://www.google.com/search?q=talentless+hack
[7]  http://www.ohmessylife.com/
[8]  http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum3/5646.htm
[9]  http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum3/5688.htm
[10] http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum3/5723.htm
[11] http://www.google.com/search?q=gimli+site%3Adiveintomark.org
[12] http://diveintomark.org/archives/2002/07/29.html
[13] http://www.google.com/search?q=reservation+hotel
[14] http://www.venere.it/home/italy.html
[15] http://www.venere.it/
[16] http://www.google.com/search?q=news+observer+nc
[17] http://www.news-observer.com/
[18] http://www.linkslsgolfworld.com/king-arthur-knight-of-the-round-table.htm
[19] http://www.nando.net/nt/nao/
[20] http://www.google.com/search?q=eminem
[21] http://www.alltheweb.com/
[22] http://www.alltheweb.com/search?query=eminem