Google destroys the semantic web
When the PageRank algo was first invented, it was almost perfect: it used the semantic structure of the web, counting links as votes. Google was a small company that nobody knew of, and nobody cared about.
But now, when Google gives many sites 50-70% of their traffic, the incentives to cheat the algos are bigger than ever. It is very much like physics: you cannot measure a system without changing its state. Same thing happened here: now, every effort is not spent on linking to useful sites, but linking to sites that you have an interest in linking to.
Pragramtic webmasters put rel=”nofollow” on all “useful” links (that are intended for visitors), and only leave some sold or links to their own pages without the nofollow property. This works short-term, but in the long term it will destroy the semantic structure and, as a result, Google will have to invent a new way of ranking websites. So in the long term, this strategy won’t work.
Footnote: this should not be interpreted in any way that I dislike the “nofollow” param or that I don’t use it myself. These are just my reflections=)
April 6th, 2006 at 7:41 am
This is so true!
To bad we all are using these techinques ourselfs, actually we are forced to do it since others would have the edge if we didn´t…. sad but true.
Answer: Yeah Marcus, the competition forces everybody to find and employ the most sophisticated methods to improve rankings. But as it is now, I don’t think this will end up very well. When too many people use SEO, the quality of the organic results will drop even more than it has done so far.
April 9th, 2006 at 3:06 am
The trick to keeping your name high on Google without doing shady nofollow tricks is to come up with a unique name that gets fewer than 100 hits before you publish your site and then spread your site by word of e-mouth. Then other people will start searching for that name, and you’ll rank decent because nobody else is using that name for anything. Barring that, you have to think of a juxtaposition of concepts that nobody else is thinking of.
April 30th, 2006 at 2:31 pm
“The act of Google trying to ‘understand’ the web caused the web itself to change.” - Jeremy Zawodny
You are right but I don’t think the nofollow will “destroy the semantic web”. How many webmasters even know about that tag? 1% perhaps.
Here is an interesting thread about Google starting to use traffic patterns:
http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum30/33769.htm