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Search Engines No Longer Represent All Web Sites  

:: Wednesday, October 13, 2004 ::

The Web is too big.

Though I've been feeling the bigness of it for a long time, this article, Filthy Linking Rich And Getting Richer! by Mike Grehan solidified it for me. I had no idea so many scientists and mathmaticians were picking apart the Internet as they are. And, they're making some interesting discoveries.

     "It may seem as if the web grows in a very unorganised and haphazard way. But that's not really the case. It's beginning to show powerful underlying regularities from the way in which web pages link together to the patterns found in the way users surf." says Mike.

I always knew the popularity contest emphasis Google pays to web sites would backfire some day. That day is here.

Web sites that have been around for a few years will always outperform newer sites added to search engine indexes regardless of whether the newer site is of better quality. Mike writes,

     "So are the "rich getting richer" insofar as linkage is concerned at search engines? Yes and it's a rapidly worsening factor. The experiment carried out covered data collected over a seven month period. And from that experimental data, they observed that the top 20% of the pages with the highest number of incoming links obtained 70% of the new links after seven months, while the bottom 60% of the pages obtained virtually no incoming links at all during that period."

Do As the Masters Do

Many of us have spiritual or motiviational teachers, from the past or present day, who have said something that clicked with us and made us followers, if not admirers. If you notice, many of our most beloved teachers are those who make themselves readily available to us. They'll travel the world, for example, to talk in shopping malls, hospitals, or spiritual centers. They speak from podiums, or join walks to raise money. Countless ways...but the point is that we can see them up close and personal. We get to know them and what they might offer.

This is what I think we need to do with our web sites now.

No longer can we rely on search engines and hope someone finds our pages. If you have a list of 30 web sites in one niche that you visit often, you know the ads are so redundant that you don't even "see" them anymore, let alone want to click on them.

We'll need to know our end-users, customers, readers, and yes, even The Potential Ones. Unless we make a gigantic effort to get off our butts and out into their worlds, they'll never know we, or our web sites, even exist.

One Person At a Time

Taking stock of my own situation, I've given more thought to who I want to provide services for. I'm well known in one industry, but this isn't enough because I know I can offer help to many different types of web site owners.

Mike's article mentions "hubs" and "social networking". He also injects a thought, courtesy of his own father, which further illustrates my interest in stopping the Big Gulp Promotion Approach. Mike's father once said,

     "Getting a million dollars from one person is hard. However, getting one dollar from a million people is really not so difficult."

Here in the USA two Presidential candidates have taken to the road to meet people and convince whomever they can that they deserve a vote. If not for Election time, they would be riding in their Limos or sitting behind their desks in offices filled with more polititicans, not voters.

This is what we do when we hide inside the safety of our own respective industries.

Link Litters

Mike's article states, "Among the chaos of activity and information on the web, scientists have analysed data which has been collected by the internet archive and other sources which has helped to uncover hidden patterns which hold many clues to what's really happening in cyberspace."

One of the clues is how communities remain contained within themselves. For example, web designers buy from sites that are targeted to web designers and post in forums on web design. Quality Assurance testing has its own community (think StickyMinds) and their members, articles and products are all contained within the cluster of the QA world.

But many QA testing methods are also interesting to usability people. Testing applications that block pages from being crawled is an SEO interest. Programmers would benefit from understanding theories discussed by the Human Factors industry. But you don't see a lot of cross-link breeding between these industry segments.

You do see in-breeding, to the point where in some cases, many of us are rehashing the same things, such as blogs that feature the same news items. How many SEO news blogs are necessary before there's a glut?

The Web, as I said, is too big. Voting by link popularity and link connections is not an accurate measurement of web site worth. It doesn't represent the people. It's like having two major political parties. Sometimes it's a vote for who scares you the least, or whose concerns match yours. This isn't enough to elect true representation.

We're in for changes in how we optimize and market web sites. Mike Grehan has already researched the future, and has launched the 3rd edition of Search Engine Marketing, The Essential Best Practice Guide.

:: posted by Kim Krause Berg on 10/13/2004 02:31:08 PM

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