The Problem with Google…
PageRank, conceived and named after Larry Page, is an algorithm that is used by Google that ranks websites in their search results. It does this by analyzing how many links point to a specific website and the value of those links. Websites that take advantage of keyword rich content on their sites tended to garner high quality links. This meant that in PageRank, it would be given priority from the rest.
It was only a matter of time until marketers developed schemes that could use PageRank to their own benefit. They simply did this by creating superficial, low quality, short but keyword rich content that would increase links and web traffic. Thus the birth of ‘content farms’, such as answers.com, e-How.com and wise-geek.com, to name a couple, came to be. The results were as intended – their websites rose up the ranks, which brought in traffic, which translates to money of course.
What was happening to actual substantive websites? They were being drowned out. In 2011, however, Google obviously aware of this issue introduced Panda. Panda, named after the Google engineer Navneet Panda who created it, essentially detected these phony sites and removed them from their SERPs clearing up the space for websites with actual content. But, of course as is everything, it is prone to errors. Many people with legitimate content have come forward to claim that Panda has negatively impacted their website’s rankings.
The “content farm” site Suite101.com has been Pandalized.
All of these complex issues made me think about how many websites compete for the top spots within their particular niche, and that is what most people actually get to see. Wouldn’t it be interesting if there could be a search engine that would do the opposite and fetch results that aren’t at the top but are refreshing and different albeit less popular? To my surprise, such search engines do exist. One such example is MillionShort which allows a user to remove the first 100, 1K, 10K, 100K or 1 million websites from the result set. This approach is an innovative way to get rid of the blanket of consumerism that plague search results from such sites like Google, and allow the user to discover relevant websites sans the filters that could be gamed or erroneously leave out genuine websites. The unpredictability and original new sites a user can discover can start to bring life into the web again.
Sources:
http://moz.com/blog/how-googles-panda-update-changed-seo-best-practices-forever-whiteboard-friday