August 15, 2008

Hey, I thought this column was supposed to be a point/counter-point thing, not both people beating up on Google. :)

Frank, I'll disagree with your assertion that "Knols show up in the organic results faster than you can get them through Webmaster Central." If you follow the discussion on Sphinn, there's a person saying that knol pages actually took longer to get crawled than elsewhere on the web. And if you're relying on Danny's single data point of the featured knol page showing up in the top 10 after one day, I should mention that DaveN's post on the subject also showed up in the top 10 after one day. In fact, DaveN now ranks #2 while the knol page isn't even on the first page.

More generally, knol pages do not get some sort of ranking boost and do not inherit any sort of additional trust or authority because it's on google.com. Anyone can make a knol page vs. making the page somewhere else on the web, and the knol page won't receive any advantage that the regular web page doesn't.

Chris, regarding your assertion that buying links works, I'm assuming that you're looking at the backlinks of sites that do well for queries? The fundamental flaw in that theory is that just because a page has a particular backlink doesn't mean that backlink is working in terms of flowing PageRank or anchortext.

I remember several years ago, people were convinced that guestbook links were working when they weren't. Why? Because someone would check the backlinks to a competitor, see guestbook links, and assume that those links were making the main difference. At the time, we sorted backlinks by PageRank. To an SEO doing a competitive analysis, the first links that they would see would be high PageRank guestbooks, so the SEO would conclude that the guestbook links were the primary factor. That misconception continued long after guestbooks started receiving much less weight in Google. At some point, we decided to start randomizing which links to show, and this "I see these guestbook links pointing to my competitor, therefore I (wrongly) conclude that the guestbook links are what is causing a site to rank" situation was one of the reasons we started randomizing which backlinks to show. Another reason, just fyi, was so that sites with PageRank of less than 3 or 4 could also see some of their own backlinks.

Ok point taken mate. I will play some more... but seems Google pages seem to get positioning for local without any inbound links.

Thanks very much for stopping by Matt! I see what you mean...just because a link is in a reported footprint doesnt mean it is pushing value. BTW the only reason I dared question the Google is because Frank made me do it. :p Good seeing you albeit briefly this week, and I look forward to the promised removal of more spam.