be careful what you google for

Overheard...

"The Google method for reimbursing Web sites and ranking them has led to a proliferation of sites designed merely to collect revenue from Google. These sites may contain some superficial articles on a subject, but their main purpose is to trick the Google algorithms so they gain a high ranking and earn income from users who use their links. Google is constantly trying to modify its algorithms to stay ahead of the imposters.

The net result of all this "portal spam" is that searches done through Google become less useful. Instead of finding meaningful results, the user is confronted with a bunch of meaningless sites, while the really useful sites who are not "playing the game" end up relegated to the bottom of the results, if they show up at all. People end up abandoning the Internet for their locally focused and trusted source, the Yellow Pages."

-------------

from a related article:

..... I'm expecting that number to inflate considerably now that Google has disclosed that it is testing the placement of ads in syndicated RSS feeds. (See yesterday's Industry Standard article for more on this.)

Too bad, because the great value of RSS has been non-existent ad noise. Given the great wealth of blogs (and bloggers who need some cash to compensate them for the time they waste re-posting the comments of others), this has the potential to be a significant new revenue stream for Google and other search engines that will race to compete.

--------