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Google’s way out of the SEO morass
Posted by Mike Sugarbaker at 12:35 pm on 5/2/2005
If you use Gmail, Google’s free email service, you may have noticed some occasional variance in its login screen over the last month or so. Sometimes, but only sometimes, it says “Log in to Google Accounts” rather than “Log into Gmail” or whatever. Now, since Google has long made use of Gmail logins as the key to their new-ish system for Google Groups, and recently enabled search history for logged-in users, plus other stuff, it’s pretty clear that they have their eye on Google Account as a brand, for the short run at least. Maybe they’ll even integrate Google Accounts with Blogger usernames, although that would be a bear of a job. But I think they have their eye on something a lot bigger.
Google needs searchers to have accounts if they want to defeat search spam, the deceptive results created and artificially boosted by the efforts of SEOs, or “Search Engine Optimizers.” According to some, the percentage of total web traffic taken up by likely-inadvertent visits to non-legitimate sites, or Potemkin villages if you prefer, is getting up towards 25%. Google’s future is in advertising – search ads are about to overtake TV network advertising in terms of total revenue – and forces that tend to dilute searches on common consumer desires, or merely make them very frustrating, are a direct threat to that future. The PageRank algorithm, wherein sites are rated for relevance to a keyword based (at least foundationally) on links from other sites, is starting to look so game-able that it’s as much a liability as a strength.
How do accounts for searchers change all this? They enable a web-of-trust approach. Webs of trust work by anointing certain seed entities and having them trust other, less seasoned entities. As those neophytes gain experience, they can trust others, and so on. The way the original description (or at least the first one I found – which is much better and more thorough than the one here, naturally) is written, it talks about users in a community; search users are not exactly a community, but they are aggregable in lots of ways. Although I suspect that Blogger will be involved somehow, I don’t really have any clue how to apply the web-of-trust idea given those differences. (That’s likely among the many reasons why I do not work for Google.)
I just have a feeling that something is coming, is all. When it does come, whatever shape it takes, it’ll not only incentivize lots and lots of people to get Google Accounts, but it’ll be the first time in a long time that the search game changes in kind, not just in degree. Of course, the last time it changed in degree, the degree was so great that it became a difference in kind. That was when Google first launched.