The Destruction of the Web

Yet. Google's on it though.

>> The launch of Google Scholar Citations and Google Scholar Metrics may provoke a revolution in the research evaluation field as it places within every researchers reach tools that allow bibliometric measuring. In order to alert the research community over how easily one can manipulate the data and bibliometric indicators offered by Google s products we present an experiment in which we manipulate the Google Citations profiles of a research group through the creation of false documents that cite their documents, and consequently, the journals in which they have published modifying their H index. For this purpose we created six documents authored by a faked author and we uploaded them to a researcher s personal website under the University of Granadas domain. The result of the experiment meant an increase of 774 citations in 129 papers (six citations per paper) increasing the authors and journals H index. We analyse the malicious effect this type of practices can cause to Google Scholar Citations and Google Scholar Metrics. Finally, we conclude with several deliberations over the effects these malpractices may have and the lack of control tools these tools offer.

http://arxiv.org/abs/1212.0638

But things are worse than that! With few exceptions (Stack Exchange and Wikipedia are notable) most searches will return sites that have been SEOd.

My Google search for [spectacles cases] returns these two sites on the first page:

(http://www.spectaclecases.co.uk/)

(http://www.aglassescase.co.uk/)

> Welcome to SpectacleCases.co.uk. You will find a wide selection of Glasses Cases / Spectacle Cases / Sunglass Cases.

> Made from leather, fabric, metal or plastic finished to a very high quality. Hard and soft cases for spectacles, glasses and sunglasses. We also have a good selection of cheap glasses cases which offer great protection for your glasses.

> Welcome to AGlassesCase.co.uk. The one stop shop for Glasses Cases, Spectacle Cases and Sunglass Cases. We also sell a number of Glasses Cloths

> Made from a range of quality materials including leather, fabric, metal and plastic all finished to a very high standard. We sell hard and soft cases for spectacles, glasses and sunglasses. We also have a good selection of cheap glasses cases which offer great protection for your glasses.

These two different sites are the same company.

Maybe they're a great place to buy spectacles cases from, but it's vaguely upsetting that Google can create freakin' awesome stuff (A self driving car! It is actually wonderful and futuristic) yet can't fix this stuff. Obviously, Google are not to blame, and really the problem is with sleazy SEO and odd behaviours by vendors.

Because these search engines were not as powerful or accurate as Google at mining content from the web, you would tend to follow links more, relying on the overall navigational structure of the WWW rather than everything being the two step "Google terms -> Go to website in results page" process it typically is today.

Many people posted fragments called "web rings" on their web pages: these would be a linked "ring" of similar, related sites, grouped by a common interest in the subject matter. It was a useful (though very random and sometimes temperamental) way to discover similar sites and content.

Other sites had "guest books" where people could comment on the site and include a link to their own. There's little functional difference between guest books and today's blog commenting systems, except back then there was less traffic, so site owners tended to actually read the comments, respond to them often, and follow the links of the commenters back to their own sites.

Then SEO spam came along, and eventually most people realised 90% of the links in comments were probably not worth following. Then Google added nofollow, so the chances were the only person who would ever find your site through comments were the owner of the site you posted on - if you were very lucky and it wasn't buried in a sea of spam or one-shot snarks.

Or your definition of "SEO'd" is leaning more to manipulative/sleazy.

In your example about the spectacle cases, would the other site being an affiliate make a (huge) difference? If Google punishes companies that have more than one website, people would shift to affiliates or try to hide they own the websites in other ways. In a way I feel multiple McDonalds in one city is perfectly possible. However, there needs to be a balance between the "best" websites (be they from the same owner or not) and diversity of the results (a query deserves diversity).

[1] http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2008/10/the-importance-of-s... "We knew from the outset that Google would be a big part of our traffic, and I wanted us to rank highly in Google"

[2] http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/pagerank-sculpting/ "In the same way that Google trusts sites less when they link to spammy sites or bad neighborhoods, parts of our system encourage links to good sites."

[3] http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&ans...