Andrew Shotland over at Local SEO Guide had a great posted the other day about his analysis of backlinks to presidential candidate’s websites and remarkably the google algorithm correctly predicted the Democratic Winner; but was wrong on the Republican side according it to his analysis Ron Paul should have won hands down with more than 3 times as many links as Mike Huckabee. As we all saw though that wasn't the case. But anyone who has been following Ron Paul or his rise to internet fame knows that Digg users absolutely love Ron Paul they eat up everything that Ron Paul related. So of course he is going to have more links than anyone else.
So does this mean Google's idea of one link equals one vote is broken? Or is the Ron Paul phenomenon more akin to spam and therefore not as relevant? Because as we saw the number two Republican Mike Huckabee did indeed win. So maybe in Andrew's analysis he should have penalized Dr. Paul just like Matt Cutts would penalize a filthy spammer. Lets face it, Digg users basically spam consistently and blindly promote Ron Paul stories all of which of course point back to Dr. Paul's site. And as we all know it's a very limited number of Digg power users that really control the content of the Digg front page. And once it goes hot on Digg of course more and more people link to the story in hopes to get a little residual traffic from talking about the hot item. Voting up and talking about that item becomes the "in" thing to do. So it then becomes unfair to count each one of those links as a vote, because in essence they are manufactured links - in reality nothing more than a link farm.
So am I trying to same Google's algorithm is broken? No I am actually saying the opposite, that Google's algorithm is fairly on target as it goes with deciding what content is popular and relative. But it also shows a fundamental flaw in the Google algorithm, that people can give links and people can get people to get links and powerful people can reach more and more people garnering more and more links. So good news is that Google gaming will continue on as long as links are part of the equation. Even without links I am sure some portion of the Google algorithm will have some gameable component.
Google Operating System starts this fiasco with the "January 1 TCP/IP" query and how Google is unfairly rewarding new pages with inflated ratings, out raking rank for everything under the sun wikipedia. So of course since this comes from Google's mouth the gates open and a flood of bloggers start picking up the news and reciting this as fact like the algorithm really had changed. BlogStorm finally offered a voice of reason:
This search had very few results and wasn't commercial enough to trigger any kind of spam filtering so straight away bloggers started to rank highly purely based on simple factors like title tags.
He then goes on to talk about the Query Deserves Freshness and how that more than likely played a major part in the way that the results were displayed for the "January 1 TCP/IP" query that started all this madness. As BlogStorm points out in the excerpt below
Because the search term "January 1 TCP/IP" went from no previous search history and very few results to millions of queries in one day it triggered the QDF algorithm ranking new content highly.
So Google OS go on and continue to make a point that people then started to game google exploiting the new algorithm. But really any of us who have been following Google Trends and how it can be gamed like LocalSEOGuide.com has been showing us all of December know that this algorithm isn't new & isn't anything excited & isn't anything that can really be gamed in a spammy kind of way. It's probably more akin to spamming on the square.
But really none of what I said it was I think this post was about, this post was all about Google OS linkbait. And if you asked me it seems to have worked beautifully. Since October the blogosphere been a buzz with talks about Google Smackdowns, the evils of PayPerPost, how all sponsors must be nofollowed and finally Matt Cutts makes the revelation that you must nofollow for all links from compensated content even links that are editorial and not from the sponsor of the post. So all this negative buzz about Google, so Google OS decides hey let's write up something nice and get the blogosphere talking about something positive an algorithm change that they can exploit! Do you really think that the Google OS people had no clue about the QDF algorithm and the ramifications that it will have on "trendy" search terms? I think Google OS is gaming the bloggers and I think it worked brilliantly.
So what else is happening tonight ABC showcasing the Wife Swap Season Premier, On Fox we have the BCS Bowl presentation of the Fiesta Bowl Tostitos Bowl Tostitos Fiesta Bowl where we see the Oklahoma Sooners take on the WVU Mountaineers. What will a WVU Victory mean to WVU Football next season or better yet what will a lose mean to Oklahoma Football?
Well guess that's enough Google Trends Gaming for me :)