Does Google Need A Disclaimer?
Posted on October 25, 2007
Filed Under seo | Leave a Comment
There has been a lot of discussion recently about Google’s latest update and specifically about drops in PageRank (see Greg Boser, Andy Beard, Daily Blog Tips, TechnoSailor and, for a list of other discussions SearchEngineLand). Many assuming that it is some sort of penalty.
Many years ago I worked in a casino. Very few people who entered the casino were under any illusions. They knew that the amount they left with could be, and probably would be, less than they entered with. My day job now is as a programmer in the financial services industry. In fact, I work for a stock broker at the moment. An industry that has possibly one of the best known disclaimers around – Remember, the value of your investment can go down as well as up.
I have never really understood why such a disclaimer seems necessary. It just seems obvious from the very nature of the investments that the value can go up, or it can go down, and it can do either of these for reasons that are completely out of your control. Most people on losing in a casino do not claim that the casino is doing anything it shouldn’t be. Most people when the stockmarket drops, affecting their investment, don’t claim that it is a conspiracy by the stockbroker. The latest brouhaha over PageRank though seems to show that it is not obvious to everybody.
So perhaps Google needs a disclaimer next to that little green bar – “Remember, PageRank can go down as well as up.”
While the possibility of a penalty is there, and perhaps some people are confusingly using the word penalised when they don’t mean to imply a penalty, I am not seeing many people attempting to first prove that this is not simply a change to the way PageRank is calculated for everybody.
What could have changed. A few, doubtless not exhaustive, ideas.
- Google changes how much of pages’ juice is passed on – seem unlikely but possible.
- The amount of juice passed by a page according to its position in the list of all links on the page has changed
- The amount of juice passed by a page according to the section of the page it is contained in has changed – It is well established that the SEs are good at determining what is content and what is boilerplate.
- The amount of juice passed by site wide links has been changed – Again, I was under the impression that it was well established that Google did not pass full juice for every site wide link. Note that this could affect Blogrolls.
- The amount of juice passed by links according to their age has changed
If you’ve got any others, please post them.
I thought it was also well established that one of the advantages to Google of considering so many, some interlinking, factors in its algorithm was that it made it hard to establish the exact importance of any one factor. This being the case, why am I seeing so many posts talking about establishing “a cause” or “the cause”. I wouldn’t expect Google to release a single factor (or even single digit factor) update unless they absolutely had to for exactly the same reason.
Some of the posts I think are being careless in the terms they use to discuss the issue; discussing a general change in the algorithm but referring to it penalising sites, or talking about “the cause” when they are actually looking for a combination of factors. Given the fuss, and paranoia, that surrounds any Google update I think that everybody needs to be careful in their terminology in order to keep the discussion productive. Any mention of penalties for example tends to bring those who aren’t important enough out of the woodwork to post their rationalisations.
Google is never going to stop changing its algorithm. With the number of people looking to game the system, as soon as they do they become the next Alta Vista. To close, perhaps the lesson to be learned is, again, from the stock market. A website is a long term investment. Continual work at it will, over the long term lead to gains in value but over the short term fluctuations can be, and should be, expected.
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