Google feeding: a new phenomenon
I've notced a new (to me anyway) phenomenon.
After the joy of Dave Gorman's Googlewhack Advenure [Dave is a genius. I know him a bit, have been involved in the world of comedy a bit and honestly think he is doing some of the most original work anywhere while keeping it both light and funny] I am thrilled to discover a new Googlism.
Both John Gruber with Writing for Google and raelity bytes with Foreach rewind in Perl have posted to their websites recently with the explicit intention of entering helpful information into Google searches.
This is fascinating. Dave has noted that specific titles or phrases are indexed almost insantly and, if the information is good, will end up very highly ranked.
I think there is a significant change here and it's all good. Turning the 'search engine optimisation' concept on its head really. Instead of desperately trying to get your pages ranked higher by studying algorithms or major submission marathons, the key to a good ranking these days is simply to provide good data.
Google is getting really good now. We are reaching a point where 'beating the engine' is far far more costly than employing, say, a good copywriter. The best way to get well indexed these days is to have clean, well structured xhtml, the more semantically correct the better, with specific, possibly unique information.
I'm in a good mood so I imagine a scenario where that whole other world of web marketeers, the whole search engine industry, start to devote resources to getting their clients to move to standards compliant, high quality websites because it's cheaper and more effective than the old methods.
But seriously, Google is indexing and prioritsing data in exactly the way I want and the idea of posting specific well-titled 'answers' as they crop up in life seems a great way forward.
Cheers.
UPDATE: Traumawind is also talking about this very same issue: Traumwind - Daring Fireball: Writing for Google
Posted: Wednesday 21 July 2004 :: |
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