Tag: Wikipedia

Google Cannot Do All Internet Advertising

Last week saw the launch of Google’s Knol, a sort of Wikipedia With Ads. This is a major event, which will impact most Internet stakeholders in very significant ways. It had been running in a Beta version since December 2007 but now is open to all.

There were many at its start who questioned the wisdom of such an online property. Richard Ball set out the counter arguments well in his post, Google Knol Signals the Apogee of Google’s Hegemony. Nevertheless Google has pressed ahead and we must all learn to live with the consequences. There are many weighty questions to consider such as that posed by Darren Rowse. Is Google’s Knol A Wikipedia Killer or a Blog Killer?. The implications for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) are even more unclear.

The only ones who are clearly advantaged are the advertisers with more advertising vehicles to consider. Google’s competitors will clearly not take this lying down. Many new opportunities will likely arise other than Adwords. For example Performancing is putting an extra push behind its Targeted Blog Advertising.

We are certainly living through interesting times.

Has Wikipedia gone "No Follow"?

There’s a thread on the DigitalPoint Forums asking “Wikipedia gone No Follow?” I assume the contributors have done some checking but it certainly doesn’t seem to be happening on all pages as yet. If it were, I think it would be an excellent move on Wikipedia’s part. If you’re motivated to edit an entry and you get some traffic by the excellence of what you wrote, well so be it. It certainly works for me.

In a sense, Wikipedia is correcting the fallacy in the whole Google PageRank approach. It’s like Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. There are some things you can’t measure. If you try to measure them then they’re not the same. Once Google says inlinks will boost a web page’s relevancy, then of course everyone, often supercharged with dumb computer programs, generates as many inlinks as they can.

If Google had been smart they would have kept PageRank as a corporate secret like the KFC or Coca Cola secret recipes. It’s a great principle provided you don’t tell anyone about it. So they should have gone public with the BrinBoost, naming it after the other founder. The BrinBoost would be a measure of the value of the outbound links or outlinks you put on a webpage. If everyone thought that the BrinBoost was the key factor they would be motivated to improve the quality of what they write.

You could even have a BrinBoost ‘thermometer’ with BBs from 0 to 9. They could then have devoted say 5% of their staff to supporting the BrinBoost approach.

They wouldn’t abandon the PageRank thinking of course but it would be buried within those 100 factors they use for assessing relevance. This secret would be known to only a few high priests within the Googleplex. So they’d have the best of both worlds. They in fact would have improved relevancy since people would not be trying to create all those irrelevant inlinks. The PageRank approach would work even better. Who knows Yahoo! and MSN/Live might even have been unaware of the Google secret weapon.

Ah well, it’s too late now and we’ve all got to suffer. Perhaps that “No Follow” approach is something Wikipedia should adopt. If only all the search engine spiders obey, it would clean things up enormously.