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The Man Who Didn't Belong
July 7, 2004. One oddity in the Google
SERPS for nigritude ultramarine is the website that held position for a month
at the top of the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS), and just this morning was
declared as the second-stage winner of the contest. This is the website of Anil
Dash, a popular and respected commentator of the weblog-operator variety.
Dash's request for a favor from his readers - a link from their sites to his nigritude
ultramarine page - resulted in his weblog rocketing to the top in a very few days
after he decided to enter the contest. He came to rest at the top position hours
after the first winner was declared on June 7th, and sat there, immovable, from
that time on.
In many ways, the Dash weblog - completely unrelated to the field of Search Engine
Optimization (SEO), and actually quite hostile to it - is reminiscent of the sluggish
behemoth site that often sits at the top of an otherwise bustling SERPS.
In many industries the very top site in the Google SERPS will be occupied by a
less competitive - or even non-commercial - web site that happens to be the institutional
authority in the whole field (academic, government, etc). Often the top site is
the Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) for the industry, or the patent-holder
at the source of all branding for the product.
Sometimes the OEM-site truly is the most valuable site for a searcher to visit,
other times the affiliates and competitors vying for position below the top holder
are doing a far superior job of explaining the industry and presenting clear purchase
choices to the consumer.
--2--
The difference with the Dash site is that, rather than being a mediocre site with
a legacy entitlement to the claim of hub, or authority, his site is held to be
a superior one in its own field - but it is utterly unconnected to the world of
search engine optimization and marketing, which these SERPS represent.
In reviewing how closely the nigritude ultramarine SERPS emulate a real situation,
we have to label the Dash site as a man-made anomaly. In the "real"
world, Anil Dash's weblog would never appear in these SERPS, the search engines
are far better than that at indexing a site and placing it in its appropriate
categories. And as a website owner he would have no purpose in manipulating his
appearance in this industry.
Dash brought his weblog into the contest from observing how people were gaining
position, which was by having other websites link to them. It is the inbound link
that carries most weight with Google, far more than simply optimizing a page using
the standard checklist of how to place the keywords and so forth.
Anil Dash took the top position within a few days of issuing his request for links.
Interested people continued the dialog he started in posts to the page, which
served as a feed of freshness to the crawlers and the rankings, as well as continuing
the propagation of links and the attraction of more attention.
For the next month the contest players had to look at the unchanging theme of
the page that Google retained at the top of the SERPS as its judgment of the site
most relevant to the search term.
--3--
There is some irony here. What Dash has done, in attempting to demonstrate the
power of "authentic" content over manipulative content, is simply to
use formerly "real" sources and writings in a manipulative way. He has
artificially manipulated his website into a place it doesn't belong. Most of the
other sites artificially manipulated their sites into a place they DID belong.
Take a look at a simple links map for the Dash site, courtesy of the TouchGraph
GoogleBrowser, which shows how Google sees the neighborhoods that connect with
a website. Click this
link to open a new window with a 92K jpeg image, measuring 963x679 pixels.
Created by querying Google, this map shows the universe of connections within
which the Dash site exists.
You can go to the TouchGraph
website with Java enabled and enter the URL dashes.com/anil, and you'll get
a graph resembling the image above.
Dash's website is in exalted company - Wired, Doc Searls, Zen Garden, Village
Voice, on and on, reflecting much hard work and involvement over the years. But
none of these connections shown as Anil Dash's constituency has any natural reason
to be at the nigritude ultramarine search result page - there is nothing there
to interest any of the people interested in Anil Dash.
His inbound links were created as favors by those who esteem him, non-professionals
with no connection to the contest who put silly and otherwise meaningless links
on their own sites to confuse their own visitors. Not only could Dash never easily
ask for this favor again, he didn't perform any service for his connections in
return - none of them can benefit from going to the nigritude ultramarine SERPS.
And since this series of articles looks to the realism contained in the SERPS
created by the nigritude ultramarine contest, it has to note and emphasize the
unreality of Dash's inclusion - put another way, why in any real market would
an enterprise manipulate dominance in a niche that held no value to its stakeholders,
apart from corporate whim and error?
Neither Dash nor any of his people needed to crowd out what was an enormously
precise and technical event within a very specialized industry, in a keyword space
selected precisely because it was empty of other people. He brought nothing to
the contest. By his own explanation, he entered the contest as an expression of
contempt for the entire industry.
The 800-pound gorilla pushed his way into an industry in which he simply didn't
belong. Any big dog could have done this, and proved the same degree of nothing.
CNN could have done this, Slashdot could have done it, and possibly Microsoft
would have done it if there had been profit there. But none of them belonged
there, and no benefit could have come to their constituents from their pushing
into the contest, simply to prove a point that also didn't exist, and to win a
prize that could not even be divided amongst the helpers.
There is probably nothing more tactically rapid than a weblog at this moment on
the Web, and the sometime number-two contestant, another weblog, had already demonstrated
in the race for the first stage prize how efficiently a weblog can game.
Coming on top of this, the Dash site showed only the power of size. This may be
an achievement: he eclipsed the contest.
The Dash presence at the top of the SERPS dampened some of the moves by solo operators
that we might otherwise have seen - leading to less experimentation, and thus
less to study and learn, for both the professional operators and their counterparts,
the techs at Google. There is no doubt that the second round would have inspired
some spectacular ploys - both above-board and underhanded - for first position.
Sadly, Dash put a cap on the amount of new information that this contest was going
to generate
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