Am I A Blog Or A Website
Am I A Blog Or A Website
May 09, 2003
Google will soon begin penalizing Blogs: as a result, over the next several months, Blogs will appear in Google search results at a lower ranking than they appear now. In turn, Websites will move up in search results.
And so the question is, am I a Blog or Website?
Of course, that is not an easy question, because a Blog is a Website. Both are cut from the same cloth, text and graphics.
Google will try to define Blogs by an algorithm -- a mathematical formula. Plug the numbers into the formula and voila, a definition of which Websites are Blogs. But what formula?
If you search Google for ‘definition of a blog’ you get, as the third result, one of the very ealiest blogs.essays :: weblogs: a history and perspective. And this elegant history and perspective will not help Google to define a formula. How can you put into a formula that a Blog is a unique journal of one person’s experiences, published on a Website?
And why, to step back a moment, is Google penalizing Blogs? What’s so bad about a blog appearing in search results, as the example above does, and providing an elegant history and perspective of blogs?
Andrew Orlowski writes in The Register that "through dense and incestuous linking, results from blogs can drown out other sources."
OK, I will stop here. Before I leap ahead to the next topic of censorware, and the evils of penalizing speech that is not content-neutral.
UPDATE: Thanks for the comments! I've found that blogs are being penalized by my own experiments. But here are some of links related to this controversy ...
Evan Williams the co-founder of Blogger (recently purchased by Google) evhead says: "as far as I know, Orlowski is full of crap."
And a Google Employee commented: "I think Andrew Orlowski is taking a comment and taking it in the direction that he wants to go. I would take that article with a grain of salt.
GoogleGuy, going for understatement. :) "
But the 'understatement' from both of these Google employees is much less than a full denial. To be precise, I'm not saying that blogs are going to be removed from the google main index.
My question is, are blogs being penalized, so that they show up lower in the search results, than they have so far?
And if you follow the Google search results as I do, you can see that blogs are already being penalized in this next revision of the Google main index, called the Google Dance.
Finally, I just want to say that, contrary to Orlowski's accusation that blogs are 'incestuous', I believe many blogs are an increasingly important media, as my next post shows Larry Lessig Blog on New FCC Media Rules
As I say in that post, it's disturbing that Google may be limiting the influence of the blog media at the same time as the FCC is increasing the concentration of Big Media.
Please post your own comments below:
