Are You Ready For The Mother Of All 'Google Slaps' ?

[xiaophil]

A recent article in Advertising Age contained an interesting quote from Google's CEO:

“Wouldn’t it be nice if Google understood the meaning of your phrase rather than just the words that are in that phrase? We have a lot of discoveries in that area that are going to roll out in the next little while.”

What if the value of content was determined not from a particular sequence of words but by the ideas behind those words?

Think that sounds a bit far-fetched? Think again.

From my experience of natural language processing I know it takes an enormous database and massive computing power to extract any significant meaning from text.

And guess who has both?

Ranking the value of text based upon its meaning has huge implications for how we currently define quality content, especially 'unique' or 'original' content.

An article may be reworded, run through a thesaurus and otherwise jiggled about, but the ideas in that article remain the same.

Even when hand-crafting 'original' content, don't the ideas precede the writing? And where did those ideas come from?

What is the value of offering someone a hundred links all containing the same idea worded differently?

A recent personal example: I just adopted a small puppy which fell ill, and the local vet told me the name of her condition.

After reading each entry in the top page of search results for this condition I was no more informed than after reading the first, as they all provided exactly the same information albeit structured slightly differently.

What a waste of time.

Eagerly I await the day an idea-based search engine becomes available.

And it may be just around the corner.

An interesting if only hypothetical experiment might be to have it scan through all of the currently available internet marketing resources.

I wonder how many unique ideas that lot would boil down to?

Another quote from Google's CEO in the same article : "The internet is fast becoming a 'cesspool' where false information thrives."

And when that cesspool gets sanitized my guess is that a vast quantity of results will drop from the ranks into oblivion, never to be seen again.

Will yours be among them?

***

To your every success,

Phil.

[JustaWizard]

Hi Phil - I think that this is an important consideration, the evolution of how SE's "interpret" search terms. I follow Matt Cutts and heard the same "cesspool" quote recently, and that hints or even portends changes on the horizon.

Your ill puppy example is apt; it's not a matter of whether Google will "flush the toilet" it's just a matter of when. I'm not sure if they're really in a position to judge the ultimate value of content posted, especially when it's sincere, original, fresh content and not merely recycled/reworded information.

We'll just have to stay tuned and see what Google does, eh?

David

[vince8151]

Another quote from Google's CEO in the same article : "The internet is fast becoming a 'cesspool' where false information thrives."

I couldn't agree with this more.

But, the basis of a free society is one where all can participate no matter their opinion.

How can one differentiate between "purposeful false information" and "opinion"?

Is Google's computer large enough to do this? I think not and will eventually fall prey to someone's, (programmer?) subjected opinion.

original, fresh content

This is mentioned a million times each day.
The majority of it is purposeful, redundant, false information being disguised in such a manner as to extract money from someone.

But, it sure beats going to work every day!

[CmdrStidd]

Google programmers have been hinting at this for at least 4 years that I know of and they still have not rolled anything out that even closely resembles it. I think this is just another smoke screen attempt on the part of Google, but that is just my opinion. I do not have any facts to back me up on this except the 20 or so other times that they "hinted" they were close to rolling this thing out.

[BrianMcLeod]

Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI)

Read up:

Google Semantically Related Words & Latent Semantic Indexing Technology : SEO Book.com

An issue far more disturbing to me is the weight Google is reportedly giving to "brands". They're essentially giving established brands the first 3 or 4 slots in the serps where optimized pages lived previously.

Best,

Brian

[tommygadget]

A couple of things come to mind here:
1) A monopoly is never a good thing.
2) People deciding what we should see or not see is not always a good thing.
3) Who died and made G's programmers "dieties"?
4) Google is a for-profit organization, NOT an idealistic, benevolent benefactor of the people.
That's what comes immediately to mind.

TomG.

[Chris Lockwood]

If the Internet is a cesspool, then Google is the sewer worker with crap all over himself.

Pretty disgusting comment coming from them, considering what their business is.

[Andyhenry]

I don't see the big deal.

If you're focused on providing unique and useful content to your visitors - that will always be what people are after.

It's crazy to think that you're suddenly going to have to invent to ideas to desribe the same thing just to please Google.

[artwebster]

I suppose this is a long overdue and desirable aspect but I see signs that there is a little irrationality in some of the posts here.

To claim that freedom of speech might be affected would only be pertinent if Google was the monopoly supplier of search results and was a social service. It is neither - it is a business, like any other business, catering to a demand.

Maybe Google is aware of the sewer analogy and maybe Google is sick and tired of trying to provide a quality experience to its' customers when, as the sick puppy well demonstrated, the plethora of 'me too' sites and articles militates against it.

Maybe Google will become the quality search engine for serious research and unique information and maybe internet marketers should build Schmoogle, their own, couldn't give a damn about the visitor experience search engine?

Maybe a sensible compromise position can be found?

Who knows?

[Matt Maiden]

Can you imagine how long a search engine that is only going list a few pages of what it thinks is relevant is going to last?

Let's say that Google decides that there are only 3 pages worth of Dog Grooming sites and that's it. Once businesses and especially entrepreneurs figure out that trying to please Google isn't worth it they will start making sites for MSN, Yahoo, and the others.

Now when that happens, MSN and Yahoo have enough leverage to start selling more ad space and Google is not going to let that happen.

Right now Google loves the fact that most of the SEO talk is about how to please the Big 'G' and get better rankings with them.

I just don't see them shooing off all of the courtiers because they only respect a few.

[milan]

"Wouldn’t it be nice if Google understood the meaning of your phrase rather than just the words that are in that phrase?"

Wouldn't it be nice if computers were intelligent? But they are not...

[Alp Bozkurt]

I just can't believe how a crappy article submitted to first EZA and then it submitted to tens of bookmarking sites take #1 slot on Google search results.

This is no different than keyword stuffing in 1990s. Google came to the scene when general public were not happy with the search engine results. Yahoo and Altavista were bringing keyword stuffed crappy content as top results.

Then google came and started to present most relevant and useful results and killed Yahoo and Altavista.

Today google started to produce crappy results and they have no other choice than fixing this flaw or, sooner or later they will be replaced by a smarter search engine.

This should be fixed by Google ASAP.

[milan]

Originally Posted by Alp Bozkurt

I just can't believe how a crappy article submitted to first EZA and then it submitted to tens of bookmarking sites take #1 slot on Google search results.

This is no different than keyword stuffing in 1990s. Google came to the scene when general public were not happy with the search engine results. Yahoo and Altavista were bringing keyword stuffed crappy content as top results.

Then google came and started to present most relevant and useful results and killed Yahoo and Altavista.

Today google started to produce crappy results and they have no other choice than fixing this flaw or, sooner or later they will be replaced by a smarter search engine.

This should be fixed by Google ASAP.

This is very much different than keyword stuffing in 1990s. You can't exactly throw any garbage at EZA - these are human approved. And EZA wouldn't be where they are if they were not.

[Alp Bozkurt]

How can you say this knowing that they approve anything if it's a text in a readable format. They don't check if the content is crap or not.

I myself also have lots of crappy, barely readable content sitting there and didn't have any problem having them approved.

Originally Posted by milan

This is very much different than keyword stuffing in 1990s. You can't exactly throw any garbage at EZA - these are human approved. And EZA wouldn't be where they are if they were not.

[milan]

Well, I'm not happy with a lot of their articles. But I think they're getting better. Every time I see they dissaprove an article they had a good reason too. They're not subject matter experts either...

But it's still much better than keyword stuffing in the 1990s! It's hard to spam your way to the top on very competitive phrases just by using article directories. The 1990's were a spammers heaven.

[Jason Johns]

I don't see what the problem is - so long as you have written decent articles / webpages that are aimed at humans and not web spiders then you aren't going to have a problem.

If / when Google do this, the only people that are going to have to worry are those that have garbage on their websites to try and get around the search engine algorithms. the only people Google are attempting to deal with are those that are producing poor quality sites. The people who have been created good quality content have nothing to worry about from this or any other Google "slap".

All the best

Jason

[Wakunahum]

It would be kind of nice cause your one article could have more terms people find it for.

Those with really, really bad content have something to worry about.

Articles already can be found for multiple terms and even related terms that aren't actually on the page. Going in this direction makes logical sense.

[AnneE]

I would welcome a Google that rewards originality of content.

As a consumer of information, I too am tired of people spinning, rehashing, regurgitating and cutting and pasting content, content, content.... That should be allowed, but let that crap fall further down in the search results.

Just my two cents.

[jasonl70]

i heard they will go live with it in 2012

[misterlmno]

really 2012? thats too far away..

[Matt Maiden]

Jason,

Cracked me up. LOL

Guess there will be plenty to write about but nobody to read it.