The concept of search is something that’s always been a little mysterious (for lack of a better term) to me. Sure, I understand the basic idea of it, but how does search really work? Search Engine Watch describes how crawler-based search engines “spider” Web pages, index pages, and then rank them in the order that the search engine software thinks is most relevant. The third part of this equation is what intrigues me the most.
How are ranking algorithms written that they can determine what site is more popular or relevant to a user versus another? GoogleGuide explains this a little bit, noting that Google uses over 100 factors in determining a site’s PageRank, such as the position and size of the search terms on a given page. This recent New York Times article that a colleague sent me does an even better job of explaining how Google constantly tweaks its PageRank algorithms to ensure users are quickly and easily finding what they want. (Really, this article is a must-read if you’re even remotely interested in search.) But for the most part, the intricacies of ranking algorithms will remain a mystery to most of us. Like the NYT article says, employees at places like Google are barely allowed to discuss it…because these innerworkings are what give search engines their competitive edge.
For those of us in the social media world, though, it’s a good thing for us that some people do discuss what it takes to optimize a blog or social media site so that it’s highly visible in a search. Rohit Bhargava’s “5 Rules of Social Media Optimization (SMO)” and Guy Kawasaki’s interview with Technorati founder David Sifry both discuss similar ways to try and increase a blog’s ranking. They mention a variety of ways to make a blog more visible: make tagging and bookmarking easy for users, link to other blogs, put a full-text RSS feed on your blog, post frequently, submit your content to other sites, and so on.
These are great recommendations for bloggers who are looking to optimize their blog in terms of its rank in different search engines…but I’m still a little skeptical. With millions of blogs out there, simply following Sifry’s and Bhargava’s advice is not an automatic recipe for making it into the Technorati Top 100. These strategies will absolutely help bloggers make themselves more visible, but putting these SMO tips into practice isn’t a surefire way to enjoy a ranking spot near DailyKos or Gawker. Clay Shirky, an instructor at New York University, conducted a study that offers some insight as to why certain blogs are popular and listed as top search results while the rest are not. For you celeb gossip junkies out there, it’s kind of like Hollywood: there are the A-listers….and then there’s everyone else whose names we barely know.
This piece in New York Magazine, “Blogs to Riches: The Haves and the Have-Nots of the Blogging Boom”, is a favorite of mine. Shirky did several experiments to examine the “disparities in the blogosphere.” He started by counting inbound links to a sample of 433 blogs. He found that the A-list – a very small number of blogs – had hundreds of inbound links. Yet almost all the others had only a few sites linking to them.
“Economists and network scientists have a name for Shirky’s curve: a “power-law distribution.” Power laws are not limited to the Web; in fact, they’re common to many social systems. If you chart the world’s wealth, it forms a power-law curve: A tiny number of rich people possess most of the world’s capital, while almost everyone else has little or none.”
I’m assuming that these 433 bloggers in Shirky’s experiment certainly employed strategies to help them get noticed. But based on these results of Shirky’s experiment, it’s an uphill battle for bloggers to increase their ranking even if they’re following the tips from Bhargava and Siftry. Perhaps it can be done but….who can actually “make it big” in the blogosphere?
