Unfortunately what was a clever way of indexing the web on the first place quickly became the main source of spamdexing for website designer seeking for easy money. The main used technique is referred to as “Link Farm“. The way Technorati ranks the blogs is also based on this technique (see Technorati Authority = Google Pagerank v0.01).

Google recently made a big cleanup of its database. There were a big fall of pagerank for these spam websites. They loosed up to 50 ranking points in the search results for relevant keywords.

Fighting spamdexing is tricky for Google. The search engine robot needs to recognize the relevant and consistent links from the organized reciprocal links. On way of solving this is to detect the patterns like A links B and B links A that happens too much to be true for a given website.

Spammers already changed their techniques by hiding the link exchange. Direct reciprocal link is too easy to detect and these will disappear from now on. Blog posts asking for backlinks have stopped their programs and websites are removing links in the bottom of all their pages.

The future is not so good for Google as it seems quite easy to make more clever use of link sharing that would be a lot more difficult to detect. One way could be to use patterns like A link B link C and C link A. And you can go deeper in the relationships if the organised community is made up with lots of websites.

Google can also use other ways of detecting websites that belong to the same owner because th provide services like analytics, adsense, webmaster tools, etc.

We’re just at the beginning of an endless fight !

But as I explained it in one of my past articles, search engines dot not understand humans. That is a fact. They found results based on keywords and redirect you towards popular websites (with many backlinks) containing those keywords. I know it’s a simple quick summary but the end of my thinking is to come.

I quickly noticed that the most part of the visitors coming from a search engine to a website will be likely to click these ads that display exactly links label that are directly related to what they were looking for (in fact the keywords). And because making money online is resulting in optimally placing adverts in the most visible part on any website the result is that the website only acts as an advertising support, no more no less.

99% of the Internet users are not even aware that the google adsense links are adverts broadcasted by Google. Therefore they jump from one site to the other clicking mainly on adverts until they found some content not overwritten by adverts. Ad Publishers (that make too much use of Google Adsense on their website) should stop buying adwords as it won’t be efficient at all (except for Google).

Probably you should remove some of your blogs ads to free your content a little bit if you want to be read! You can also monitor your feed stats (And avoid of course to advertise on your feed articles!).

Blogging is at first something you feel like very interesting and funny to do. But after some posts, you discover that you had only 3 visits the day before (1 is you). You’ve been really passionate about your topic and you produced very interesting posts but unfortunately it’s not so easy. Writing articles is a good thing but without readers other than you it’s totally pointless (except if you want to keep a sort of diary).

This is where the problem lies in fact. The content quality is one thing for sure but advertising your blog, optimizing it for search engines is another one. Book writers face exactly the same issue when it comes to publish their books. Spreading your words to the world is another job dedicated to professionals.

Unfortunately bloggers are not Internet professionals for the most part. That is one of the very nice aspects of blogs is that it brought anyone to be part of the web.

So at the end the famous blogs are the ones owned by computer and Internet literate persons that learned how to use their knowledge to market themselves on the Internet.

The previous Technorati slogan was very true:

More than 74 000 000 blogs, some of them have to be good.

The problem is that I’m not so sure that the Technorati top 100 represents only the good blogs but rather the ones that have succeeded in being famous and celebrity is not only based on content quality.

I’m sure 99% of the blogs never reach 1% of the Internet visitors. And among that 99% there are for sure good blogs but they are anonymous for the most part.

I must admit that it’s not true for the particular example of my article which was submitted as an external link in Wikipedia article “Criticism of wikipedia” by an anonymous contributor. It is the last link in the following capture:

The link was first quickly removed with the following comment:

this is a personal blog, and it is not practical for the article to link to every blog entry criticizing Wikipedia

This is exactly the kind of reaction that I was pinpointing in my article but I must admit that a few hours later the modification was reverted and the quality of my article was recognized:

The entry offers a perspective not found in the article

I’m quite impressed by this scenario because it contradicts my arguments. That’s nice if Wikipedia is evolving towards evaluating content before automatically rejecting any anonymous contribution whatever the relevance of the contribution. I’m glad if my article helped to debate on that topic.

My blog also attracted more than 800 unique visits yesterday. My alexa rank is also improving week after week.

Thank you guys.

I would highly appreciate any feedback on my posts, I know I might be a very critical person but I like to question myself a lot.

I’ll do my best to continue the work even if maintaining a blog is really time consuming.

The amount of resources required to run some of the astonished Ajax effects on certain websites is sometimes quite significant. My PC fan goes crazy when I start Google Reader for example.

I must admit, I still own a 3 or 4 years old laptop but it allowed me to analyze the evolution. In fact now the amount of information the browser analyzes has considerably increased with Ajax and the web 2.0. Furthermore, almost every single action (passing over an image, clicking, dragging, etc.) is now a terrific amount of calculation for your microprocessor.

Your browser not only parses the HTML of your pages but needs to parse the Javascript commands that are sent back by the server. Your browser needs to parse the XML and execute the Javascript functions. Some websites make my firefox browser freeze for a few seconds, and the memory consumption of the firefox process increases a lot when tabs are loaded with rich ajax sites.

The time where we could say “if it’s only about browsing the Internet, you can buy any computer, no matter its power” is now over. Now web 2.0 puts the end-user at the center of the Internet Experience and its computer is therefore more and more called upon.

This issue is the first sign of what we should expect from browser being more and more the future computer OS. Don’t you think ?

Technorati is in fact an Internet Search Engine but dedicated to blogs. So Technorati issues are more or like the same than any other search engine like Yahoo or Google. The main issue being building a robust and fair ranking algorithm to index all the blogs so that you find the most accurate results when searching for a particular keyword.

Technorati publishes the ranking of the blogs using mainly two criteria. The first one being the number of users that selected your blog as one their favorites and the second one being the “Authority”. From that Technorati produces two top lists. Here is my opinion on these criteria:

1 - Number of favorites

This criteria is not very reliable because you can add any blog to your favorites then ask the blog proprietary to do the same with your blog. It’s a reciprocal exchange. Everyone will accept this trade. So collecting a high number of blogs that favortite you is a question of time and how much effort in contacting people you want to put in this.

In addition, apart from exchanging favorites, adding a favorite is not really useful because for the most part the Technorati users use a feed reader if they are interesting in one blog (see FeedBurner approach) or a social bookmarking service like delicious.

2- Authority

This is the real one for Technorati. This criteria is defined this way in the Technorati FAQ:

Technorati Authority is the number of blogs linking to a website in the last six months. The higher the number, the more Technorati Authority the blog has.

So if a blog puts at least one link (it can be more) towards your blog then you increases your Authority by 1. Thus Technorati is using here the so called method of “Link Popularity”. Here is the Wikipedia definition:

The philosophy of link popularity is that important sites will attract many links. Content-poor sites will have difficulty attracting any links. Link popularity assumes that not all incoming links are equal, as an inbound link from a major directory carries more weight than an inbound link from an obscure personal home page. In other words, the quality of incoming links counts more than sheer numbers of them.

Google used this philosophy as a part of their page ranking algorithm. I don’t know if Technorati uses the Authority in their keyword search engine to filter the results. But they are surely using it to publish a ranking top list. In that context it’s the number of links that count rather than the quality of them.

The big issue behind this is that it is an opened door for the “spamdexing” and particularly what is called “Link farm”. It’s basically a group of web pages that all link to every other page in the group. This method was widely used and gave very efficient results for first search engine implementations like Inktomi. These search engines were counting the inbounds link equally as Technorati is doing it. So building communities and link exchange scheme were very efficient to increase the ranking of website pages.

Google and other search engines learned from that experience and rather than simply counting all inbound links equally, the Google PageRank algorithm determines that some links may be more valuable than others, and therefore assigns them more weight.

So is Technorati reinventing the wheel ? As Technorati and blogs in general will became more and more popular the Technorati ranking system will quickly reach its limits and Technorati will be faced to the same issues than search engines back in the 90’s. Unless they are counting on being bought by Google, they’ll have to think about a smarter ranking algorithm.

In fact it has already started because many popular blogs among the top Technorati list make use of “spamdexing” methods. They exchange backlinks with different methods like selling comments back links (without any tag rel=”nofollow”), exchanging links through blog reviews, trading Technorati favorites. These new techniques are referred to as “Evil blogging” but are not different from “spamindexing“.

To conclude I pray for the success of real interesting web content. There is still a lot of work to achieve before search engines understand humans.

So let’s take a simple example. To make a better comparison I will consider a popular blog which makes $10 000 a month (using advertising with banners, text links, reviews, etc.). We will suppose that the blog publishes 3 posts a day. A post is something like 300 characters long. We will ten consider that a post is equivalent to one book page. So a blogger writes a book of 400 pages in about 4 months. So that’s $40 000 earning for a complete “online book”. The problem here is to count the number of readers. Usually with such blog you make something like 4 to 5000 unique visitors a day. Of course a visitor may read only one post whereas overs read all the posts. But this is not an issue for that analysis. So over the 4 months you will have something like 600 000 unique visitors. The term “unique” is not really true here as there are returning users usually over the 4 months.

A book on the topic “get rich online” sells something like $30 and is about 400 pages long. If you consider a book that sells quite well, the book will sell approximatively 25000 copies. The author will really earn something like 10% of the sales amount so that makes $75000. Assuming that the author could write it in 4 months.

Writing a book is not exactly the same work than writing a blog. If you write a novel you need to imagine a real story and create some suspense.

So winning money online with your blog can be a very good source of constant revenue. Moreover this revenue is very likely to increase over the time. Whereas for a book you need to take the risk of never being published. Thus, the 4 months of work could be complete waste. And even if you get published you still need to sell a certain amount of units.

On the other side writing a bestseller could make you earn million of dollars. This doesn’t seem to be easy to achieve with a blog.

We, bloggers, are all the property of our blogs and as a consequence of our readers. A successful book writer is surely exposed to the same feeling. You have to continuously feed your readers with new original content. This leads to the production of very poor posts in the bad times and piece of art in the good ones.

Bloggers have been captured by the Internet, they want to be part of the revolution. They want worldwide recognition for what they think, what they are or for their singular talent. In fact bloggers are slaves to their thirst of admiration and recognition.

But are you totally dominated by your blog ? To find out how much you’re stick to your blog, try to answer to these few questions:

1. Do you switch on your PC when you wake up in the morning ?
2. Do you spend a significant part of your “normal” job work time to think of or write contributions for your blog ?
3. Do you still have a social life ?
4. Do you still spend some time with your friends ?
5. Do you still go to theater ?
6. Do you spend hours seeking for new information on the Internet ?
7. Do you check your blog stats more than once a day ?
8. Do you know where is your wife right now ?
9. Can you still tolerate the sun ?
10. When was the last time you phoned you mother ?
11. When looking at something in the streets do you ask yourself “How could I blog this ?”
12. Can you decide to go on vacation for 3 weeks starting from now ?
13. Is you brain constantly monopolized by an everlasting question : “What will I blog tonight”.
14. Do you read almost every blog about blogging tips (problogger, blogging tips, etc.)?
15. Do you check your feed subscribers stats several times a day ?

Ok don’t look at me like this, you’re definitely addicted to your blog !

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Even Yahoo and Google have joined recently this list. Is there really a demand for these services ? I wrote a past article about the fact that these services where to my mind useless. The answer is surely yes there is a need but the solution to this demand is not yet the appropriate one.

The real issue behind that is the constant need for fresh content that one’s really interested in. This is something Google has failed to fulfill. Or maybe it did at first but Internet Users are becoming harder and harder to please. This need goes further than just typing a keyword. 1 or 3 keywords will never tell Google what you like and what you’re exactly looking for. This works well to find informative content, definitions or explanations. Google is a Wikipedia search engine. No more, no less.

In order to satisfy an Internet user request for fresh, subjective and interesting content you need to know details on its personality, on its life, on its opinions, on its way of thinking, on its passions, on its preferences, on its social rank, and so on. One result that is perfect for one person for the keyword “slavery” may be completely out of scope for the other.

That’s exactly the challenge that the semantic web will have to take over in the next years. Nowadays, Google is providing many services but is not using the inputs of the user to build a real complete portrait of him. You need to be able to explain robots who is the person that you’re trying to satisfy and adapt the results based on that.

Of course some nice services like Stumbleupon concentrates on one aspect of a person which is the websites he likes or not. Then this is compared to the other users data to provide you content that you should like. So here the user feeds the required information for other users. The service only crosses the information but does not go further (yet).

And this is not enough as you all know that every single person is unique. Bookmarking is not enough to border the personality of the user.

I’m quite confident is the fact that the next web 3 or 4.0 will evolve the right way and social bookmarking websites are only the first step.