“…the meaning of a link has been transformed from a reference to a vote.” - Bill Slawski, from his interview with Aaron.
THIS is how Google has, and continues to change the face of the web. Thanks for putting it into simple context for us Bill.
Be sure to read the rest of this great interview. Bill is one of the few SEO’s with the superhuman ability to translate patents and whitepapers into language the rest of us can understand.
Todd Malicoat is an digital marketing strategy consultant specializing in search engine optimization, social media, and traffic acquisition based in San Francisco (Silicon Valley), CA. He works with startups, small business, and corporate giants - with the requirement that they move quickly, and embrace search from the top down for better business results, and constant improvement of their websites. He travels the bay area with his laptop, and preaches SEO and internet marketing strategy to find a way to fund his next exotic fishing trip.
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jason
June 14th, 2006,
3:53 pm
is it really accurate to describe a link as either a reference or a vote?
This metaphor has always bothered me. Perhaps it’s irrational, but it seems too much like Google is trying to make the web conform to it’s own vision of what the web should be.
Not to mention, this analogy completely ignores why people link in the first place.
Trisha
June 15th, 2006,
4:49 pm
Thanks for the link to the interview.
While on one hand it makes sense, I can’t see SE’s punishing sites for having dead links. There must be some really large, old sites out there with all sorts of old links that aren’t being hurt by it.
Grokodile
June 21st, 2006,
5:16 pm
As others have said, this issue has some merit and some pitfalls.
One of the orginal great things about the Internet was that everybody would link to
everyone else when they found something useful.
Now, with concepts like this, everyone wants you to link to them, but the want to
jealously hoard their own “votes” and not help anyone else.
Making the ranking issues clear like this, when search engine rankings are worth
so much money to so many people, simply means that ways to abuse the system
will be devised. They are out there. Entire markets exist to help people gather
such votes in virtually undetectable ways.
I think there is a bit of naivety involved… such as assuming that how things used
to work will continue to be how things will work.
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