Is Google Being Gamed Into Irrelevance?

(Reading time: 3 – 4 minutes)

I’m building a WordPress advice and tutorial site (Website In A Weekend), which has been indexed since January 2009. I have 52 high quality posts, some of which are 2500+ words, all original content, all internally linked to provide solid narrative structure, and all having a reasonable amount of outgoing links (it is the web, after all).

Nearly every article has actionable content, often something the reader can Do Right Now.

Despite the stupendous quality, about 2 of these posts make it into the top 100 pages on Google. The rest are invisible.

Which I wouldn’t really care so much about… except 90% of the pages in Google’s top 100 results… are flat out garbage. Double digit numbers are spam blogs.

Now, as a scientist, I am trained to observe.

My observation is that Google has no accurate way of measuring quality or usefulness to readers.

Like I said, I don’t mind so much that my search results are low. My beef is that I am getting flattened by spam blogs.

Is it rigged?

I don’t know.

I do know that in “hot” markets, if Google doesn’t figure this out, small publishers of high quality information simply won’t be found using organic search. Whether this serves Google is an open question. It certainly won’t serve readers well.

If this continues it will slam shut an entrepreneurial window: small fry won’t be able to clear the barrier to entry with hard work and quality product.

Then we’re right back where we started from.

For example… Private Label Rights SEO

Bukisa really scored here, top page of Google!

Want an example?

Sure you do.

Take a look at the left image showing the Google search result for “Private Label Rights SEO.” (I’m doing some research for another stealth project.) I’ve outlined the search result pages “1-10″ in a red box at the top of the page so you can see the ranking.

Now take a look at the actual page. What a load of horse puckey. Note how it’s “keyword stuffed” with SEO (didn’t highlight it), making for an incomprehensible sentence, and that the whole article really has no information at all about SEO material.

So stupid.

Opportunity knocks

There’s two ways to see this kind of activity, where Google is getting gamed into oblivion. The first is despair, that no matter what you do, someone else will always figure out a way to “game” your work into oblivion.

The other is more productive: Each one of the BULLSH*T search results presents an opportunity to write an article with solid content, post it, and let the long term bring it up the search results. If it’s a hot term, it may never get to the top of Google search results, as it gets ever more creatively gamed.

Also, as a Google user, I’m more inclined to go straight to page 2. Nobody gaming search engines wants to be on the second page. Whereas there is often a lot of very useful content written by people NOT gaming the system, if you dig down a little.