Tom Foremski at SVWatch writes how digitization destroys value. Everyone talks about "disruptive technologies" and "creative destruction" as good things, but after 17 years of the web, what we're getting is mostly disruptive destruction. Industries and jobs are being wiped out. That's great for a few VCs and a few mega-websites, but it doesn't create anything to replace what was destroyed for others.

Tom writes that these new technologies are 10X better and 10X cheaper. Actually, it's generally 1,000X better and 1,000X cheaper. My new car radio can play MP3s; just push a memory stick into the USB slot. Better than CDs; no skipping, it can't get scratched, and it's instantly changeable: just copy new albums and songs onto the memory stick. And forget FM radio; in comparison, it sounds muddy. USB memory sticks are free at trade shows. Tom points out that an album used to cost $15-20. But now, digital music is basically free. Anyway, read his article. 0 comments

So, how does Google rank pages? Google finally talks. A blog at The Wall Street Journal has a 3-part series of interviews on Google Quality Raters system. John Paczkowski (WSJ's blogger at All Things Digital) interviews Scott Huffman (Director of Engineering), Matt Cutts (Senior Engineer, Spam Team), and Amit Singhal (Google Fellow, works with the Search Quality team) (links below to the interviews).

The first interview includes a link to the Google Quality Rater manual (the 2007 edition). You can download this and see for yourself how Google's team of 10,000 (yes, ten thousand) contractors review and evaluate websites according to a long list of criteria.

In short: It's the QUALITY of the page, not SEO, that counts. A website can be SEOed to the gills, but the Google Quality Raters evaluate it and if they don't like it, Google engineers write new filters to block it.

Google uses humans, not software, to evaluate sites. The software does the heavy work (the indexing of billions of pages). But "bad" pages creep into the top results: either the filter was poor, the page is spam, or the page uses SEO tricks. So humans look at the top results, evaluate these, and the filters are adjusted. When they find bad pages, these are pushed down (Matt Cutts states that in the second interview.)

This means that much of what passes for SEO (keyword density, page rank, back links, etc.) has a limited value: it can get a page INTO the index and it can bring a page up in ranking, but the Google Quality Raters will look at the web page and evaluate not on its technical issues but on the quality, which means navigational, informational, or transactional criteria.

To read the WSJ blog items: 1) Interview with Scott Huffman. 2) Interview with Matt Cutts.

The implications of the Quality Rater manual and how to improve pages according to the manual is clearly described in our book Search Engine Marketing (see Insider-SEM.com). Our book is the first to describe this and we are so far the only book that describes this. 1 comments