Why do Google searches turn up lots of bloggers? Is it because bloggers are basically one big link farm, sucking up bandwidth from real news sources and putting Andrew Orlowski’s knickers in a twist?
Dave Winer links today to two other theories–both suggest that “respectable” papers like the New York Times are shooting themselves in the foot when it comes to page rank.
First, Dave quotes Doc: “The ‘googlewashing’ Orlowski talks about was done by the Times, not by Google, and not by bloggers.” Google indexes pages that are on the Web. When the Times hides its archives so you have to pay-to-view, Google can’t find them. Open the archives, and those pages will start showing up in Google again.
Second, Dave cites a Microdocs study of what pages Google leaves out when it does searches. The telling point here is that Google often ignores pages that haven’t been updated in the past few months.
I use Manila, so my old stories are stored–not just in a page based on the month I wrote them–but also in “departments” that get updated each time I write a new story. By putting this story in my “Life, the universe, and everything” department, I am calling Google’s attention all over again to similar stories I wrote some months ago.
So the whole problem can be solved if the NYT turns into a blog and (this is my idea, not Dave’s, I want the credit!) starts using Manila. No, don’t bother to thank me, Mr. Orlowski–all in a days work for this hard-working blogger.