Comment by Silhouette | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Silhouette | Hacker News Reader

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The trouble with this idea is that Google can't magically see private links/recommendations on social networks any more than anyone else can.

For example, one site I help with has just a few inbound links from low PR sites as far as Google is concerned, and gets a page rank of zero accordingly. In reality, it probably gets more inbound links via social networking in a single day on most days, and unsurprisingly those personal recommendations often drive more inbound traffic than any search engine.

Google's basic premise of ranking the importance of a site based on how many links it gets and where from is wildly inaccurate in the era of social networking. Normal people mostly don't run their own public web sites or blogs any more, they share stuff on sites like Facebook and often only with their "friends".

Personally, I think this is a good thing, because both as a visitor and as someone running sites I would rather rely on legitimate personal recommendations from people who are genuinely interested in a site than on some arbitrary algorithm running in a data centre somewhere on another continent. I don't think it's healthy for any one intermediary to have a dominant effect on whether interested people can find interesting content on the Web, and sites like search engines and social networks are merely intermediaries.

> Google's basic premise of ranking the importance of a site based on how many links it gets and where from is wildly inaccurate in the era of social networking. Normal people mostly don't run their own public web sites or blogs any more, they share stuff on sites like Facebook and often only with their "friends".

I'm not sure that I understand this point. I thought that Google wants to index Twitter (for example) but is prohibited by Twitter. So it's hard to see that their premise is wrong: personal recommendations on social networks are just inbound links from specific sites, just not sites that Google can index.

I'm sure Google would like to index all kinds of private content, but since they can't see it, they can't index it. Moreover, a lot of public forums based on user-generated content automatically annotate their links so they don't contribute to page rank either; this is done for sensible reasons to prevent blatant spamming, but does mean that a lot of legitimate positive links also don't count. This combination undermines the entire idea that a page rank based on the quality and quantity of incoming links that Google can see and will count is a good indicator of the value of a site.

In other news, searching for things on Google increasingly seems to turn up large, commercial sites first and only to reach smaller, more personal, and often more informative/less biased sites several pages down. Meanwhile, posting a question to my friends on any private forum we share will often get better results within a few minutes anyway.

In your example, I see it like this: Google sees those links and gives low page rank but quantity helps too. So if you're getting a bunch of links on social media, it follows that eventually people will blog about it (crawlable content) and link back to the site. Sure it may be a crappy blogger blog but it's legit and Google does count that. Over time a ton of non-spam PR0 backlinks can and will help rank for search terms. Of course, getting some big PageRank links will help a lot more and if you have any say in the matter, can help with what keyword you rank for.

I guess my point is that, talking generally now rather than about any one specific site, we just don't need to put as much weight as perhaps we used to on what Google think of our pages this week. More and more of our traffic comes from personal mentions, passed on by people who are actually interested in what we have to their friends with similar interests, and people who find us that way are far more likely to be genuinely interested themselves and to enjoy our material, increase our income, or otherwise match whatever we created the site for.

People use buzzwords like "going viral", but really this is just the same old exponential growth of word-of-mouth recommendations for good products, speeded up thanks to modern communication technologies and the social networks they support.

Obviously we still make our sites accessible to search engines. It's not like it's difficult to do that if you've got real content and a sensible information architecture, and after all, a bit of extra traffic never hurt anyone. Maybe, if an enthusiastic person finds us that way, it could even seed a new network of people finding us.

But I see this becoming less and less of a priority and dedicated search engines becoming less and less relevant for a lot of sites as people learn to use social networks to spread the word. In particular, I don't see cbeach's original idea of a "search engine that ranks mainly on social-graph recommendation" adding much value in that scenario, simply because the social networks will probably offer similar functionality without needing a third party anyway.

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