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 Google is by far the most
popular search engine on the planet. When it first was established, Google became the preeminent search destination by simply
being a high quality product that people liked using because it worked. These days the main reason Google is the number one
search engine is because their competition is very poor. In a very real sense Google is the "Moe" of search
engines -- a stooge but the smartest of the Three Stooges.
Google is mediocre, but not because its results are consistently of mediocre quality. In fact, this is very much what
it is not. In reality Google is a mix of dead-on accurate results and significant, plainly inept errors. Google's "950
penalty", where certain pages are penalized to a ghetto close to the very last results displayed, is inconsistently
and
bizarrely applied. Many of the highest quality poker information sites have at one point or another been
hit with 950 penalties, not because these pages were spammy or low quality, but because they were "too good", too
strong or too relevant.
Since about September 22, 2005, the 950 penalty appears to have been targeting pages that seem "too good to be true".
In many cases, pages that seem too good to be true are in fact just that, not true. For example, a page on a hacked
.edu domain with an abundance of random text covering all manner of synonyms of the general topic (like having
gibberish sentences like "Games cards play betting Texas strategy poker") is pretending to be a thoughtful page on a
trusted domain when in fact is nothing but haphazard gibberish that will soon be redirected, with an affiliate link, to
some random gambling site. For quite some time Google did a very poor job of detecting such sites. They still do badly,
but are far better at it now. However, apparently in trying to detect these "false positive" pages, they also sometimes
penalize on-topic, genuinely in-depth, solid value pages on respected domains -- "respected" by Google that is...
domains that have many #1 and top 10 rankings.
An additional flaw of Google is its very poor handling of theme or topic. In this case the theme would be "poker",
plus related concepts like card games and gambling. A link to a poker site from a poker site should be viewed as considerably
more valuable than a link to a poker site from
a jewelry site, or worse,
a network of random link sellers. But sadly, for
the most part, with Google "a link is a link". This leads to quite a few very below average quality sites managing
to rank well for a wide variety of terms. Circa 2002, Google did a reasonable job detecting topical niches, but
these days the source of a link seems to not matter. (Another example is the hacked .edu sites which can rank #1 for
poker terms entirely from guestbook and blog comment links, without a single link from a poker-related domain.)
Still, Google's results are dramatically superior to its competition. The Google top 10 for a "poker" search returns
nine sites that deserve their approximate ranking, plus the Wikipedia which is an absurd #1 or #2 result, but whose mis-ranking
is at least understandable. |
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