Cre8tive Flow

Google officially stated the other day that they’ll be crawling through HTML forms. It’s an interesting move — their stated goal is to increase their coverage of the web by adding this new aspect to their crawling. I’ll note right away that this is not an immediate general addition to their crawling practices:

Only a small number of particularly useful sites receive this treatment, and our crawl agent, the ever-friendly Googlebot, always adheres to robots.txt, nofollow, and noindex directives. Google Webmaster Central Blog

It was inevitable that, with another PageRank obsessive week in SEO, people would start calling to ditch PageRank, lose the PageRank display on the toolbar etc etc. I believe that all such arguments are flawed, and for a variety of reasons, that I’ll keep to two.

Firstly, there is the problem of measurement. What, exactly, is the problem that removing PageRank, form the toolbar or the algo, suppossed to solve? And what metrics do we use to measure this? Comscore data shows that, despite having over 50% of search, Google increased their market share in August, 2007. The most important metric (market share) seems to favour Google by a wide margin, so i can;t really see that any of this really hurting their bottom line.

Normally, I hate wading in on topics that have been done to death, but on this occasion I feel the need to.

For those that don’t know, Google reduced the PageRank for a number sites, in many cases between two and three the toolbar scores/ranks/numbers. This has caused many people to write a heck of a lot of posts, and make me eternally thankful that Blogs use bits and bytes, not paper (I reckon an Amazon worth of trees would have been cut down otherwise).

I was reading a great paper about the first Google (aka backrub) trial and cam accross a fascinating quote:

I feel stupid when I see a TV ad from ASK.com about “The Algorithm”. They don’t make sense to me. So the advertising makes me feel dumb and somewhere in there should be incentive to use the search engine?

Nope. That can’t be right.

Since so many people question the logic and message behind ASK’s ad campaign, I find I’m not alone. Many of you have no idea what the hell is going on either.

Cre8asiteforums’ members are all over this, in Ask’s Bizarre Bad Taste And Weird Ad Placement

If you haven’t had a chance to meet Bill Slawski in person, travel on over to Webpronews and soak up a chance to meet via an inspiring interview about local search. You’ll see a video where Bill Slawski and Loren Baker are interviewed by Webpronews’ Mike McDonald.

One of my favorite things about these video interviews is seeing how people I’ve read for the last few years move and interact. So far, I continue to like us all quite a bit. We share an intellectual generosity and curiosity that I treasure.

SearchEngineLand releases the story today, out of Search Engine Strategies in New York: Goodbye Teoma Algorithm, Hello Edison, Says Ask.com

Barry Schwartz, of RustyBrick.com writes for SEL:

Apostolos Gerasoulis is very excited about this new algorithm and he told me he feels this will be the most powerful algorithm in search.

Seeds of this news appear in my coverage of social search this morning, posted in SERoundtable. Check out the section by Apostolos Gerasoulis, in Social Search Overview

Ask.com is migrating Teoma and Direct Hit discussion at Cre8asiteforums.

Michael Grey recently posted a video blog entitled SEO Bloggers Step Away From the Keyboard. Despite being in a format I can’t stand (unless your name is Ze Frank or definitely-not-a-man-da Congdon), it makes a very needed point (one I will save you the trouble of working out): you are not adding to the converstaion if you don’t say anything unique, original or new.

I ‘m glad I’m not the only feeling this way, as not just Michael Grey but also former Cre8 Tech admin Dave Child (aka ILoveJackDaniels) feels this way, with Dave’s brilliantly funny post “Dear Blogger” I Resign as your reader summing up exactly how I feel.