Salon on The Google Backlash

Great, though I had to pay a big price in order to see your part of the story - I had to view the Ultramercial ;-) The price for your famousness is even higher - your blog has been dropped once more for the keyword "jeremy". Keep cool, don't bother about Pagerank and Rankings, at the moment Google doesn't get Googles point.

Yeah, I "watched" the ad on Linux so was probably spared most of it.

It almost seems like someone at Google read the story and then thought, "hey... we can fix that!" :-)

I guess this further serves to reinforce my point?

Google search for my name keeps fluctuating between my main page and my blog.. it's funny.

It's entirely unclear that Google's ranking of your home page over your blog page in a search for "jeremy" shows any sign that it is "retarded," as you put it in your original post on the matter.

Your home page is about you personally and does a much better job of describing who you are as opposed to your blog, which covers a variety of topics.

As for speculation that Google is targeting blog links, that's a blog-specific attitude. There's a range of links that Google may wish to weight differently, because of the changing nature of links period.

When Google first developed its link analysis system (of which PageRank is the popularity component, not the entire system which also take context into account), it's fair to say that blog content was minimal and interlinking probably not noticable.

That's not the case now, and it can have an impact on results -- though from my perspective, generally still only on fairly unusual queries (of which "jeremy" would be).

In addition to blogs, we also have a greater interconnectedness of content networks (Cnet, Yahoo, and so on).

Finally, and most important, is that web site owners and marketers are much more savvy about building links now in hopes of influencing search engine rankings.

There are plenty of people who run non-blog, non-blog connected sites who are reporting changes to their rankings over the past few weeks on Google. So, rather than saying that Google is just targeting blogs, it's more accurate to say it is reassessing how it measures links overall.

And so to return to your original post, you are completely right in the saying that PageRank is showing its age (though what you really mean is link analysis). Google is currently making changes to adjust for this, and it will be interesting to see if it (or the other search engines) will be able to continue to leverage links for better relevancy in the coming years.

I still maintain that Google's pagerank is now much better and refined in that it gives me your homepage when I search for 'Jeremy'. After all, Jeremy is who I'm searching on, not your thoughts on Linux, open source, Google, etc. -- not that I don't find these thoughs facinating, just that I was actually searching for Jeremy. If I wanted to know your thougths I would search for jeremy blog, or jeremy mysql, jeremy open source and I'm sure your blog would be up there, just as I'd expect.

Another great job, Google.

Fascinating. Jeremy, your pagerank article and the following discussions have drawn so much attention to your blog that even Danny Sullivan from searchenginewatch made a trip to your site in order to give some comments here ;-) Personally I agree in most points with his arguments, but there is one great difference left. IMHO your blog should reside/rank before your homepage, just because of the voting of so many links out there saying that there is something important or interesting behind it. And the more people discuss on jeremy and blogs and pagerank the more links will show up to your blog - all saying "vote for jeremy!". Who defines what is your most important or meaningful page? What happens if you set your blog on your index-page and if you move the old index to a page named "about me" for instance. Would or could google track such a change convincingly? Google is far away from understanding such things, and real live is arbitrarily complex. My vote is for your blog as the most important page - so i call for number one position for your blog :)))))

At least that story about you and the nurse is still in the top 5 when searching Groups for "Jeremy". ;)

I think "Search Engine Spammer Bites The Hand That Feeds Him" would be the most appropriate title for this article. If he would have only played by the rules.

Currently jeremy.zawodny.com resides at number 2, the blog at 77 for your ego-ogling. Don't tell me that Google knows what it is doing :)