What Would Google Do_ - Jeff Jarvis [20]
About.com works hard to make itself Google-ready. Writers are taught search-engine optimization (SEO)—how to craft headlines, leads, page titles, and text around keywords so Google will recognize what each article is about. Writers are also taught to monitor search queries. If users are asking questions for which About.com doesn’t have answers, they write articles with those answers. Keeping an eye on search terms is a preemptive readership survey, except instead of asking what people have read, About.com finds out what they want to read.
About.com’s search-engine-optimization wizardry infiltrated its corporate sibling, The New York Times, where editors began to rewrite newspaper headlines for the web so Google’s computers would understand them better and send more traffic to them. (For instance, the headline on a book review in the print Times may be clever but indecipherable unless you see the accompanying photo of the book cover and captions; online, the proper headline should include the title and author so anyone searching on either will find the review.) The Times also creates content aimed in part at pleasing Google: permanent topic pages on newsmakers and companies, which the paper hopes will become resources people will click on and link to over time, helping these pages rise in Google results, bringing in more traffic. Google was also a key reason why The Times changed its digital business model and stopped charging for content online (which I’ll address in the chapter, “Free is a business model”). The most important benefit The Times received by opening up: Googlejuice.
Everybody needs Googlejuice
Googlejuice? That’s the magic elixir you drink when Google values you more because the world values you more. It’s another virtuous circle: The more links, clicks, and mentions you get, the higher you rise in Google’s search results, offering you the potential for yet more clicks. The rich get richer, the Googley Googlier. I wonder whether, someday, companies will come to be valued not only on their revenue, marketshare, EBITDA, and profit but also on their Googlejuice.
The benefits of Googlejuice are lost on companies that do not make their information searchable—from local businesses that don’t have sites to stores that don’t post sales to manufacturers that don’t publish product details to magazines that put content online in overcomplicated designs and databases that Google can’t read. The benefits of search are also lost on a few media companies that resent Google and think they are punishing the big, bad beast by hiding from it. They’re cutting off their noses to spite their faces. Various European papers have argued that Google and Google News are making money off their content and so they have demanded that Google stop searching their sites (which is easy for a site to do; just add a snippet of code to any web page to tell robots and spiders—the programs that crawl the web for search engines—to stay away). Blocking Google only means that it will stop sending readers, which is nothing short of suicide. That’s like newspapers saying to a newsstand operator, “How dare you make a penny distributing my product? Give my papers back or I’ll sue!” Google is their new newsstand.
It’s insane to treat Google as the enemy. Even Yahoo doesn’t (it asked Google to sell its ads). The goal today is to be Google’s friend or at least, as adman Sir Martin Sorrell of WPP has dubbed Google, your “frenemy.” The way to befriend and to exploit Google is to be searchable.
The way to become Google’s enemy is to game and spam its search results. Evildoers will try to corrupt Google’s algorithms to award their sleazy clients fraudulent Googlejuice. Some use automated software to create spam blogs—“splogs”—that carry fake content with lots of links to their clients, trying to trick Google into indexing