Do Blogs Spam Google Results?
from the doesn't-look-like-it dept
Elwyn Jenkins writes "Since April 4, 2003 I have been practically testing Google to see whether the Orlowskian Charge that Google is blocked with blogs is entirely accurate. Are blogs a spam-like nuisance in Google? The complaint from anti-bloggers is that it is almost becoming impossible to obtain good search results in Google because bloggers pages get in the way of giving you the 'real' pages. Our test of 5,000 searches reveal the facts. Blogs do not interfere with obtaining relevant results from Google." Nice to see some real research being done, though, I might question some of the assumptions made at the end, which suggest that blogs are actually under-represented in Google. However, the data does show that out of 5,000 queries, blogs show up in the top five results only 1.7% of the time. In the top ten: 2.1%. They judged that, out of those 5,000 searches - only 5 (or 0.1%) had blogs that were "inappropriately placed" and lowered the value of the search. For the methodology and more stats, click through on the story. Good work by the folks at Microdoc.
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Gaming Google
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JENKINS LIES AGAIN
Posted by xian at October 17, 2003 10:55 AM
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Lis all lies. Jenkins is a fraud and DID DEFRAUDS Standard Transactions and ruint many peoples' lives - he also owes maxecommerce over $300000. He ruint Standard Reserve too. Their are lots of folk in Atlanta GA after Jenkins blood coz he theived them too. He also is selling a fake cancer cure in AUstralia. Just do a google search on "elwyn jenkins" and read all about his B.S.
Posted by: Life Rast on November 8, 2003 05:51 AM
Case Study No. 2
Another tale of blogging excess
Elwyn Jenkins was the founder, CEO, and chairman of Standard Reserve, an Internet "digital cash" currency company with several subsidiaries and offices in several countries, that was incorporated in the British Virgin Islands. Jenkins' wife Glenda and son Loryn were also involved in the company. In 2002 it went bankrupt and customers lost their money. Lawsuits were filed by other directors against Elwyn Jenkins, who was fired, because customers' funds had been commingled with funds used lavishly for company expenses. (That's their choice of words, which softens those directors' own apparent negligence. Burned customers, on the other hand, prefer the term "stolen.") Mr. Jenkins now resides in Sydney, Australia and is known as "Microdoc," a blogger whose favorite topic is the Wonderful World of Google.
Mr. Jenkins has a number of blogging and other sites, most of which were set up in early 2003. Most of his domains are heavily interlinked. (Half of the sites below began timing out on 2003-06-02, a day after Mr. Jenkins read this page. Another has an empty home page and returns "not found" for old links. The blogrolls on his home pages have been cut back drastically, although they can still be seen on a few hundred archive pages.)
www.microdoc-news.info www.microdocs-news.info smoogle.info
googlevillage.info blogging-news.info googlology.info
microdoc.bloki.com www.question-factory.com meeting-mentor.blogspot.com
radio.weblogs.com/0111745 verityintellectualproperties.com textchunk.info
personalbrain.info technacy.info verity-ip.com
bloggers-news.info
His pro-Google blogging reflects a bizarre penchant for coining new words. The so-called "Google research" on his blogs does not meet any standards for research that we've ever seen, and some of his conclusions would be laughable if they weren't so vague as to defy any sort of reaction whatsoever. Together with the made-up words to define the role of Google and bloggers as the new players in "technacy," the entire effort fails to instruct or impress. Print editors often have to "edit to fit," to squeeze into column inches. Bloggers edit for PageRank.
Wise words from blog spammer Elwyn Jenkins, PhD
"There is an additional idea that you need to implement to get good results from Google and that is as you write each day, make sure you are using new words connected with your area of interest. I have a list of 158 words that must arrive in my text over a two month period -- these, if you like, are keywords that have to do with my area of interest. Make a list and make sure you get through all of them over a certain time. This will increase the number of people arriving at your site from Google who put in all manner of query strings." -- found on a pro-Google forum, 2003-05-02
There's also another method to the madness. Mr. Jenkins gets on the blogrolls of other bloggers, and his traffic to the two Microdoc News mirror sites is respectable. Some A-list bloggers such as Dave Winer, Doc Searls, and Evan Williams (evhead.com) have unthinkingly complimented him and linked to these sites. Williams, the co-founder of the company behind blogger.com and now a Google employee, actually has Microdoc News on his blogroll. In short, Mr. Jenkins' vaporous content is well on its way to earning him a place on most of the A-list blogrolls. From there he'll be able to make a lot of money from blogging. And Google, no doubt, will make a lot of money by inserting ads on the bloggers' pages. The only people who suffer will be those who try to use Google to find meaningful content.
Making money is clearly his goal. The key sentence from one of his pages, titled Make Money Online, is this: "Dr. Jenkins has pioneered a unique approach to using Google and blogs to build traffic." Another page plugged a book on the topic of email marketing, titled Discover the Hidden Power of Email.
Screen shots of Make Money Online:
PageTop PgDn2 PgDn3 PgDn4
Screen shots of Discover the Hidden Power of Email:
PageTop PgDn2 PgDn3 PgDn4 PgDn5 PgDn6 PgDn7 PgDn8
In other words, if you pay him money, he'll tell you how to game Google through blogging in order to make even more money. This is nearly identical to the familiar schemes of link farms, or of selling PageRank -- except that the outright sale of text ads with pricing based on PageRank is much more honest than what Mr. Jenkins is doing. The new twist on these old schemes is that Mr. Jenkins actually claims that PageRank doesn't matter that much for Google traffic. All the time he claims this, he uses every method known to increase his PageRank, and brown-noses Google at every opportunity. It's basically a covert gaming technique that uses old schemes covered up with vague and questionable content, while denying that such schemes have any relevance at all.
In spy tradecraft, they call this a "cover story." The A-list of bloggers, who cannot see past their own brown noses, are buying into it uncritically.
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Re: JENKINS LIES AGAIN
John Ray CEO
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