An article has been published on Newsweek(Nov 5) about Google.According to that article Google is more vulnerable than anyone think.I am not as much wise as to comment about vulnerability of Google.I am just trying to share what i feel.
Daily Herald link of that article.
According to that article,dissatisfaction is growing about Google search.People are not getting from Google search what they expect.Their is no doubt that Google is the most popular search engine.According to that article 60 percents of web searchers use Google where as its closest competitor Yahoo get 12 percents searchers.
Google search is so popular for its relevant search results.But people are starting to say its not that relevant as they want.I feel sometimes i am not getting the best ten or twenty results on a search.Actually no one need more than one if he find his desired result.
But if unexpected results keep coming on a search engine people will try to get another search engine if that can provide better search result.Why these unexpected results are coming?I feel backlink is one of the main cause of it.Generally the exact factors to determine the position of a web page in a search is only known to search engineers.But we all know backlink is one of the major factor of it.
Google provide results according to the PageRank of a page.One of the factor to determine PageRank of a page is quantity,quality and relevance of its backlinks.A better or more relevant site can fall behind if it has less or no backlinks than other relevance site.Here is the Google Help on improving PageRank of a Page.
It says one of it lines that "In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to their pages".So webmasters are trying to get links to their page through link exchange program as paid links are not allowed.Here is what Google says about paid link.
Here is Link Schemes of Google.If you go through it you will find excessive link exchange can harm PageRank of a site.
So at this point one may think if search engines ignore that backlinks that came through link exchange the bad effect of backlinks can be minimized.Is that true?NO.
There will be other ways to exchange links if reciprocal links are banned by search engines.If some webmasters decide to exchange links they can easily do it by exchanging links among themselves and not with each other.Let me give an example.
Among 10 websites a website can link to other 5 web pages.Those 5 web pages can get link from other 5 web pages excluding than one they are pointing to.Not all web site will get 5 baclinks but some maths can do the optimization.If each of these 10 sites get involved in another circles a huge chain of backlinks will grow.So bots will fail to identify them.And it is the truth of universe for all time that computer programs can not win over human brains for all time.
So exclusion of manual link exchange is not the solution of the problem that rising for backlinks.I feel attention on backlinks to measure a page value is becoming another obsolete method like relying on title and meta tags,contents keywords etc. that search engines used before.
I feel time has come for search engines to find an alternative better way to measure page value