I is for Interwebs
Key Words are DEAD. That is what I said, “dead.” Maybe if we had adopted the good old LC Subject Headings (see example) as necessary tags for web content this whole mess could have been avoided, but online keyword searching has come to replace more nuanced search that was once done in libraries.
So online searching switched from indexing of links, that initially were intended to reflect the quality of your network of links, to keywords used in your content, not just meta-tags and descriptions, but the actual content of the information that is contained within the pages and posts of your site or blog. Soon after though, keywords in content came to be exploited by “content farmers.” Writers have always worked in stables and been treated like livestock (moo…) but… this new type of farmer had no connection to any acquaintance with past intelligent husbandry principles, and these guys worked purely through commercial farming that produced tasteless, low nutrition content that may have been prettily packaged, but was impossible to serve as part of a nutritious informational meal.
Content farms paid outrageously low prices for articles, but with an increasing global market and new ways to taps low wage seekers these farms found “contractors” who were willing to work for less than what it cost to create the formulaic keyword salted content they sold.
Search engines no longer heavily weight their site rankings on links or keywords, or even comments for that matter, according to my SEO guru friends. As far as I can tell Google began talking about the changes they were making to search algorithms that are referred to collectively as Panda in early in 2011. There have been several releases. So, don’t believe anything you are told about SEO for the moment if keywords are mentioned. What I have been told that you want to do is become familiar with the concept of the semantic web. But I’m not so sure that is true, either.
There is nothing wrong with informing yourself about where others say we are heading, but we humans are awful about actually getting where we say we want to go. The concept of a semantic web has been around for a while; the semantic web, is in many ways the holy grail of the internet. Panda will not lead to the semantic web. These new search algorithms employed by Google will not create meaning from data. Understanding of user will not miraculously appear from this iteration of search capabilities that primarily gets back to the original intent almost two decades ago of using links to determine the authority of the network in which the content generator exists.
Context, peer review as it were, must be taken into account in a way that cannot be gamed by marketers, hucksters, nor even cult leaders with delusions of grandeur. That is what Panda seems to be trying to do. Panda is an iteration, a refining recursion, of using both the network of those who access data and the network of the content creator to determine the context and networks in which the content exists while also taking the quality of the information contained in the specific piece of web data into account.
Those are the basics of what is happening. No, I don’t know how Google does this, but this seems to be what they say they are doing.
Now on to why I think women are uniquely positioned to take advantage of core data within the new and improved web, what web gurus call the semantic web, as reflected through a more nuanced and context sensitive search methodology.
Women understand context and know how to balance competing priorities. Women understand that comments are actually conversations. Women also know when someone is trying to hose them. Women create the daily stories that accumulate to become our culture. The semantic web is attempting to recreate the way we humans understand things. Women are experts at this.
For at least the last several thousand years women have raised up new generations of humanity to prioritize sustenance, dangers, and recreation. A critical mass of women are now using the web to organize and orchestrate their daily lives. Women have been creating blogs, networks, and bazaars and markets via the web for the last decade in a way that used to be done via the telephone or in person at a community gathering point such as a church, or market. Daily life has come to the internet. Who better to create and utilize daily life through the web than the women who have always tended to daily life, through the nuanced interplay of education, shopping, cooking, cleaning, budgeting, care-giving, record keeping, clothing, shelter, family and community communication.
Our culture, even a simple index of the web is far more complex than what SEO businesses can manipulate. Women have been the indexers and organizers of human life for, literally, ages. Google is just attempting to mimic the natural process of organizing and accessing information about what we do, what we want, based on a more natural model that takes social relationships and context into account. Real attempts at tapping the structure of the semantic web are probably integral steps in the creation of it. It is all very heady stuff and we are not yet up to the task knowing what we are doing.
But… women have already changed the web with mommy blogs, social networks, e-commerce, and Pinterest. We are uniquely positioned to consciously take advantage of creating content for the web and providing gateways to it because we have already been doing something like that since before the dawn of civilization.
Of course savvy men can also do the very same thing, and if they do take process building into account as well as product manufacture, they could also be successful.
Get your nuance on women! Escalate your quality content creation, create what you know and do it well, it is what Google is looking for. We are the change we have been waiting for.
Women May Be the Winners of the Google SEO Wars
For those of use who watch the web search industry develop, the recent transformations within it have created excitement to say the least. Everything has changed. Or at least that is the current buzz. Major changes have been made to how Google does search over the last year. That is true. Search is always evolving, so do not panic and simply inform yourself about what is happening to the information process that bloggers count on to fairly index and refer to their blogs.
I remember being heavily penalized by a subject area reviewer volunteering for DMOZ for having a page on one of my earliest websites that had a list of books of particular interest to Late Boomers that linked to Amazon.com. The editor trashed the whole site because of the page. I was livid. I saw many other sites that were far more commercial than mine do well. Links were where it was at way back in the early adolescence of the internet. If you didn’t link properly, properly according to whom I never did figure out, your site could nose dive. Even though it was a directory and not a search engine with which I had trouble, that is when I started paying some attention to what came to be known as Search Engine Optimization, or SEO.
Google rose to prominence and finally dominated the market a couple of years into the new millennium. Checking your page rank on Google became as common place for individuals with web pages as checking the number of hits your website received. Almost immediately search engine “professionals” emerged from the primordial info slime and the 21st Century’s first group of snake oil sales persons integrated themselves in amongst the few real SEO professionals. Lots of people who pass themselves off as experts are con artists, but most SEO sellers are just well-intentioned people who do not know as much as they think they know. Real SEO requires staying on top of what are essentially trade secrets – the proprietary algorithms that are used to fuel web search.
What are called ink farms and content farms were some of the major problems for the search engine companies. Link farming attempted to create higher rank or search page result listings by trading or selling links that would increase a site’s supposed credibility or authority as at one time incoming links were treated as valid reflections of the authority and influence of the site. Linking just to increase links inflated the number of links while decreasing the worth of a link.
Search engines, such as Google, began to do battle with link farms mid-decade into the ’00s. Link farming slowly withered as search engines began to cut the weight links had in search, and content was declared king. Then sites had to have content or articles or blog posts to rank highly in search results. Content rather than links then began to be farmed, or more accurately ranched, as major content farms used two main strategies to produce content for sites that would fake out the search engines.
One type of farm hired individuals to write lots of stuff for very little money, so the quality was not that great, but the quantity of the content was enough to feed lots of sites, many actually used regurgitated content. The content farms then sold to sites so that the sites would have lots of fiber for the search engines to digest.
Another type of farm hired people to write posts and articles that seeded keywords at just the right frequency in pieces that did not even have to make much sense. This was done because keywords are used in meta tags and should be reflected in the content that the meta-tags describe. This was the juncture at which content became confused with key words.
Now we seems to be entering a new focus phase for search engines. I like to think that while content is still king but the but the power behind the thrown has been recognized and is queen in all of her contextual glory. It is good to be the queen, in the Mary Englebreit sense of the word., because all those cherries and patterns, color, attitude and relationships are what matter in the process of getting the searcher connected to the information he or she wants. Social authority is the new buzzword for search. To rank well in the brave new world of search you need have quality content and that translates, according to the word on the street, to often updated, non-keyword seeded content that is accessed by important people.
The “important people” aspect of the new search is reflects the increasing awareness of the heavy hitting nature of social media. The recommendations of people you trust, as measured by your info stream with them more than whether you actually know them or not, is the “new” and secret ingredient of Google search.
Some folks, such as the women who started the BlogHer network, Lisa, Elise, and Jory, were paying attention long before Google began to pay attention and these savvy women had launched conferences and networks based on a feminized understanding of information in the digital age. Sites that foreshadowed the coming changes, which some people are only now “getting,” and all the concomitant changes to search that have resulted reflect what I like to think of as the feminization of the internet. (I am writing more about this topic this week in what may or may not become a series of articles.)
To restate this succinctly, what has happened recently with Google stems from search engine companies trying to outmaneuver scam artists whose sole purpose in life is to get you to look at stuff in which you have absolutely no interest. Deceptive ads, promises of free prizes, and manipulation of search engine results are three of the most common ways such “marketers” do this. This practice gives real marketers who work to deliver a good product a bad name, but be that as it may, everyone does want your attention on the web. So while some of us may be expressing concern as we mull over the whole Google privacy hoo-haa, at the very same time, some things Google is doing are very much in our interest as women, household managers, content creators, and savvy private and public consumers of information. Google appears to be using relationships and networks (of both creators and consumers) in the algorithms that determine what the authority is of individual chunks of information on the web. And women are the mavens of communication and relationship networks.
Women understand context and know how to balance competing priorities. Women understand that comments are actually conversations. Women also know when someone is trying to hose them. Women create the daily stories that build most our culture. The semantic web is attempting to recreate the way we humans understand things. Women are experts at this.
My Nuts and Bolts Infrastructure for a Research and Content Business
Do you ever get caught in a vortex? I do. Perhaps it comes from living in Arizona, but then again, I don’t live anywhere near Sedona, which as everyone knows is Vortex Central. Too many things to do, too many things coming at me, too many decisions to make about too many choices. Clients, book, blog– those are my real priorities. But all of these core areas of my life require me to do research – Everything Requires Research – and putting all these things together into a reasonable and sustainable form of work in the current world that requires that people like me be writers, graphic designers, marketing pro, and publisher. Arggghhhhh! Okay. I feel better now.
With the rate of information creation and flow reaching near singularity– inducing levels I sometimes feel like I will implode and fall in on myself. Friends and he blogging and e-business meet-up guru, Pablo, mentions this evolutionary likelihood every time I attend the monthly Meet Up. I also try to keep up with several streams of incoming information from (and I’m mixing apples and oranges here) BlogHer, Twitter, Facebook, Peace and Justice networks, Media Bistro, and a few feed readers that seem to find different information in different ways about the very same subjects.
I’m starting to get a handle on what I need to do to be successful, and if I stay focused, everything will fall into place this year. I have done my research, found my passion, know my limits, built and am continuing to build a great network.
So what I have put together thus far:
- Two new websites/blogs that target my business specifically, and the throughput for that business. While they are separate, they are complementary. Hill Research Services is the business and where I sell me and my creations. Reason Creek is the new, and one would hope, last, attempt to create a place for my writing.
- I have either imported or am in the process of importing most of my blogs posts from my various, and yes, sundry, blogs that I have had over the years.
- Build Peace, Late Boomers, Done Nesting, Cuppakona (from Geocities), Wildflower Woods (a Gene Stratton Porter blog) a
- and even a few from blogs that never really got off the ground such as Things in the Attic, and Casita Gaia
- then there are also a few things that were created for short term “runs” on Brazen Hussies.
- oh and there are my Second Life blogs
- my blog and my site on medical child abuse for adult survivors of Munchausen Syndrome by Proxy
And I haven’t even gotten to my poetry or the subject essays I had on the old Geocities site.
I have settled on using themes from Elegant Themes. I love the newest themes there! The designs vary, there are new themes or templates and revisions of older ones being regularly released. I am using HostGator for hosting multiple accounts (use coupon code upacreekmarch2012 to get 25% off a basic account).
Now I just have to keep at it and put info on my older sites about these and get readers to transfer – that is the part I’m worried about.
As soon as everything on the site looks pretty, and works and plays well together, I will blast myself all over social media networks (twitter, linked in, facebook, pinterest, and on and on…) in a likeable, unobtrusive, curiosity inducing and semantic web friendly way. Wish me luck on that one!
What have I forgotten? Seriously, what do you see that I am missing? Leave a comment and let me know!