“Why Google is #1 With Weblogs”

Search for "weblog" on Google, and Google's own weblog comes up as the first hit.

Dave Winer says that this looks like a human tampered with the search results. (Dave is responding to, and partially disagreeing with, an article on Micro-Doc News that plainly claims Google is cheating, along with the other search engines.)

I disagree completely. While I don't know all the rules for their ranking algorithm, they've made it very clear that a few things matter the most:

1. The number of inbound links
2. The text used in the inbound links
3. The title of the page being ranked
4. The quality of the inbound links
5. How often the search word appears on the page

Google is so popular, is it all that surprising that their newish weblog has a load of incoming links? No. In fact, there are 984 links to their weblog, at this moment. Compare that to the 577 links currently pointing to the number 2 result.

Read through some of those links pointing to Google's weblog. Most of them say, "Google Weblog," which means "weblog" is in the link pointing to their site. More ranking points.

The title of their weblog is "Google Weblog." More ranking points.

With so many sites pointing to the Google Weblog, they get the full range from worthless inbound links to very high quality links.

Google's weblog probably doesn't use the word "weblog" nearly as oftne as other sites, but that's also the least important part of the page ranking algorithm.

Just because a site is all about weblogs, or uses the word "weblog" all the time, doesn't mean it's going to get a high page ranking in a search for "weblog." Put "weblog" in your page title, and get people to include the word "weblog" in the links to your site, then you'll get a higher rank.

Now I have a question: does anybody actually care about this stuff? Google's good, but does anybody actually expect it to be perfect, and to understand everything it reads? We know the rules that Google uses, so if it's important that you be ranked highly for some search term, then why don't people just follow those rules instead of accusing Google of cheating?