Search News: What Can Guy Kawasaki and Danny Sullivan Tell Us About Relevance?
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Written By Noah Mallin | March 25, 2009 | Share This
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The raging debate in the search salons at the SES New York conference this week were not about the dozens of companies that decided to forgo booths and/or sponsorships (look for more of this as the year goes on) but about a hornet’s nest stirred up in the aftermath of Alltop founder Guy Kawasaki’s ® speech to the assembled legions yesterday. Kawasaki preached his mantra of the-more-the-merrier when it comes to social media – and since the guy has at least three other people Twittering under his name I think he really means it (rumor has it that his speech was actually made by two midget interns in a Guy Kawasaki suit.) We have been longtime believers that it’s the quality of interactions that matter in social media, not the number of followers. Obviously it’s better to have 1000 people following you than 1, but what occurs there ought to have some value to them.
Many of these concerns were shared by Lisa Barone who wrote a wonderfully snarky, yet fair, recap of Kawasaki’s speech for her blog. The fun really started however, when her post made it to Sphinn and attracted a comment from Search Engine Land main man Danny Sullivan. Sullivan asked the broader question of why Google seems to turn a blind eye to link aggregators like Kawasaki’s Alltop when they are much more aggressive in burying other sites that might be considered link spam but which we were started by no-names (compared to Kawasaki who is a celebrity, at least online.)
The reality is that being a celebrity, even online, is like being rich. It’s hard not to make money (as anyone who’s seen Brewster’s Millions knows) once you have a lot. Celebrity earns interest too. Kawasaki and his ilk naturally attract lots of followers and even though he’s throwing a huge number of links into Alltop, he’s got plenty of links coming in by virtue of being who he is, as well as his content. The darkside of this in social media is Digg where an army of logrollers votes for each other’s stuff on a regular basis, keeping the same sources close to the top time after time.
All of this points to a deeper problem – what is relevance and how can it be measured. Again, Kawasaki would tell you that it’s strictly numerical and in his experience that’s true. His minions push out reams of unrelated links all day on Twitter and he has 93,000 followers (!), plus his links in and out means that Alltop ranks well (though I haven’t had the same experience of it coming up in Google searches the way Danny has).
Just as the guy (or the Guy as the case may be) with 93,000 followers may not actually be providing the experience that’s most relevant to me in social media, the site with the most links in and out may not be the most relevant one for me on a search engine reply page. In a sense this is part of the argument that media giants are making when they complain about their rankings in Google search results.
Yet part of the pleasure of the Internet is that the “professional” is no more or less valued than the “amateur” - in theory everyone has a chance to rank well. Much of the difficulty major media sites have in ranking can be directly attributed to poor SEO on their sites rather than a deliberate devaluation of their worth. Even with better SEO though, many midrange media titles have a hard time competing with the link power of an aggregator like the Huffington Post.
I don’t think there is an easy solution here but I do think this is a problem that is having a more obvious impact on the quality of search results.
Questions or comments? Feel free to leave them here or check out Reprise Media folks on Twitter.
Topics: SEM: Paid Search, SEO, Social Media |
This in turn prompted the post entitled, “Search News: What Can Guy Kawasaki and Danny Sullivan Tell Us About Relevance?” Written By Noah Mallin of Searchviews, the company blog of Reprise Media, it recapped yesterday’s top story and added, “The raging debate in the search salons at the SES New York conference this week…(was) about a hornet’s nest stirred up in the aftermath of Alltop founder Guy Kawasaki’s speech to the assembled legions yesterday….Many of these concerns were shared by Lisa Barone who wrote a wonderfully snarky, yet fair, recap of Kawasaki’s speech for her
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