Hi all,
I think Dom has it nailed.
My understanding is that it was a couple of kids who created google (do they still own the deciding shares?) and anyway I imagine if they are still deciding factors in the company that they’ve seen enough money to satisfy …
but then there is the old saying which doesn’t go this way … but its best I can remember … all powerful leads to all corrupt … the words ain’t right but the meaning is, and when you’ve had your fill of money and what it brings … and you are satisfied rather than one of those who couldn’t buy happiness … then what’s left? Power.
You can never have enough of that. So I think the theory has merit but also agree with Dom that they don’t need to cheat in terms of tainting the algos … they just plug in whatever keyword they’re shooting for and I imagine it pops out a nice little recipe for how many times keyword shows up, how many versions, how many links should be coming in to that page and from what type of sites …
I do find it curious that google ranks its own pages with numbers like 8 while most struggle to see a 5.
More curious is a search i did the other day (I can’t remember now for what) and google had a page about 5 or 6 ranking, and it was for a search that had nothing to do with them and I remembered thinking how odd it was their page came up because what on earth could they have to do with this?
I let it go and didn’t think more about it until now.
If i understand correctly on the linking thing … then your site should rank for keywords that are used to link to your site. I ask you? how many people link to google using any kind of keyword they’d be using to get traffic to their site? Unless of course you knew that it would help your ranking which might be the case since google seems to be an authority on at least some subjects that I felt they had no business with. (wish I could remember what i searched)
anyway … so people might be linking to google, but wouldn’t they just put up as their anchor text: “google” ?
I would. Hell if you don’t know what google’s about by now … you need to throw those eight track tapes away, turn off the rerun of I love Lucy and by ALL means get that mullet changed to something else.
so where I’m going with all that is that yes google is probably getting plenty of links incoming to it but how many of those are targeting any other keyword? let alone odd phrases they have no real reason to be showing up for.
someone mentioned to me (Sir BonusGeek) that right now he felt a lot of sites were showing up with just a bunch of links helping them that were coming in from all kinds of places (not targeted) but he felt they’d eventually fall out of grace.
But if you consider it from my point that IF google is wanting to rank for a wide variety of subject matter then their algo would have to be set up to give points to those with quantity of incoming links to have enough effect on SERPs so that their obvious mountain of unrelated links would still be able to compete successfully against legitimate sites for that keyword phrase (via content and targeted incoming links).
It would surely explain why BG felt there were a lot of sites with unrelevant incoming links (in quantity) ranking high. Because that’s the only way google could rank for phrases that are basically off-topic for their business model.
also curious is that I have seen membership sites with high page rank on the inside of the fence. What’s that about? if it takes a membership to get inside then why would google even allow that site’s inner-fenced pages be indexed?