Google’s declining relevancy

David Naylor stated that he sees search in the long-term being a two-horse race between MSN and Yahoo!

Whilst there’s probably some tongue-in-cheek there, his reply in the comments section to GoogleGuy is pretty illuminating - Google will not list a page on Avon’s UK site because it is recent.

It’s a big frustration for myself, too - rather than Google listing site pages according to best relevancy on their own merits, Google has been pushing development towards distrusting the web and choking new content simply for being new.

I’m not aware of what form and degree of spam Google are having to deal with - but as an SEO, webmaster, and Google user, I can say that it is Google’s relevancy that seems to be reduced more than spam.

The idea of crippling new sites - sandboxing - is a pretty atrocious and potentially insidious development. Imagine if news broadcasters decided they would only broadcast yesterday’s news - heck, last week’s or even last month’s news - because they didn’t trust their initial stories. Where would the news relevancy be then? Seems to be the same with Google at the moment.

And it’s potentially insidious because it effectively tells new businesses that they must rely on PPC rather than organic listings - the wall between Google AdWords and Google Web Search never looked so fragile.

Another problem I see is the natural boost Google gives to .edu sites.

I started SEO in non-commercial reference areas. Even still, those out-of-date University pages are atrocious to compete again, because Google has decided that university sites are less accessible to manipulation and are therefore given an unnecessary boost.

Maybe true to some extent - but it’s not all that hard to find .edu domains turned over to SEO practices. And god forbid you visit Page and Brin’s old university paper online, which has more casino text links than most blog spam pages.

Boosted .edu pages also mean that pages with incomplete and fragmentary information are given precedent over more recent sites that may have fuller and more more extensive collections. Even worse is that many of these old .edu pages appear abandoned, with “last updated” in terms of years, and broken e-mail links.

And that’s a real problem as network theory applied to links entails that older pages will become more and more entrenched in their rankings without significant factors to compensate for this.

The perverse thing with Google so far is that rather than tackle such issues, there are instead exaggerated, with the continued presumption that older domains as being more trustworthy as being equivalent to older domains having better quality content - which from observation appears to be a baseless presumption.

Google is suffering from its prior success - I have no doubt that it faces real spam issues that need to be dealt with. But I am not at all convinced that Google is going about it the right way. Hey, I’m sure Google think they are - but I’m sure Alta Vista did as well, before they effectively imploded themselves. It would be tragic if Google suffered the same way.

Google’s perceived decline of relevancy is a topic recently raised at Search Engine Watch, and Danny Sullivan raised some pretty interesting suggestions.