Are The Search Engines Censoring The Internet?

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Every single day I surf through about a dozen sites, looking for
interesting articles and message board posts. I do this for many
reasons: for my job, which requires that I stay up-to-date on
current technologies, and for my hobby, which allows me to write
articles about the internet and the web.

A big portion of my daily routine involves visiting forums

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related to all facets of the internet. These forums often have
some incredible information not readily available anywhere else;
the best of these (WebMasterWorld, JavaScript City, Spider Foods,
WebDev Forums, Lisa Says it all and the Web Site Abstraction
Forum) are tightly monitored and are heavily trafficked by
knowledgeable people.

I find them very useful not just for ideas, but to occasionally
post something of interest to others. You know, that's something
that I truly enjoy. Stumbling across a post which asks a question,
responding and finding out that I really did help someone solve

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an issue. There are few better feelings than that.

Anyway, today I was looking through some posts on these boards
and I noticed a very common concern and theme. Virtually every
webmaster on the boards is concerned above all else with one
thing: getting traffic to their site. And to get traffic
virtually all of those same webmasters was convinced they have
to get high rankings in the search engines.

I'd seen this before, of course, but today I noticed something
that actually made me angry. I realized that the search engines,

especially the larger ones, are causing people to self-censor
their own sites.

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One lady stated she had a painfully built set of links for
quilt sites. She believed it was the most complete set of quilt
links on the internet, and seemed quite proud. However, she was
disturbed and even was considering removing the links because it
might hurt her rankings in Google.

I continued looking over the posts on that and other forums and
found similar posts scattered throughout. One person was afraid
because he included pages of content not related to the theme of
his site. Would Google drop his ranking and thus cut his income'
Yet he really wanted to include those pages ... but felt he had
to remove them because of this search engine.

You see, what's happening is Google and other search engines have
to work very hard to create very intelligent robots to scan the
web for sites. Until recently, these robots considered each and
every page as a separate entity. Now, however, a change is
occurring. Google is attempting to group pages together into
sites, and then judge all of the pages as a group. The
implication of this is apparently sites which are "tightly
themed" will be positioned higher in the results pages than
those that are not.

I guess the theory is that a tightly themed site is somehow
better than a site which has lots of information about many
different subject.

Google also ranks pages (and now perhaps entire sites) based

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upon the number and quality of sites that link back. The thought
behind this is that if a site is linked to by other quality
sites (sites related to the theme), then that site is somehow
better than other sites and deserves to rank higher.

So what's seems to be happening is many webmasters are very,
very concerned about every move they make. Every change to their
site is measured against the question, "what will Google or
Altavista or whatever think of this change'" Will making that
change drop their rankings' Will it get them removed from the

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engine' Will the Earth come to an end simply because a link to a
site with different content is included'

Other questions I have seen include: will using Flash drop me
out of the engines' Should I use tables or will that hurt my
page ranking' If "low quality" sites link to mine, will Google
get annoyed and kick me to the second page'

This is, in my opinion, utterly and completely ridiculous. The
purpose of the web and the internet is communication. People
write articles, create graphics and multimedia and place them on
the internet because they have a story to tell or some
information to impart.

Of course it is important ......