Posted on Friday 11th of March 2011 at 08:56 in The Internet

How Google suddenly made search results socially voted

Google announced yesterday that they're finally deploying the functionality that allows you to block entire websites from your search results.  So are you sick of seeing link farms or forums that require registration to see the solution?  Block them and they'll no longer appear in your results.

This is a great step forward in claiming back the search results page (previously I've been known to use "givemebackmygoogle.com" which removes many of the price comparison and affiliate sites which litter even the most basic informational query).  

Wait, did Google just add social voting to entire domains?

If you look at it from a single user perspective then it's an awesome usability improvement.  However, what happens if "www.linkfarm.com" receives 15,000 "blocks"?  Is that sufficient indication for Google to de-prioritise the entire domain?  Under the same business model that "flagging" and "reporting" work - if enough users determine it "bad" then it is removed, or at least returned for moderation.

Googlebot vs. human
One of the hardest things to do when crawling a domain is determine the usefulness with reference to a set of keywords.  Basic practices such as keyword density will only get you so far; hell, even Latent Semantic Indexing isn't foolproof because you can have a page littered with relevent synonyms without being useful to a human.

However, with Google giving humans the power to block domains, they'll then know which domains are being blocked with higher frequency than their equally weighted peers.  Common sense dictates that Google will use this human knowledge to adjust how domains are weighted in the results.

Experts Exchange will feel this one...
Anyone who searches for vaguely technical solutions on the Internet will be aware of the Experts Exchange site.  I personally think it's a brilliant website and used to be a regular user, but the community has been outraged for years at their prominence in the Google results when you need to register to view results.  So if social voting does impact how domains are ranked in the future, expect EE to take a nosedive.

But that means we'd be able to game domains?

While Google haven't said that the block functionality will have any correlation to the global index, it seems likely to me.  The risk however is that competitors will start blocking each other's domains in an attempt to gain the "natural" SEO advantage over each other. 

Interesting either way, even if my suspicions are entirely bogus.

 

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