Creeva’s World 2.0

Image from here

This story hopped across my feed reader today, it peeked my inter­est since before I expanded it I only had the title, “Search giants join to tidy up Web addresses”.  I wasn’t sure from the title if they were look­ing at try­ing to apply pres­sure before any new TLD’s were going to be added, if they were look­ing at the URL short­en­ing issue that seems to be pro­lif­er­at­ing across the net, or what­ever else they were try­ing to do.   So much can be derived from that sim­ple sen­tence that I felt I just had to read that article.

It seems Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo all decided to have a sit down yes­ter­day.  From the arti­cle the fol­low­ing was discussed:

All three on Thurs­day announced they’d sup­port a tech­nique by which a lit­tle extra code in a Web page can indi­cate the address of its “canon­i­cal” version–essentially, the orig­i­nal, pri­mary URL. The move will make it eas­ier to tell search engines what they should pay atten­tion to and to avoid treat­ing duplica­tive Web pages as different.

What does this mean to a crossposter?

Well sim­ply that you are less likely to be tagged as spam.  When this search engines opti­mize and find dupli­cate con­tent on mul­ti­ple sites they assume most of that data is uno­rig­i­nal and there should only be only true source and owner of that data.   The prob­lem grows since it is no longer spam­mers doing this.   Many blog­gers are now shar­ing the same story from their pri­mary blog on other ser­vices and other social cir­cles.   When Google sees my same con­tent on Creeva.com, then Myspace, then Live­jour­nal, then Vox — it doesn’t know who runs the source mate­r­ial.   This in turn can get all the sites to be mod­ded down in the search engine data­base since they don’t know which is the true orig­i­nal site.

Another unde­sir­able side of this can also emerge.  Sup­pose you work really hard on your blog design and pre­sen­ta­tion, but also cross­post (I con­sider myself half ass­ing blog design by the way).  You have this beau­ti­ful pre­sen­ta­tion method, and your Live­jour­nal site is the first returned result in the search engine for a par­tic­u­lar story.   You are now dri­ving traf­fic to a site that you put up for the com­mu­nity, but haven’t mon­e­tized at all and is not the aes­thetic appeal of your main blog.    This will not help you keep read­ers and grow your sites reg­u­lar viewership.

What this method they are try­ing ot come up with will do is put a bit of microc­ode in the post that allows the data to say it came from your main site.   The cross­posted links may drop off search, but really that’s fine if your doing it to share data in com­mu­ni­ties and not attempt­ing to game the sys­tem.  Your blog will rise to the top of search results instead of your cross­post­ing des­ti­na­tions.   This will help you con­trol where your read­ers land.

This is really a boon to every­one in the sys­tem espe­cially cross­posters

Once this sys­tem is actu­ally rat­i­fied and imple­mented by the search engines, the peo­ple that imple­ment it will have more con­trol over their com­ment and spam­mers will die off.   To be more exact let’s look at the cross­post­ing sce­nario.   We’ll assume that spam blog oper­a­tors are going to be watch­ing this closely and will attempt to change/modify the microc­ode and say their site is the author­i­ta­tive one of the orig­i­nal data and not your actual blog.   Well the cross­posters will have one, two, a dozen sites that point back to their own orig­i­nal blog, giv­ing it more weight and author­ity in the search engine results.   Essen­tially the cross­posters who man­age and put effort into this can out assert the spam sites on who the data source really is.

My Fear

The one thing that wor­ries me with the asser­tion of who was the orig­i­na­tor of the data is the spam­mers though.   With enough pro­lif­er­a­tion the spam­mers could say they are the orig­i­na­tor of the con­tent.   No mat­ter how good you are in the Inter­net soci­etythe spam­mers could just set up 2000 spam blogs copy­ing your con­tent and gain­ing the assertive­ness that they are the orig­i­nal site.   This is where we have to trust cur­rent search engine tech­nol­ogy that can detect spam blogs and hope they are not over­writ­ten by trust in this new sys­tem.     It will always be a war in many ways, but hope­fully this is all a step in the cor­erct direc­tion of mak­ing search engines faster and more accu­rate, while not penal­iz­ing those that fol­low by the rules, but dis­trib­ute their con­tent to many of their own networks.