We’re Dead! We’re Not!
News of the day is that some blog networks, including Engadget, have incurred deep losses in page rank. Sky is falling, world is over, right? Not quite.
The primary reason: PageRank is more a marketing myth than how Google really works these days (read thousands of factors, not just links).
But the news reminded me of another tale of Google-woe: who remembers Squidoo? That whacky world of structured geocities-like pages packed with affiliate spam. The script kiddies poured in, Jason Calacanis waged a war against the site and then ‘Google slapped’ the site with penalties. Well kind of. Here is the usage graph:
Looks like the folks at Squidoo are really reeling from that one.
Long live spam!
