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Google Groups appearing in organic SERPS
I had a thought the other night, it was an evil thought that came while thinking about all those who are not being allowed to play in any SEO reindeer games. What if Google flooded Google groups with PageRank to allow it go forth and rank in the organic SERPS? It is obvious that Google holds back the floodgates and has been very generous to SEOs in allowing blog posts to go unchecked in Google search even if the advice is sometimes incorrect, snake oil or done by those looking to hurt Google’s reputation. So what if Google unleashed Google Groups and allowed it to rank with the best of forums and blogs? Would it replace the advice given by leading SEOs?
I made a snarky post in Google groups asking if pagerank is finite this week. Myself and a few others decided that sinse it would never be ranked in the organic SERPS we would move it here.
In the image below you see Google Groups outranking Aaron Wall for “Is pagerank finite”? Is Google preparing to open the floodgates? I can kind of see now why Google makes those in this industry nervous, they could change things in the blink of an eye even though I do not believe this is currently their intent. ;)
February 19th, 2007 at 3:36 am
This makes a lot of sense; especially how many links are pointed to groups. The only area I imagine problems with is with traditional groups that Google pulls in. With a community as large as some of these old groups they could link to a forum without triggering a bomb based filter. Especially if the have old sites that have been around for years, which many IRC and old school forum admins have.
It’s actually been surprising that these have not appeared in the SERP’s earlier, since some of the content could be highly relevant depending on the question.
It would be interesting to know how much of the content is bad versus good content.
February 19th, 2007 at 8:22 am
I believe Google does not allow this area to rank even if it is highly relevant. Could you imagine if they did?
In the end I guess the question is, whose advice is more relevant?
February 21st, 2007 at 7:21 pm
This has actually been happening on some relatively obscure terms for years now, although indirectly.
One thing I’ve noticed and quietly complained about is that big G was showing sites that scraped Usenet newsgroups and pretended they were forum posts. These would show up on Page 1-2-3 of relatively obscure SERPs (mostly techy stuff.)
Here’s an example:
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rls=GGLF,GGLF:2006-19,GGLF:en&q=pre+word%2dwrap+CSS
There is a page called thescripts.com that looks like a forum post, but was actually posted into Google Groups originally (I know because I was the poster.)
So to me, the solutions are either to get rid of SERPs like this entirely or to just replace them with Google Groups results. Apparently, big G has taken the latter approach.