On Google's Ranking Economy

Micah Tillman and I were having a conversation about a new economy the other day- one that's been brought to life by Google's Ranking Algorithm.

It all began when I attempted to put a link to his website on my sidebar, but ended up linking to my good friend Seth instead. It was a little embarrassing, but seemed easily corrected. All I needed to do was update the link, publish the site, and everything was back to normal…

Except that it wasn't...

You seen, my site is ranked by Google as a definitive site for 'Nathan Key' (which is good, because I like being the definitive source of info about myself).

Now, I don’t think too many people are looking for me, but since I have fairly regular traffic here, Google respects me enough that their little webcrawlers use my site as a legitimate source of information. Therefore, when they saw me link to Seth’s site (and call it Micah Tillman's) they assumed that I knew was I was talking about. So now when you search of Micah- Seth’s site comes up toward the bottom of the first page as a potential option…

Yikes. That’s not right.

While Micah was pretty cool about it, my mistake sparked a short conversation about traffic economies which, of course, got me thinking about ethics.

What I mean by ethics is this: Since part of Google’s algorithm includes visits and links in & out of a site, it follows that any site with a lot of traffic also has the ability to influence Google’s ranking system. They have the ability to tell the world where searchers should go to receive definitive information about a certain topic.

And since information is power and “with great power comes great responsibility,” it seems to me that we need to be awfully careful what we’re linking to and how we’re linking to it.

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