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On the emergence of SEO-rumors

Rumors and half-truths about the assessment of various factors by searchengines are as old as searchengineoptimization itself. Put into the world somewhere at some time, they resemble urban legends in that they likely survive for a long time. To watch the emergence of such a SEO-rumor happens as seldom as astronomers can watch a live supernova. But today, dear readers, we have the unbelievable chance to witness the birth of such a rumor, come closer – do not be shy – and be amazed.

The people over at “Google Operating System”, a blog that occupies itself with tips and assumptions about Google, have determined that the new-years doodle contains a little surprise by hinting at the introduction of TCP/IP, one of the fundamentals of the internet, 25 years ago. They use the Googlesearch, which is linked through the logo, for “January 1 TCP/IP” to point out a problem that has been around for a while. While Google usually builds the ranking depending mostly on backlinks, they can naturally not do this for pages that are only a few minutes old. It seems that Google decided to rank new sites better than old ones in a few and specific cases. This happens when a searchquery that has very little traffic otherwise, sees a drastic increase thereof – in such cases Google interprets this to be an important News-report and hence shows the most up-to-date results. “Google Operating System” used the linked Google-logo to show just this. Up to this point it is comprehensible and has been reality for a few month already but only for a very restricted number of keywords.

TechCrunch, a well knows US-webX.0-blog, got wind of this shortly thereafter and shortened the original message to the effect that Google has changed its algorithm. This is wrong for two reasons that were already mentioned in the former paragraph: on the one side, this change has been in effect for a few month already and on the other side there are very few searchqueries that are affected, for which the number of searches varies strongly. One day later, meaning today, it seems that the German editorial staff has gotten over their new-years-hangover and have gladly picked up this topic: whatever TechCrunch writes has to be correct when you come to think of it. First in Germany to sprout this nonsense was the Computerwoche with the title “Google ändert seine Suchkriterien” and shortly thereafter the PC-Welt adopted this story unchecked. I am eagerly awaiting who of our quality journalists will jump on the bandwagon next – but what should we expect from the Internet-bathrooms walls.

[update 01.04.] The Internet World Business as well as other “experts” are still adopting this nonsense unchecked and are thereby circulating this rumor. A golden star can be handed to Golem – even if they are a few weeks late about the abolition of the supplemental index, their report about the “QDF” is correct.