There’s an interesting article in today’s Web Pro News, where Jason Lee Millar suggests that Google are being forced by increasingly embarassing high-ranking spam results to change their ranking algorithm. 

The crux of the article is that the web, and the way it’s linked up, is changing rapidly. Things are speeding up, and it seems that black-hat seo’s are on top of these changes, manipulating trends and social media networks to piggy-back ,as it were, into the google search results.

Much of this relates to ‘link velocity’ – or the rate at which you get linked to. Prior to the social networking revolution, suddenly getting a whole load of new links could have been seen as a clear signal of something spammy. The speed at which information is spread now, though, has changed things completely. If you publish a piece on your site, feeding into your twitter/facebook/digg/etc accounts, which in turn gets picked up by your various friends & followers, there’s every chance that within the space of an hour or two  you can pick up a whole load of links at a rate hitherto improbable. Search engines like google obviously need to be aware of your article, and make an assesment (in real time) as to the importance of it.

Google, on the other hand, cannot control for content appearing on the Web at large, and historically its famous algorithm performed better than any other at weeding out spammy webpages and malicious results. Unfortunately, that was a version of the Web that was more static. The live Web presents entirely new challenges manifesting as the first major weakness the search engine has faced.  

Tags: anti-spam, establishing an online presence, googlerank, link velocity, pr on social networks, the live web