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Simon Willison’s Weblog

The dangers of PageRank

A well documented side effect of the weblog format is that it brings Google PageRank in almost absurd quantities. I’m now the 5th result for simon on Google, and I’ve been the top result for simon willison almost since the day I launched. High rankings however are not always a good thing, especially when combined with a comment system. A growing number of bloggers have found themselves at the top position for terms of little or no relevance to the rest of their sites, which in turn can attract truly surreal comments from visitors from search engines who may never have encountered a blog before.

I know of a couple of entries on my own blog that are attracting this kind of traffic. The most interesting is probably this entry on artifical diamonds, which has attracted comments from both buyers and sellers of artificial gems. My entry on MSN messenger usability problems from 2002 has drawn a steady stream of hilarious comments, no doubt caused in part by its top rating on Google for msn messenger sucks. Amusingly, for a long time Microsoft’s own search engine was giving my page a high rank for a wide variety of less negative messenger related terms.

My own experiences of this phenomenon pale in to significance to some of the others I’ve seen. The most impressive example has to be Jason Kottke’s brief review of the Matrix Reloaded, which drew over 900 comments from Google strays, developed its own micro-community and resulted in Jason pondering who owns the conversation on my web site? Jason eventually deciding to close and archive the thread after the page grew to more than a megabyte in size.

The problem can take on a far more disturbing twist. I won’t link directly to these entries for fear of adding to their predicaments, but searches for crime scene cleanup and suicide chat rooms both return blogs in the first two results. The former thread is mostly crime scene cleanup companies marketing their services, but the latter is quite frankly disturbing. It’s certainly lead me to double check the titles of my entries before posting them.

Thankfully, avoiding this kind of unwanted comment traffic is pretty simple. One way is to simply disable comments for entries older than a certain time (generally a couple of weeks), although personally I like to see the occasional comment on old entries. A neater solution proposed by Russell Beattie last year is to simply hide comments from search engine referrals, thus ensuring that random strays won’t leave their mark without understanding the nature of your site first.

Posted 6th February 2004 at 4:58 pm

This is The dangers of PageRank by Simon Willison, posted on 6th February 2004.

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17 comments

  1. Ahhh, I know what you mean. I seem to be having the same type of "problems" (it's not really a problem, is it?). It doesn't bother me much though.

    Dennis Pallett - 6th February 2004 18:26 - #

  2. It can be a problem depending on the kind of traffic it generates. I for one would prefer to avoid having to deal with hundreds of comments from suicidally depressed strangers.

    Simon Willison - 6th February 2004 18:31 - #

  3. After i climb in pagerank on an entry i feel obligated to keep writing about it. Some sort of strage social responsiblity.

    Darryl VanDorp - 6th February 2004 18:43 - #

  4. I find it more amusing than disturbing, myself. I think Google has a lot of work to do to counter blogs properly, without throwing them into their own separate search area altogether. They've got enough PhD's to figure it out, I'm sure. It's at least a better problem than what alltheweb.com has: which is absolutely no relevance. In the meantime, I find it funny with how highly ranked some of my pages are, especially when it attracts comments that make no sense.

    Probably the best case of this I have is my entry on free credit reports

    I mention the maze you have to go through to make this free credit check actually "free", including sending an e-mail. People miss that part and they post their cancellation requests to my journal -- often with their complete SSN#).

    I really should close comments on that post, but curiosity keeps me from doing it. I just end up deleting the posts after a while (except for the one fake SSN# in there now that a friend posted).

    Thomas Stromberg - 6th February 2004 18:49 - #

  5. I made decision early to disallow all comments. I figured if some really had something useful to say they would just send a ping back top me... this way you can build a community of ideas... isn't that what the we is all about anyways?

    Samual Icky - 6th February 2004 20:52 - #

  6. After noticing the Google PageRank affect on traffic coming to my site, I now cull off-topic posts from my blog. I want people to come to my blog for specific topics, but I often feel compelled to post outside of those topics, thus the reason for off-topic posts. Sometimes, those off-topic posts get more traffic than the on-topic posts, which annoys me to no end.

    Scott McGerik - 6th February 2004 22:34 - #

  7. Ha. Not exactly the same, but I get hits like crazy for clownpenis.fart after a comment about the SNL skit. Top on google for quite a while now. Kind of funny. Kind of sad.

    Chris - 6th February 2004 23:48 - #

  8. I think Blogs are interesting sets of links, so Google payback for the good linking work. Also the "nets inside nets" lobby effect of virtual blogs links work like political lobby. Maybe Google will be force in the future to give less power to blogs, but this will before the Blogs become anying, and actually this is not true. Imho.

    Tei - 7th February 2004 01:41 - #

  9. I mentioned a very popular female pop singer in one entry, something unrelated about nudity in another. Google started sending me people looking for the young miss in the buff. I made a joke entry about that. Not long thereafter Google made me number #2 and #3 for images of her undraped. When that became 10% of my site's traffice I deleted the pages.

    I've had a few entries take on lives of their own, most pleasingly about mental health. I don't feel personally involved but the people talking to each other via my weblogs seem to feel they've been helped. Makes up for the stupid comments and the children who leave "adfsl."

    Richard Evans Lee - 7th February 2004 11:08 - #

  10. In addition to the higher-than-expected rank you describe, I unwittingly created a Google PageRank feedback loop on my blog. By including a list of referrers on the same page as a blog post, and in particular by displaying separately any search queries associated with the referral, my blog has got higher and higher on Google for some very unexpected search terms.

    In 2002 I wrote a brief post pertaining to England's participation in the football World Cup, in particular I mentioned a well known player called Nicky Butt. Amazingly, that post is now the first result returned by a Google search for 'butt sex'!

    Richard Rutter - 7th February 2004 13:38 - #

  11. Ha! Richard, that's priceless.

    I haven't had any such problems myself. Hope my luck holds out. . . though having something like this happen would certainly give me a lot to blog about!

    Nicholas Liu - 8th February 2004 00:51 - #

  12. I've had similar issues. The one I find most amusing is that every week I consistently get searches for "joel spolsky gay". It would appear that the cross-over of the software engineering and gay politics posts is making the world come to me for confirmation of Joel's sexuality. Given his recent handbag comments, I somehow doubt he'd mind. Now that I've said it here, do you think you'll be the top result, Si?

    Meri - 8th February 2004 19:44 - #

  13. My post on scooters has drawn the most amusing taffic, including people looking for repair advice in the comments, vendors trying to get me to sell their scooters, and even a phone call from someone trying to order parts for their scooter.

    Joe - 9th February 2004 14:38 - #

  14. I just found a new one: I'm third on Google for hotmail inbox. The support questions are flooding in already :/

    Simon Willison - 10th February 2004 19:09 - #

  15. Simon, sometimes it pays to be at the top of a google search. By the way, I still have the ten quid I owe you. Petes sons baptism is at easter, im sure your invited if your in the country then.

    Wez Smith - 11th February 2004 18:29 - #

  16. It can be a problem depending on the kind of traffic it generates. I for one would prefer to avoid having to deal with hundreds of comments from suicidally depressed strangers.

    xasa - 28th April 2004 13:30 - #

  17. Google PageRank carefully explained and what you can do with it - written by top SEO experts. http://www.pagerank-prediction.com/

    Pagerank prediction - 24th January 2006 20:37 - #

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