A few years back, when anyone Googled me, they were directed to a bunch of (and I apologize but there is just no nice way to say this, though those nice British editors at New Scientist tried) piss fetish sites. This had nothing to do with my predilections, which I must hasten to add don’t venture in that direction. So how did this happen? Crowd in, boys and girls: this turns out to be a story about search engine optimization.
Back in 2003, I engaged in an all-too-detailed email correspondence about the office “seat sprinkler” and the increasingly desperate attempts of a counter-sprinkling vigilante. (N.B.: ladies room vigilantism = rhyming “sweetie” with “seatie.”) My partner in the email exchange thought it was funny enough to forward to a friend who ran an irreverent web site. This was years before anyone was writing jeremiads about the longevity of information on the Internet.
Four years later, I finally reaped the whirlwind of an internet presence left too long to its own devices. Long after the lights had gone dark at the place that hosted the original content, the email exchange lived on, in a wholly different context.
But the question that baffled me was this: why was this long-dead content all over the first page of my Google results? How did it even get onto a single fetish site, never mind multiples? And really, Google had no interest in my citations on academic papers or in those college theater productions? Those fetish sites were seriously the most compelling way I could be represented on the entire internet?
I asked a search engine optimization expert to help me find answers. Judith Lewis, head of search at Beyond, a brand reputation tracking firm based in London, reconstructed the chain of events for me. After the original content hit the internet, Google immediately stowed it in its cache, just as it does all content–caching is the reason everything you put on the internet lives forever. After the original web site went offline when its owners lost interest, Google’s cache still contained the full story.
Next came aggregator web sites, which crib content they deem relevant based on select keywords. These sites send out software known as crawlers (programs that look for mentions of the select keywords) to retrieve any content that fits the bill and basically paste it onto their site. There are many aggregator sites, the most high-profile of which gather marketing data based on your shopping habits. They also trawl the Google cache, which is where Lewis suspects they found my email exchanges. Then several other fetish sites re-plagiarized the original enterprising fetish site. With enough of those fetish sites linking to each other, Google became convinced that these sites were important–certainly more important than the worthy little academic paper. (SEO types refer to these kinds of linking strategies as “Google juice.”) That’s how these sites became the most relevant search results for my name.
That’s how reputation works online. It’s all about the most powerful sites that carry your name. And power = links.
