In google we must have faith
Google released a pretty sizable update to it’s algorithm last week, this along with an earlier change that Matt Cutts describes as targeting duplicate content, seems to show what Google think the web should be like. You should produce engaging original content, presenting other peoples information - however nicely - is bad, well not good.
They say that 84% of the sites that have been affected by this change were flagged as spam by their users anyway and that they are pleased with the results - other people are not so pleased as this guardian article shows. The Google spam team have a hard job, identifying pages and sites that contain information that will not be relevant to their users and other teams have the task of rewarding sites that produce information that users want. However there are a lot of sites out there that use content from other places, how many sites use Wikipedia text, it’s creative commons after all. Many sites have built their entire business around traffic from Google and so when Google turns around and takes some of that traffic away it’s not surprising that they are pissed off, after all they’ve probably put in a lot of effort creating their website.
Now I agree with Google, the Internet should be about contributing to the net, not stealing other peoples work and passing it off as your own somehow so that people can click on adverts, that faceless Wikipedia editor didn’t do it so that you could make money - I know that makes me slightly hypocritical but I don’t think that anyone could disagree with the statement?
On the other hand with great power comes great responsibility and Google may have trodden on some peoples toes here, the rankings may come back as people actually click on the links but maybe Google has the foresight to see that the greater gain will be that these sites refocus on quality content and we have a better Internet - that would be a good thing, no?
Is the scourge of developers finally on the way out?
Google announced over the weekend that it’s going to stop supporting IE6 in some of it’s web applications. I bet many developers are hoping that this message will finally get through to those *still* using it that there is better technology out there and the should upgrade.
I know that the majority of these users are probably corperate users where they don’t have a choice but if the figures of 20% are still true that is a lot of ancient browsers out there that cause almighty headaches for anyone developing websites now days. Personally as most of the people who visit this site use firefox >46% and I’ve only had 2 visits with IE6 I don’t do anything special but I know that it’s important for proper sites to keep supporting it while people keep visiting them with it.
Imagine the amount of development effort and money that could have been saved if everyone had upgraded two years ago… Come on people give it up!
Good Hunting