Google Juice

Jeff Jarvis calls it "Google Juice" and I like that term so I am going to use it to describe the effect of having a site that gets indexed high in Google search results.

I was going through my FeedBurner dashboard this morning looking at my feed and site stats and saw that I got 36 visits (about 1% of all my visits yesterday) from searches on "we were dead before the ship even sank". That's a lot of words to write in a Google search so those people were clearly looking for the new modest mouse record of the same name. Here's the search result page they got.

Number one is Wikipedia, the owner of more Google Juice than any other website in the world. Number two is this blog. Amazon gets the third spot. Stereogum, Billboard, and Rateyourmusic.com fill out the rest of the top six spots. Modest Mouse's own website barely made the first page.

I am not complaining. I got 36 visits I would not have otherwise gotten yesterday. Maybe one or two of them liked what they saw and might come back. But Google Juice is not a perfect system by a long shot. Everytime I see this effect and I see it a lot, I think two thoughts. The first is that I can't ever change my domain and the second is that there's a lot more headroom in search.

Comments

[Dominik Schwind]

If you look closely, you will see, that actually Feedburner has that Google Juice.

[Rick]

It's the feedburner url and not typepad?

I bet that's because Feedburner sends your rss feed to Google but typepad just lets Google spider AVC every now and then.

[Andy Swan]

So either Google or the Band's website person is doing a terrible job.

I think a post about OWNING your own domain/hosting (and using wordpress!) could be in order---for all the wannabe Fred Wilsons thinking of starting their own widget-farm :)

[Rick]

Andy - care to explain that? Owning your own domain/hosting/widget farm... what?

[lawrence]

Fred, want more Google juice? Change your title tag format from:

AVC: Post Name

to

Post Name: AVC

The results will be significant.

[Dave Hyndman]

Fred:

Are you suggesting these results are somewhat flawed because you don't think you belong higher than Amazon, Modest Mouse, etc? If so, your premise, and therefore conclusion, may be wrong.

What if your post on Modest Mouse's new album is, in fact, more relevant than those others. To someone like me, that is actually the case. If so, perhaps Google is more right than you think.

DAVE

[David G]

3rd thought: "Search is not optimal for information discovery online". Google Search (as we know it) will be obsolete in 80% of its current use cases within 5 years.

This is why I personally back YHOO over GOOG. Pipes, Flickr, Delicious and Answers are already better places to find much of the stuff I used to discover on page 5 of the SERP's.

[Steve Poland]

Fred, in my opinion the time was yesterday to change to your own domain. The sooner the better. I think it's balls to keep investing in this subdomained URL of yours -- what if 'blogs.com' changes (anyone could buy Six Apart someday); or you're dissatisfied with the service (post acquisition?); or a better service offering/platform comes out in the future?

I would just hate not having the control -- if blogs.com goes down for weeks, you're SOL. Luckily all your readers are stored via FeedBurner, so you could easily change your blog's feed.

[And I have no clue if/how 'blogs.com' would help you with 301 permanent redirects on the blog posts of yours -- but that's the way to do it; so if anyone accessed 'http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2007/02/google_juice.html' in the future, they'd be redirected to 'http://fredwilson.com/a_vc/2007/02/google_juice.html'

[Michael Hoffman]

I totally agree with you about search and the room to get more sophisticated, which I also think is related to David G's post about sites that use tags and other ways to organize information. The problem here, *I think*, is that your high rank in this case is due to links, which are coming from feeds. The Feeds are not links based on the content of that post, but rather the content of your blog in general. So you are ranking high for a search where you are artificially getting extra credit due to links that are unrelated to specific search string. Or is that obvious...

[Greg Clayman]

I notice the same sometimes on my blog. Do a Google search for "LG 9900" and I'm the first result returned. The *first* one. Don't get me wrong, I think I wrote a decent review of the phone. But seven spots above LG's own site?

[Ayal Rosenthal]

I'd like to suggest the term "googlability" of a word or term, meaning the relevence of the search results for the searched item. Modest Mouse, which appears on the first page of google, has a high googlability.

[Mike Abundo]

Don't reveal your trophy keywords. It creates competition and gives sploggers ideas.

[Adam Jusko]

One of the thoughts behind our human-powered search engine Bessed at http://www.bessed.com is the thought that Google in particular gives so much power to certain domains that those domains then rule on searches even if their information is clearly lacking. Not every Wikipedia entry is the best source for information, and not every throwaway post on an otherwise insightful blog should rank highly. But they do, because a "trusted" domain beats a less trusted domain in Google's eyes.

This same phenomenon also leads to a lot of repetition in search results, with basically the same information from multiple domains showing up at the top of the heap.

We still believe there's a place for humans in the search arena---we can't cover every search request like Google does, but over the long haul, using human editors, we can provide better results with more variety for the majority of searches that take place each day. We're just getting started, but I'd invite you to take a look.

[techwatch]

This article was noted on Gil Zino's blog nextblitz.com and I think he's right about Google's search technology....in a few short years it will be as outdated as dial up is now.

[Eugene Kaganovich]

To a code monkey like me, "Google Juice" is a terrible term in light of this http://code.google.com/p/google-guice/