{"id":24956,"date":"2015-03-09T16:21:07","date_gmt":"2015-03-09T22:21:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rankexploits.com\/musings\/?p=24956"},"modified":"2015-03-09T16:22:49","modified_gmt":"2015-03-09T22:22:49","slug":"new-seo-advice-for-anthony-watts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rankexploits.com\/musings\/2015\/new-seo-advice-for-anthony-watts\/","title":{"rendered":"New SEO advice for Anthony Watts"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve had a cold, woke up, visited Twitter, and read a thread<\/a> that informed me that Anthony Watts<\/a> fears Googles new SEO algorithm which involves a new “trust” or “truth” rankings of some sort. After taking another sip of cold syrup, I indulged my curiosity about the new “trust” ratings, clicked, read the paper describing how<\/I> Google is going to come up with “trust indices”: I suspect Anthony has nothing to fear! <\/p>\n

Yes: It seems Google is going to add some sort of “trust” index to determine whether sites contain “true” facts or “false” facts. <\/p>\n

My impression is that Anthony’s fear stemmed from thinking biased humans<\/I> were going to be involved in creating the “trust” indices and that potentially biased “trust” index would be used to change page ranks. As Anthony currently gets a lot of Google traffic, he might fear losing some.<\/p>\n

But I also thought: using honest to goodness humans in real time that won’t scale for numerous topics. Beyond that it wouldn’t stay up to date. (What are the current FDA dietary recommendations. Did they ditch the food pyramid? Anyone know?) <\/p>\n

Anyway, one of the tweets contained a link to the theoretical paper describing the algorithm for determining whether pages are “truthful”. The paper appears to be “Knowledge Based Trust: Estimating the Trustworthiness of Web Sources” by Dong et al.<\/a> The researchers evidently had access to “a database of 2.8B facts extracted from the web” and “estimate[d] the trustworthiness of 119M webpages”. <\/p>\n

The method seems to involve extracting “triples” of information like c(Obama, nationality, USA). If your ‘triple’ is right, you get brownie points. If your triple is wrong (e.g. you said his nationality is Kenya) you get dinged. If you page contains no “facts” that can be tested against the other facts in the database, that’s neutral. But the algorithm does a bit more, like figuring out the topic of your site, detecting triples, deciding if those triples are ‘relevant’ to your web site, and then deciding if the triples indicate the presence of a “true fact” and whether the fact is “trivial”. We don’t know the exact definition of “trivial”; the example given is “if most sampled triples from a Hindi movie website state that the language of the movie is Hindi, we consider it as trivial” <\/p>\n

So, possibly, the following “triples” might gain a blog on climate change brownie points:<\/p>\n

  • “‘An Inconvenient Truth’ was produced by Laurie David”.<\/li>\n
  • NOAA runs the USA’s National Weather Service.<\/li>\n
  • Pauchauri resigned from the IPCC after accusations of sexual harassment<\/li>\n
  • “The solar constant is roughly 1.36 (kW\/m\u00c2\u00b2)” Or, <\/li>\n
  • “IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) was published in 2007”.<\/li>\n

    Or possibly not. We can’t be sure. But I strongly suspect that despite its detractors negative opinion, automatic extractors combing WattsUpWithThat will find quite a number of clearly true triples<\/i>. These include triples that are created when Anthony or his co-bloggers describe what<\/i> the IPCC AR4, AR5, TAR and what have you predicted correctly<\/i> and then proceed to explain why they think the predictions will not pan out. <\/p>\n

    But we can be fairly certain that as soon as Google starts using the ‘truth’ algorithm, the people who make a living in “Search Engine Optimization” will start finding ways to detect which sorts of “triples” help pages rank well. They’ll study how to inject relevant “triples” that don’t appear unnatural. <\/p>\n

    My tentative advice to Anthony: If you are hoping to amp up your “trust” level, try to wedge in roughly 3 triples per page, making sure some are already in the “fact” data base, but including new ones. Like, for example “Australian government has decided to not renew any of the management board of the Australian CSIRO.”<\/a> might eventually be trust boosting triple. Provided it’s true; ( I haven’t checked.)<\/p>\n

    I have a bad cold. Talk about almost whatever you like. Try to avoid carrying over food fights from other blogs though. I’m going to go take some more cough syrup! Meanwhile, speculating on possible SEO strategies based on this “trust” index are welcome! <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    I’ve had a cold, woke up, visited Twitter, and read a thread that informed me that Anthony Watts fears Googles new SEO algorithm which involves a new “trust” or “truth” rankings of some sort. After taking another sip of cold syrup, I indulged my curiosity about the new “trust” ratings, clicked, read the paper describing … Continue reading New SEO advice for Anthony Watts<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[134],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-24956","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rankexploits.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24956","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rankexploits.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rankexploits.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rankexploits.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rankexploits.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24956"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rankexploits.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24956\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rankexploits.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24956"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rankexploits.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24956"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rankexploits.com\/musings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24956"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}