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Users Are Up

Apart from the google analytic stats which are just it's view on my visitors - and you have to remember there is a layer of javascript as well as a statistics application of some kind so google analytics certainly do not report the absolute truth - there are two other sources that I use.

The first is the raw server stats which are guaranteed to be the absolute truth although interpreting them is the real challange. The second is the number of registered users or database stats in the case of BSV. Both these last sources are also on the increase.

Of course with more users comes more support. On a recent occasion I had a user who forgot his password. Since there was no password retrieval facility I had to hack the database and manually manage the change until the user could log in again. Once was enough for me to fix the problem properly and you can see the entry in today's release notes there is an enhancements called forgot username and password functionality. That's it, sorry there is no houmerous anectdote but the point is that the site is growing according to it's needs. In my opinion organic growth should always play a major part in the developent of any project or business for that matter.

Link Farms

Let me explain something about linking to other sites.

Google's early success was largely attributable to the accuracy of the results that it returned when you did a search. It soon became clear that the algorithm that was used to prioritise results was absolutely critical. Some may think intellectual property as valuable as that would be a closely guarded secret although there is an argument that you should be as open as possible, especially when a massive number of consumers are involved. Anyhow, I'm not sure why or exactly when but Google decided to divulge the concept behind their code.

The idea is pretty simple, every web page that has been indexed is assigned a number that represents how popular it is (the page rank). For a given search the results are ordered by popularity. So how can you possibly calculate how popular a web page is without access to exhaustive usage statistics of all web pages? You can't but Google believe that with the information they have, they are able to approximate popularity. They do this by looking at how many inbound links there are and the contents that is wrapped in the links.

All good and well, as long as no one exploits this information. But this is the real world so of course the same group of marketeers that exploited older search engine technologies to improve their listings used the algorithm information similarly, to the detriment of all web users. One of the tactics they used was creating link farms. Link farms are websites or areas of a website which has the sole purpose to improve the page rank of a site by exchanging links indiscriminately. Ultimately link farms are bad because they offer no value to a user at all, they simply artificially (and therefore incorrectly) increase a website's popularity which means Google's results aren't as accurate as they used to be.

Google obviously are aware of link farms and probably are taking/have taken steps to deal with them. There is one rumour going around that when they discover a link farm they simply strip the page rank of the offending site, personally I don't think they would be quite so drastic. They certainly have been presented with a problem which isn't easily solved: how do you identify indiscriminately exchanged links with truly valuable ones in a automated manner? You either need a highly sofisticated heuristic approach which will no doubt be constantly changing or you do it manually (at least some of it).

All this is also a problem for website owners because if we choose to increase our popularity using links (and when you have no budget like me there pretty much is no alternative) how do you do it without being classed as a link farm? The answer is not to link indiscriminately and that is what BSV's useful sites page does.