2008.07.29 20:17 "Re: [Tiff] CVS access", by Gene Amtower

On Wed, 2008-07-30 at 03:43 +1000, Graeme Gill wrote:

Given it's bogus, it's hard to understand why so many links point at it. Is the google ranking being manipulated?

>From what I know about google, I highly doubt that there is any intentional ranking manipulation. However, it seems plausible that a fair number of websites for "important" development projects may reference the incorrect website due to old information, causing google to rank the old site very highly due to lots of referencing sites. This is one important measure google uses to ascertain the importance of a website.

As a case in point, I did a google search looking for websites that point to the libtiff-dot-org website domain, and I came up with one big one at the PHP documentation website. I submitted a request for correction in the PHP documentation to the PHP documentation mailing list, but I suspect this is NOT an isolated case. This is one important limitation of the web - it lives forever unless we "wipe" the history clean from time to time.

Please note: Another important consideration is that google's indexing bots certainly review the content of postings on mailing list archives, so every mailing list posting that includes the address of that incorrect site (libtiff-dot-org) is only making the problem worse! Every post with this info raises the importance of that darned site one more notch to the google ranking engine. Can (and should) we clean out the archives for this libtiff mailing list of this bogus address to avoid causing the problem ourselves, maybe replacing it with the coded address as I've done above to avoid increasing its rank even further?

Gene