The internet is full of rubbish

Tim Parsons
30 March 2009
Page 1 of 2 : single page

As the internet grows and becomes more popular, finding what you need – and judging what is real and what isn’t – becomes even harder. Tim Parsons investigates how you can find your way through the clutter and make sure your audience finds you.

The scene is a familiar one across the nation – on the screens of countless office and home computers, and even out in the street on mobile handsets: a web browser waits, a blinking input cursor blinks, and the search engine behind it gets ready to unlock the secrets of the ages for you, the humble web user.

Nothing could be simpler. Just ask for what you want and banks of cloud servers traverse the limitless universe of the intertubes to deliver exactly what you’re looking for. (Well, not quite limitless, but Google has already indexed more than a trillion web pages – enough for many lifetimes of web surfing.)

So you type in your search term: ‘Good place for a business lunch’, and hit the enter key.

POW! Google returns 163 million results. Page after useless page of links to drivel about restaurants in Oakland and Abu Dhabi, tips on lunch etiquette, outdated printer specifications, self-obsessed teenage ramblings, corporate shtick and fake bank sites trawling for loosely guarded credit card details.

“Oh dear, this is starting to look a bit tricky,” you say. “Anyone got a copy of the yellow pages handy!?”

This raises a serious issue for online business owners. Considering how hard it is for web users to find the information they’re looking for, how can you make sure your customers find you among all that noise?

The credibility gap

The first thing you can do is search better. Search engines have amazing amounts of intelligence built in, but they can still be a blunt instrument. By narrowing your search and taking advantage of some smart search engine features, you’re more likely to find what you’re looking for quickly and easily.

So you’ve found a site that seems to answer your question perfectly – problem solved. Not so fast! How can you tell the difference between credible information and propaganda, misinformation or someone being just plain wrong?

First off, use your common sense. If an article is written by a reputable media organisation, institute of higher learning, government department or a brand you recognise, that tends to lend some credibility – though of course it’s no guarantee!

You should always double-check the domain name in the link (the domain name is everything between the ‘http://’ and the next ‘/’). If a web address ends in a .com or .au, the rest of the address should be something familiar, like westpac.com.au. If it looks something like www.westpac.com.au.searching.co.ru, keep your bank account details safely hidden: the domain name suggests it’s a website set up specifically with the intention to deceive Westpac customers.

Another way to judge a website’s intentions and credibility is by the way it adheres to online etiquette. Things like popup windows; loud, cheap-looking banner ads; or ‘Congratulations – click here to claim your prize!’ messages are clues the website isn’t entirely playing by the rules. This last type can easily fall into the category of someone trying to steal your identity – so be careful about whom you register with.

Pages that are filled with links that don’t seem particularly meaningful to you are probably just trying to improve their status in search results or charge advertisers for page impressions and clicks. Try another site.

Finally, lots of new services and websites pop up all the time. If something doesn’t look right or you can’t understand what it’s about, chances are it’s for a select audience – in other words, not you – or it’s not a bona fide answer to your query, so move on.

How do I get noticed?

Unless you’ve had scads of media coverage to indelibly write your brand in the collective online conscious – think Amazon, eBay or YouTube – you have to accept that you will need to find and entice relevant users to your site.

“Gone are the days of ‘build it and they will come’,” says Stephen Murphy, director of PayPerClick, a specialist performance search company.

“The most important thing is to have a traffic strategy. Sure anybody can build a site – from a simple one-page blog right up to a database-driven web-application. How you get the right traffic costeffectively is the challenge.”

Search engine optimisation is one way to ensure that when people are searching for you or something related to your business, you’ve got the best possible ranking in ‘natural’, unpaid search results.

“Another way to judge a website’s intentions and credibility is by the way it adheres to online etiquette” Google provides a host of information on ways to structure your site and individual pages to maximise their search ranking.

For instance, make sure every page title has a clear description of, ideally, at least three core value points. For instance, ‘Jeff’s Garage – expert servicing, all European makes, rego checks $45’. Also, make sure the first paragraph of text has a pithy description of your business, like: ‘We love European cars and know how to service them so they go like the clappers. Oh, and our garage is tidy and we’re not too expensive either’.

The mystery of PageRank

At this point it’s worth taking a deep breath and diving under the covers of Google’s (in)famous PageRank score, a number Google assigns to each page in its index. PageRank is ultimately a giant page reputation engine.

Imagine, instead of your most important web page, we have you, a person. If a lot of people trust you, then you have a better reputation and can ask for and get recommendations based on that. However, if someone less trustworthy recommends you, that can actually dent your credibility.

The same principle works for your web pages: inbound links (from other sites to yours) contribute to your site’s PageRank based on their own PageRank. Conversely, outbound links from your site contribute to other people’s PageRank based on your score.

This remarkably simple but supremely powerful feedback loop of page reputation is what fundamentally powers Google’s search results. It also means that if you have too many outbound links relative to inbound links, your PageRank will leech away and you’ll fall down the site rankings, so be careful who you link to!