photopassjapan - 10:18 pm on Dec 16, 2006 (gmt 0)

I'm not sure anymore if they need to devalue them any more than they already do. They're pretty much worthless unless as martinibuster stated, the information is so great that they'll get picked up ( naturally ) and spread all across the net. For then it might happen, that within this cluster of citations, there're one or two links of "value". Not that this would be the goal... and even if it gets achieved as a sideeffect, it's pretty well deserved then, isn't it? :P

Info on a web 2.0 site has no weight other than let's say...
...an article in an offline fanzine that has its readers overlaping with other communities... no Google related importance at all.

The reason for me saying this is...
Google is not about the number of IBLs anymore, position in their serps rely heavily on TrustRank whether they'll comment on this or not. And so is Yahoo! search.

Without clearing the threshold for it you won't be on the SERPs.

So aside relevancy and PR, it could be TrustRank that could be passed, but...

Web 2.0 sites have NO TrustRank. They won't gain any. Mysterious isn't it ;) ... Meaning they will pass on relevancy ( although not a too clear one for they're usually swarming with off-topic content even if the actual information is relevant )... they might pass on PR, but most of the pages don't have much ( usually none to be precise ). So they're more or less worthless from a SERP score point of view, but clearly a great idea for telling people about something. That's what they're for!

I guess most of you know... but this was news to me back then :P...
...that with TrustRank ( which i'll call this even if the trademark and the patent was "dropped" )... Google and Yahoo! have pretty much gave themselves a license to offset results for queries, query types, or for a single domain as they wish. It's not gonna make a site top 30, but without it a site can NOT be top 30, unless it's outside of one of the main Google languages. They can set and reset the hubs, and even filter out domains not to gain or pass any of it.

Myspace is most certainly held back from gaining TrustRank. So is livespaces. I kind of can relate to these decisions too.

But seeing all this i just can't believe there'd be a REASON for them to even think of watching these social networks any closer.

...

Unless they're trying to scare people who already know, or don't care that these links, articles won't count for seo, however the sheer number of people picking up the information, and spreading it on the net OUTSIDE the untrusted domains... might very well matter.
Information, reviews, links, citations appearing randomly... for the article, site, product, service,... joke... whatever... was so great that they post something about it out of empathy... so that they can relate themselves to this information... and feel like as if they've contributed to it in a way :P ( i'm doing it, you're doing it, Google lives off of this ;D )

And once the word is out, there's no way you can track this back, but...

I'm with whitenight on this.

Why would anyone want to? Why?
There's your most reliable quality filter ever!

People "voting" with no... none... zero benefit for doing so, simply because they liked something and want to relate themselves to it.
This is how the net has worked since day one!
No, make that this is how society... no... this is how INFORMATION works.

You know... if Google really does anything else about this matter than having someone comment something scary about it at random...

They're more paranoid than most borderline webmasters on this forum :P

You can't limit the flow of information.
If tomorrow a major newspaper was to publish an offline-only article with the cutest thing in the world that as a matter of fact had a website... and it'd get a lot of links from fans of cute things from all around the world, REAL quick... what then? Nothing. Nothing at all, it should be at the top of the SERPs for cute pretty soon. As it deserves to be there!