steerpikegg - 3:54 pm on May 28, 2010 (gmt 0)

@shaddows

I think the point here though, is not that anyone expects anything for free particularly, it just that for many online only based companies without massive budgets, long tail was a way for us small fries to grab a small piece of the action from the mega-corps. The mega-corps in my sector ensure that anyone without a 60% or more markup on product is completely pushed out due to minimum bid requirements.

I think it would be a reasonable expectation with a search engine that someone searching for a left-handed, rotarised, pneumatically powered elecrto-widget would expect results for those, and not Google's interpretation of what it thinks you want and how many people are linking to it.

Also, I don't think backlink weighting works for many 'products' - most products are not interesting or exciting and therefore you would not expect people to link to them (at least without paying). Let's face it, someone in the UK searching for left-handed, rotarised, pneumatically powered elecrto-widget is almost certainly looking to buy it, not read a 2 year old blog post from somebody in Japan no matter how many people have linked to it (which is the type of things I've been seeing). Just because something has lots of links to it doesn't mean it's good or relevant.