Obama remains failure in the White House

Now that he has signed a perfectly useless “credit card holders rights act” into law, President Obama can take comfort in the knowledge that he still ranks first for the Google query failure in the White House, and this time he deserves the designation (rest assured, I voted for Obama).

Why is he a failure in the White House? 2 reasons.

First, Google — despite being told about this query many times — has neglected to fix the “failure in the white house” query. It was a secondary effect of the infamous “miserable failure” link bomb that Democrats conducted against then-President George W. Bush. Now Democrats can take pride in the knowledge that they have ensured Obama will be known as a “failure in the White House” for the rest of his term.

Secondly, today Obama signed into law the miserable credit cardholders’ rights act that accomplishes nothing toward protecting consumers against the usurious practices of the banking industry.

Keep in mind that I’m not standing in the ranks of people who have fallen behind on their credit card payments. I am one of those people who has paid the bill faithfully every month. I’m supposedly in “good standing” with my credit card.

Nonetheless, I and millions of other credit card holders was told in March that our interest rates would be tripled come May (and millions more accounts will see interest rates rise in June).

When angry consumers complained to Congress and the President about this outrageous rate hike, we were assured that our elected representatives would take immediate action to protect consumers against further bank abuses.

I’ve been alarmed ever since, as I realized all too quickly that President Obama and Congress lacked the political will to demand that the banks which took Federal bailout money rescind their unjustified rate hikes. Sure, the banks complain that they have seen an increase in defaults on credit card accounts.

Well, here’s a clue, President Obama: You’re about to see a LOT MORE DEFAULTS on credit card accounts before your stupid, useless law takes effect in nine months.

Many consumers announced they would immediately cancel their credit cards. After all, when the banks announced their rate hikes in March they gave everyone the option of closing their accounts. Problem is, when you do that you reduce your available credit and THAT is taken into consideration when your credit score is calculated.

So if you cancelled your credit card in April and now cannot obtain another one, guess why. Your credit sucks just enough to keep you from qualifying for a new credit card.

The trick, of course, is to get a new credit card with a lower interest rate and transfer the balance from the old card. But most consumers didn’t realize they needed to do that.

President Obama, having absolutely no knowledge about the situation, went ahead and supported the law so that people could carry guns into national parks — I mean, so that consumers would not have to worry about interest rate hikes being enacted against them individually (the law does nothing to prevent future mass rate hikes).

So consumers lost out three ways today:

First, the March-2009 announced rate hikes remain in place. Everyone who still has a credit card from those companies (J.P. Morgan, Citibank, and Capital One for sure) will still have to pay triple interest on new purchases.

Second, consumers who cancelled their cards with existing balances and who cannot now obtain new credit cards will take months, perhaps years to rebuild their credit.

Third, consumers can look forward to more interest rate hikes on their credit cards because the new law didn’t even impose a limit on credit card interest rates.

Aren’t you glad you voted for Obama? I sure am.

He is today’s “failure in the white house”. Hey, Google — did you get the message THIS time?

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SF-Fandom is a fan-run moderated Web discussion community devoted to science fiction, fantasy, history, and mythology. Founded in 2001, SF-Fandom is part of the Xenite.Org Network of science fiction and fantasy Web sites.

Google buries SciFi fan sites

If you have a Harry Potter, Star Trek, Star Wars, Fringe, Battlestar Galactica, or other science fiction fan site, you may have found yourself asking a couple of questions over the past few months:

1) Where have all the good fan sites gone?

2) Why doesn’t my site show up for “harry potter”, “star trek”, etc. when I search on Google?

There was a time when you could search on a small expression and find some really good fan sites for all sorts of movie, television, and book franchises. Google has now made that pretty much impossible. You almost have to know exactly which sites to search for before you can find them.

Why is that? Because Google has cluttered search results with low-quality commercial and semi-commercial sites like IMDB, Wikipedia, various magazine Web sites, and other non-fan oriented content. Google’s algorithm takes over 200 factors into consideration when ranking Web pages but in January they cranked up the importance for what they call “trust”. Google CEO Eric Schmidt last year started telling people that the Web really needs to be dominated by so-called “brand” Web sites (mostly commercial Web sites).

Naturally, Google’s algorithm has screwed over the science fiction and fantasy community by promoting ad-laden commercial Web sites, low-quality Wiki sites, and other “brands” to the top of many science fiction and fantasy queries. There are certainly some sites (like my own network) which, having been around for years, have accrued enough trust that we can compete with the big guns for a lot of queries.

But I already know where to find my own sites. I’m always trying to find new SF fan sites and Google has made that task more difficult. Even if you search for “star trek fan sites” you’ll find sites like Wikipedia, Wired, and Startrek.com dominating the front page of Google’s search results. It’s a sad day for everyone when a search engine deliberately promotes commercial or irrelevant content over the most relevant content.

Where to find science fiction fan sites

You actually get better results from Ask, Microsoft Live, and Yahoo!. The problem is, a lot of people use Google to find Web sites so Google is cheating the science fiction fandom community by burying Web sites which have not earned enough trust to soar through the rankings.

How to improve your Google search results for scifi fan sites

Now, if you’re a Webmaster who has lost search engine traffic, you may be wondering what you can do about this. Frankly, as a professional search engine optimizer who has been doing this for almost 11 years, I can only say there is very little you can do. You cannot compete with these sites on the basis of links because they have hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions of links pointing at them. Good luck accruing that kind of link profile. But the good news is that my sites only have thousands of links pointing at them and the fact they are able to appear in now-competitive queries means you don’t have to match the big guns link-for-link.

One thing you can do is use the expression “fan site” in your page titles and 2-3 times in your page copy. Use H1 headers or large font elements to give your page titles emphasis. Don’t repeat the terms endlessly — that makes you look cheap. But if you have a Harry Potter fan site mention “Harry Potter” several times on every relevant page.

You can also change the way you link to other fan sites. Let’s say you have a fan sites page where you link to 15 or 20 sites you like. If you link to MuggleNet, TheOneRing.net. TrekWeb, TheForce.Net, NarniaFans, SF-Fandom, Xenite.Org, etc., don’t worry about what anchor text you use. Those sites all have thousands of links pointing at them. They rank well for their major expressions and many other expressions.

If you link to small fan sites you really like or that your friends ask you to help promote, use link anchor text like Harry Potter fan site by Michael Martinez. If the site has a special name, include it at the end of the anchor text. Just be sure to name the genre or franchise, include the words “fan site”, and then give some attribution.

If you link to 15-20 fan sites this way your own fan site will become more relevant to the major expression — so it helps a little (but the odds of your fan sites page outranking IMDB are pretty slim).

You should also link to searches on Ask, Live, and Yahoo! to help people find other fan sites:

• Star Trek fan sites at Yahoo!
• Star Trek fan sites at Live.com
• Star Trek fan sites at Ask

What this does is remind fans that they don’t have to rely on Google to find good quality sites (especially since Google is determined to NOT show good quality sites). Don’t assume those links will help any of the sites, though, as the major search engines tend to ignore links in search engine results pages. Do this for your visitors.

If you write a blog on WordPress.com or another service that uses communal tagging, use tags that are relevant when you tell people about fan sites. Use “Harry Potter fan sites” as a tag for any post about a cool new Harry Potter fan site. Use “Star Trek fan sites” as a tag for any post about a cool new Star Trek fan site. People visit those tag pages and look at the blog posts. This post uses “fan sites” as a tag.

Blogger does not use communal tagging at this time. The tags you create on Blogger are only relevant to your own blog. Sorry.

How to find science fiction fan sites in spite of Google

If you are just searching for fan sites, try different queries. If you’re emotionally committed to using only Google, you can use queries to exclude sites from your search results. Here is an example:

star wars fan site -site:starwars.com -site:imdb.com -site:wikipedia.org -site:wikia.com

It’s a pain to have filter out the less relevant “trusted” sites in Google’s search results, so you really should try to use other search engines and longer queries.

Another thing you can do is click through to deep search results, starting around page 10. Google eventually has to show you some real content and not just the commercial sites, so if you dig deep you’ll find Web sites. I recently compiled a list of 36 real Harry Potter fan sites (beyond the usual top 4-5 we all know about) by clicking deep into Google’s search results.

If you see WordPress bloggers tagging their posts with “harry potter fan sites”, etc. click on the tags and see who else is writing about fan sites.

You don’t have to take Google’s nonsense lying down. If you want to find good science fiction fan sites, ignore the low-quality commercial crap Google throws in your face. Use other search engines, change your queries, and dig deep into the results. You should also bookmark and promote niche science fiction Web directories like Brad Enslen’s SciFi Web Directory, SciFi Source’s SciFi Web Directory, and others.

It’s not easy to find good fan sites any more but you can still do this. Help your fellow fans by promoting their sites through your links, your blog posts, and your social media tags.

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SF-Fandom is a fan-run moderated Web discussion community devoted to science fiction, fantasy, history, and mythology. Founded in 2001, SF-Fandom is part of the Xenite.Org Network of science fiction and fantasy Web sites.

Democrats made Barack Obama latest white house failure

I know a little something about search engine optimization and its history. Back in 1998 two college students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, wrote a paper in which they proposed adapting the now-discredited Citation Statistics methodology to evaluating Web sites.

Page and Brin believed that links acted like “votes” between Web sites (which was never the case — back in 1997-1999, before Google became big, people were linking to each other mostly for social purposes not to recommend specific content). Thus was born PageRank (named for Larry Page), an algorithm that computes a probability distribution based on linking relationships between documents.

What most people did not realize, however, was that Page and Brin were also proposing a radical marriage between link anchor text and documents. They wrongly believed that links described the contents of the pages they were pointing to. Sometimes this was the case, most times not. Based on their ignorance, they designed one of the most easily spammed search engines in history: Google.

Google gradually became popular with searchers because of its simple interface (it was a refreshing break from the search portal home pages that were so cluttered). Search engine optimizers almost immediately began taking advantage of Google’s inherent design flaws, but in 2003 a blogger noticed how links from other blogs could help move a new post to the top of the search results quickly.

Thus was born Googlebombing (technically, it should be called “Link Bombing” because it works with other search engines that have followed Google’s lead into Stupid Search Ranking Tricks). Most people in the SEO community by now use links to adjust the search results for their sites (or their client sites). It has been a long time since Google showed the most relevant or useful Web sites in many highly commercialized queries.

About 6 years ago, when President George Bush started losing his popularity, Democratic opponents began using their blogs and Web sites to link to the White House biography of the President with the words “miserable failure”. Because of the way Google handles link anchor text, these keywords affected other queries.

Soon, President Bush was ranked first for “miserable failure”, “failure”, “failure in the white house”, and “white house failure”. Republican supporters couldn’t let that trick go unchallenged so they starting linking to Web pages for Bill Clinton, Jimmy Carter, and other equally well-known Democratic leaders with the words “miserable failure”. The Democrats stayed focus on Bush but the Republicans won the link bomb war by filling the first page of search results with Democrats (except for the top 1-2 positions that were reserved for President Bush).

This situation proved to be embarrassing to the search engine optimization industry. It made us look like a bunch of goons who had nothing better to with our time but blackmark people in the search results. People in the SEO community changed their attitudes from light amusement to frustrated disbelief and disgust with Google for not fixing a big PR problem (remember, it wasn’t the SEOs who did this — it was just regular democratic and republican bloggers).

The news media caught on to the controversy and focused everyone’s attention on “miserable failure”. Finally, a couple of years ago, Google implemented what we in the SEO industry call a “hand job”: they set up a table listing many link bomb queries (about 100 of them) and blocked listings for Web sites that had been victimized by those queries. But they overlooked two queries in the Presidential Failure link bomb: “failure in the white house” and “white house failure”.

So President Bush continued to rank for “failure in the white house” and “white house failure” right up until the week when Barack Obama took office.

On January 20 the new President was sworn in and his Web team took down the old Bush-White House Web site and put up the new Obama-White House site. In doing so, they redirected all the old URLs to new URLs — thus “breaking” Google’s fix for the “miserable failure” and “failure” link bombs.

The redirection was immediately noticed in the SEO community and Danny Sullivan, founder and lead editor for Search Engine Land intervened, asking Google to reimplement the hand job. Google complied (they are, after all, Obama supporters) almost immediately.

Except, once again, Google bungled the job. Now President Obama ranks first for “white house failure” and “failure in the white house”.

Now, I was not a big fan of President Bush but I did point out the first time around that those queries should have been fixed. No one listened (and, believe me, I’ve been able to influence Google on more than one occasion). I dropped a comment on Googler Matt Cutts’ blog post about the link bomb, pointing out that Google had still missed two of the queries.

The silence has been deafening.

And the queries still show that President Obama is a “failure in the white house” and a “white house failure”.

Now, maybe if we raise a ruckus together Google will listen and expand the listings in their link bomb table to clean up those two queries. If not, you’d better believe that Obama’s political opponents will capitalize on these queries and use them to embarrass him.

And in the process they’ll also embarrass people like me (SEOs) and Google (who, arguably, deserve to be embarrassed because they have now flubbed two opportunities to fix this mess).

As an alternative, you could get your friends to link to this post with the keywords “failure in the white house” or “white house failure” in the hope it will be promoted above the White House Web site for those queries.

Of course, none of you owe me any favors, and you need to understand that as a practicing SEO theorist I fully appreciate what that many links would do for this blog. It’s just a thought.

My preference would be that Google fix the “failure in the white house” and “white house failure” queries so that we can all put the embarrassment behind us.

And to you Democrats who thought you had the last word on President Bush I say: you not only got what you deserved with this bit of sick poetic justice, now the Republicans are empowered to use this dirty trick over and over again against every Democratic leader.

Try putting THAT genie back into its bottle.

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SF-Fandom is a fan-run moderated Web discussion community devoted to science fiction, fantasy, history, and mythology. Founded in 2001, SF-Fandom is part of the Xenite.Org Network of science fiction and fantasy Web sites.