I used to have a NetMeeting site. It’s the reason I still have a warm spot in my heart for Google. I was just telling some people about why Google has a better brand name in my mind than other search engines.
Google linked to it as #1 from almost the first day I used Google back six years ago.
Let’s go back to 1996.
I had one of the two top NetMeeting sites. Brian Sullivan had and still has the other. My site had tons of information for NetMeeting users. Had hundreds of thousands of visitors per month.
Anyway, Yahoo didn’t link to it for at least the first few years it was up. Despite monthly attempts to get it listed.
Altavista linked to it, but Altavista also linked to a bunch of porn sites that had spammed that engine.
Google always had it as either #1 or #2 from the very first day.
So, whenever I had a chance I told people to use Google. I +knew+ it was the better engine.
Now comes the interesting part.
That site no longer exists. DevX took the site down a couple of years ago and redirected the pages to a C# page.
So, no search engine should link to it anymore. Right?
But, Google has it as their #2 link.
MSN has it as their #9 link. Much better, because that’s on the second page. Very few searchers will click through to the second page of a search result.
On Yahoo this link didn’t appear anywhere on the first 10 pages of results.
I was thinking about that when I read Om Malik’s report on how Yahoo is getting its Mojo back.
I’ll report the bad result to MSN tomorrow. Maybe they can figure out a way to sense when a page no longer displays the expected content.
PS, let me link to Brian Sullivan’s site again so his site will get linked better on Google: netmeeting. The words you use to link to a site will help get it linked higher on that search term.
Robert Scoble is the founder of the Scobleizer blog. He works as PodTech.net’s Vice President of Media Development.
Go to Scobleizer …
