I would say, if you're looking for "Jeremy Zawodny", or "Derek Balling", that the most relevant URL for that search is that person's web site, just as if you google for "Ford Motor Company" that I would expect the Ford Motor Company web site to be the most relevant URL, and not "sites *about* Ford Motor Company".

For many people, their weblog *is* their site. I long ago tossed the crappy site I had, in favor of simply using a weblog with some 'about' style links on the side.

D

PS - give yourself credit, you're one of the most important Kasias to *us* anyway. ;-)

Hah, you just upped the Pagerank rating for your "Y!Msger Tech Support" post again. :D

Thank you! I'm glad someone else will admit that blogs are not the 'be all' of the web. I can think of about a zillion different cases where someone's main site would be way more important than their blog...for instance, how about a photographer who keeps a blog? What's more important to people, seeing this person's blog or seeing this person's images?

I think Google is trying to soften PageRank somewhat, but they don't have a clear game plan. As a result, it's beginning to simply look like Google is broken. It may not be a reaction to blogs. The BlogThis! gadget in their latest version of the toolbar was not designed to up the quality of blogdom! I think Google sees blogs as a fine outlet for Adwords, and they cannot see beyond that. They're basically monetizing their entire operation, and the algorithms that made them a decent engine in the old days are now taking a back seat to the pot of gold they see at the end of the rainbow.

A search for my name "daniel brandt" without the quotes pulls up a staff box on www.google-watch.org as number one or two out of 180,000 hits. You may think that's cool because the box lists my associates. But get this -- the box is a GIF for privacy reasons, and Googlebot didn't pick it up and cannot read it.

The only content on that page is the words "Return to home page." Further investigation reveals that a blogger in Italy used my name as anchor text on his two duplicate blog sites. Those two instances of anchor text are the only way Google linked that contentless page to my name.

This is getting nuts. Try a search for "discount brokers" without the quotes. The first site out of 459,000 is a parked domain, and the second is a directory that has been empty since at least November.

I've been a critic of PageRank for a few years, but whatever Google is doing now is starting to make PageRank look good!

I agree with Daniel.