What brings visitors to your website?

Remark: This article has originally been posted under a different title with a different intention. It has been changed in major parts.

In theory people visit a website because of its unique content. They chose a website because it provides information no other site offers. In practice very few websites offer unique content and people prefer a site over another because of its page-rank. The relevance of google™ page-rank in the web world is mostly undisputed but here are some search results, sugessting that its relevance surpasses the relevance of unique content to an extend where the latter is only a device to get a high page rank:

The majority of the “about 309,000,000″ hits for the term “unique content” is about search engine optimisation or automated content generation. I took a rather subjective approach of filtering by adding the following terms: “-seo -service -adwords -marketing -traffic -affiliate -free -automated -adsense -database -engine” and concluded that about 90% hits included at least one of these probably seo related terms. I’m quoting one of the 300,000,000 hits here as a representative:

Search Engines and Duplicate Content

Plagiarism, which is nothing but copied content, produces duplicate content between two websites. It is well known that search engines are adverse to duplicate or identical content and that page rankings can suffer because of plagiarism. Google has guidelines against plagiarism and warns website owners against creating multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content, as stated in its Webmaster Guidelines. Having even a substantially duplicate content, much more a totally duplicate website, will penalize a websites’ page rank.

It is quite interesting that uniqueness is defined as not being a true-to-the-word plagiarism of something already in existance. Naturally this is the only condition for uniqueness, an automated search crawler can verify but it is against the intuition that unique content should transport some idea not yet stated on the web. But try to think of the last unique idea you saw on the web. There might be such thing, but it occurs vary rarely.

There always has been redundancy in human communication. In itself, there is nothing new or wrong with the observation that, when thinking of a common topic, people come to similar conclusions and questions and have an urge to make them public. But in the days before the web, “public” implied a far smaller audience for nearly all communicators.

Don’t let any artificial ranking decide what you publish and how.

Getting people to behave

Several ways to encourage a cartain behaviour through sheer angst occured to me writing the last post. I will document them here.

Let’s say you own an internet platform where users can sell their goods in form of an auction. You might then be interested in other users bidding high amounts of money on these for a couple of reasons. First of all the premium you get for yourself depends directly on what the selling user got for his item. But then if he gets a high amount for it he will be satisfied and more likely to use your platform for another item generating even more revenue. Yes, you could even think of the buyer. The higher the amount he bids, the higher the chances that he gets the item and ends up as a satisfied costumer.

What you could do to provoke higher bids is to display a text like “You are just about to be outbidden. Is this really your maximum bid?” The message “Your maximum bid equals the actual bid at the moment. Is this really your maximum bid?” would describe the same situation and, though being fairly unneccessary, be purely informative. The reader could think “yes” by himself an move on happily. The statement in the original text on the other hand is a rather controversial. Without any evidence it suggests that there is somebody out there who will bid more. Admittedly most buyers would be aware of this possibility without the text. But I think the text is designed to let the mere possibility become a concrete danger in the reader’s mind which can only be avoided by taking action.

Another thing you might want to assure is that money and goods are really exchanged. You could try sending a mail like “Congratulations, you are now obliged to buy this item” instead of “Congratulations, you have just bought this item”. Nothing to complain about here, both seem equaly matter-of-fact. The majority of the people who don’t want to fulfill this obligation probably was drunk, had their children using the computer, misread the description of the item or the like. An email to the seller explaining the problem should solve it in most cases though involving social contact. Well at least that’s the caveman’s point of view.

The modern solution however is inherently technical. If the buyer has a good reason the system allows him to take back a bid. With the slight difference to direct contact that you, the owner of the platform, now decide how a good reason is defined. And if you don’t like a particular reason you can still kindly remind the buyer that he has an obligation that is to say he’d better behave. Wow that really is an improvement on individual mail isn’t it? Could this have been accomplished with the less severe formulation? I doubt it.

Regardless of the nature of your internet platform, it might be helpful to include something like this in your terms of service:

Indemnification. You agree to indemnify and hold harmless (insert name here), its contractors, and its licensors, and their respective directors, officers, employees and agents from and against any and all claims and expenses, including attorneys’ fees, arising out of your use of the Website, including but not limited to out of your violation this Agreement.

Use it, it’s creative commons.

I don’t know about others, but me it scares to death. It made me think again whether I really want to start a blog, it made me put all those ridiculous ® and ™ signs in the other post, it prevented me from uploading screenshots (since all rights to those are reserved by some company) and I’m only hoping that nobody will object my usage of “he” instaead of “her” (where the real gender is unknown) as sexual harassment. I don’t want any new laws and I surely don’t want any companies to make their own laws for their respective domains. But I’d really love to know exactly what I’m allowed to do on the internet and what not and to be left alone if I obey. I don’t see how this is possible at the time, keeping in mind that I could be sued for something I was not even aware of at any moment. Of course it is also the clash of the cultures: nobody knows what people in all parts of the world wide web consider an offence. But I have been told that the ideal I support here, is what Americans refer to as “privacy” and if there is a way to implement privacy on the net, it surely involves stopping to scare people who intend no harm.