Re: Abuse of this list

[Jonathan Robie <jonathan.robie@redhat.com>]

This is something I couldn't have weighed in on publicly while I worked 
at DataDirect.

The search engines love sites that have a lot of phrases related to 
specific topics, distributed among many different files. From my gmail 
account, I infer that Google also knows about the names of people 
associated with specific topics, so messages from people like us add to 
the credibility of an XML site.

Stylus Studio and DataDirect XQuery have managed to get very good search 
engine ratings - if you search for acronyms or phrases we use in XML, 
you'll see what I mean. But like you, I find it objectionable when an 
email I send gets changed into a source of links into the Stylus Studio 
site to improve their search engine ranking. It makes it look as though 
I were referring to their software at times that I am not.

You'll notice that the Stylus site also includes many of the W3C specs, 
other mailing lists, and anything that might tell the search engines 
that it contains a large body of credible data related to the things 
that they sell. I don't like this strategy. It does seem to be an 
effective way of increasing page rank with the current Google 
algorithms. I wouldn't do it. I especially would not modify people's 
messages or existing documents to refer to products I'm trying to sell. 
I think Stylus and DataDirect are great products, but this strategy 
always bugged me.

One thing has gotten better: at one point, Google would sometimes prefer 
the Stylus copies of information to the original; for instance, if you 
Googled on "xml-dev", it would take you to their copy of the archives, 
or often to their copy of a document. Now that does not usually happen.

Jonathan