Digg Outranks Wikipedia? Naaaaaah, Say It Isn’t So

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

WebPro News is reporting that Digg outranks Wikipedia for the search term “January 1 TCP/IP.” You know what that means? It may mean that inbound links from authority sites may not be worth as much as they used to. Should webmasters be concerned?

I’m not willing to say for sure just yet, but according to this video featuring Kara Ratliff, that is a possibility. Ratliff says, “Throw away everything you know about Google’s way of archiving and ranking things. The incoming authority links are basically useless.”

Maybe she’s right. If Digg does outrank Wikipedia for important search terms then it does show that more recent information can rank higher than historical information, and that has been a problem for all of the search engines. How many times have you searched for something only to retrieve results that were a year or two old and found more recent information buried deeper into the search results? It’s happened to me a lot.

If Google has changed its algorithms to move more recent information to the top of its search results then that could change everything about the way we go about link building. Of course, it’s still too early to tell. In a way, I hope it’s true. In another way, though, I hope it isn’t. And the reason I hope it isn’t true is because some of those older, more historical search results are actually more accurate and relevant than the more recent ones. However, some aren’t. So maybe what we need from Google is a tweak that allows for some of that recent information to filter to the top while some of it doesn’t. If that is possible.

At any rate, don’t count your chickens yet. It’s just the second day of the year.