Over the years people have asked me why I maintain yafla.com (after a Slashdotting a few years ago, a reader wrote to ask if yafla.com stood for "Yet Another F'n Lame Ass.com?". I got quite a kick out of that, and I considered replacing Yet Another Five Letter Acronym in my mind with this more cynical variant). While it is a legitimate company that I do work under, basically I'm by design a one man crew and have no lack of work, so I don't actively solicit for business. Nonetheless I've always wanted to maintain a credible internet presence just in case I think up something that would be .COM brilliant.

To serve this desire, one of my goals with yafla.com was to maintain it at a middling ranking, publishing enough interesting information that people would link to it and visit, and when I do post something interesting about a non-mainstream topic, it at least has a chance in heck of appearing somewhere near the front of the links returned by search engines (given that people who actually care are most likely to get here via a search engine. People coming from blog-of-the-day or discussion links are much more likely to be fly-bys who pad the hit-count but don't actually value from the content. I get no pleasure from empty hits).

Of course there's also the personal credibility angle: Along with published print articles, I also post informational tools or papers on yafla.com to maintain some karma in the industry, and also as a goal - a destination - that drives me to investigate topics that otherwise I might not so thoroughly consider. I've placed Google Adsense ads on a couple of papers as a test, but they yield a pittance: I could "make" far more than the Google ads yield by getting a regular coffee instead of a large in the morning.

One thing I have noticed, however, is that the number of hits coming from search engines like Google has been rapidly declining over the past couple of years, basically charting as an inverse of the number of blogs filling the medium. It seems that as more and more blogs are coming online, all of them promiscuously cross-linking and trackbacking, the value of getting a couple hundred links for a neat domain tool, or a dozen links from highly specialized sites concerning a specific topic, has declined to the point of being irrelevant.

With the new inflationary pressures, it seems that nothing less than thousands of blog swarming links will really get you search engine credibility. This is doubled by the fact that most (or all) of the major search engines are terribly dumb, in that a million generalist blog linkings to a guy for his xbox game tips will yield him top results for SQL queries the day he posts his first Hello World SELECT statement. To my knowledge there is no search engine that separates links out into areas of expertise (Google pseudo-does this by analyzing the context of each link, but it is terribly deficient), eliminating this useless global ranking for all searches. Many blogs are earning credibility by association (due to demonstratable weaknesses in algorithms like Pagerank), such as the huge rise of blogs.msdn.com entries for virtually every search term (even where the individual blog itself has few or no direct links from the outside world, but has credibility by being linked within the whole of blogs.msdn.com. This is weakness I wrote about several years ago on this very site, though in that iteration it was GeoCities accounts that were disproportionately being ranked).

The question I am pondering, then, is whether the only way one can remain internet credible (in search engine terms) is to integrate heavily within the blogging community, quid-pro-quoing endless links and trackbacks, ingratiating oneself with other bloggers, posting meaningless comments about every posting every other blogger makes (which they will of course do in turn). It's a sort of super-pyramid scheme, but with no bottom level.