I wonder how big the bounce rate signal is, if it’s really there. That’s great for quality sites with a lot of loyalists, but it seems like it would make being a newcomer (even with great content) a lot more challenging. When we search, many of us are looking for exactly what we want, in such a quick and dirty fashion, that even appealing sites that we’ve never seen before get bounced because we say “I’ll check that out later.”

Is this really journalism?

When the WSJ and CNN wrote about my Foner Books website they did something you negelected to do. They talked to me. Actually contacting the people you are writing about is pretty much Journalism 101. When the New York Times featured my laptop repair website in a story a couple years ago, they talked to me as well.

When the Peace Corp and 4H wanted to use flowcharts from my websites, they asked, rather than stealing or abstracting like content farms. The pages you find of dubious quality have been copied by article farms, scapers and lazy forum posters hundreds and thousands of times. But I guess you chose to look at the order page, and were shocked to find that it included order links.

The saddest thing about the Panda update for me is that Google now promotes piracy sites pushing copyright infringements of my work over my own site, where most visitors would find what they are looking for free. But those piracy sites are feature lots of the “like” buttons that you like so much. They also feature lots of community action, where kids post “Thanks for the book, dude, I was looking for this.”

All that might be your idea of quality. It apparently is Google’s idea of quality. But good luck finding answers when you have a real question, as opposed to participating in Internet tourism, like Google’s test group.

And next time you write a story, consider acting like a real journalist and getting the other side.

Morris Rosenthal
Foner Books