Insidious Lassitude

My website samwaters.org is now ranked fourth on Google. Well, it was this morning. Inexplicably it’s now down to seventh. Mine is not apparently a popular destination for lunchtime surfing. Or perhaps the vacillation (it’s ninth now, I’ve just checked) of my popularity has revealed Google to be but a sham, and this vaunted and trumped up Googlerank algorithm program thing to be phantasmal and apocryphal.

Behind a wrought iron fence and cloaked in a misty skirt of murky hoodoo, the workings down the Google mineshaft are known to very few on the surface. I’ve just looked (Googled it, of course) and there’s very little information about how the search engine functions. There’s plenty yak and tittle-tattle, but perishing little truth. Given all the evidence (or lack of) it seems to me that the Googlerank algorithm program thing is founded upon some sort of necromantic sorcery. There are no rules; only the illusion of them. It’s a verisimilitude; a gimcrack! I think I’ve seen things like this before. I’d bet that Google mineshaft is a folly; those pit workings are but cardboard silhouettes on the horizon, forever retreating should anyone set off toward them. Google’s a destination which is impossible to reach.  If I did manage to sneak around the back and past the phantoms ghouling the door at Google HQ, I’d find Harry Potter alone inside hunched over a computer screen tapping his magic wand on the keyboard. And he himself is a fiction! I feel the duplicitous hand of America on my shoulder here…

Still, all this said, I still think this is a popularity contest that I can win. Consider the facts. Here are the things I know (or think I know) about the criteria the Googlerank gimcrack algorithm program thing uses to judge us: First, Google considers links into a website to be ‘votes’ for that website. Second, Googlemonster’s perception of the importance of a website is influenced by the freshness of the content, and the speed of the server it is stored on. Third, the length of time a domain name has been used is critical because it takes a year before Google learns to trust that the domain isn’t spam which will lift the veil on the Googlecrack scam. And the fourth thing I know about Googlefeit is that it reads keywords to help it understand what the page is about. Ok, my website - remember, the fourth most successful containing the terms ’sam’ and ’waters’ in the whole virtual world - doesn’t have any keywords; the domain has only been registered a few months; it’s on (or intermittently falling off the side of) a shonky cheapo server; and the content of the site hasn’t been updated virtually since the start of time. I’m yet to build the site, and there’s only a placeholder ‘under construction’ page there so I’ve not told anyone it even exists. I’m the only person who’d go there and make traffic for the Googleshaft to count as a vote. Yet I’ve singlehandedly propelled myself to no4 in the world rankings. Ousting along the way a previously popular American actress who shares my name. I’ve not even made a conscious effort to take her on, and yet through my own narcissistic gaze I’ve outstripped her in the popularity stakes. Clearly I’d even underestimated my own value. If I go and look some more I’ll easily reach no1. Which is, of course, where I rightly belong.

Ah, who’d've thought narcissism could be so constructive. Or at least give such a good appearance of being constructive.