[Ref-Links] economic effects of link-based search engines on e-journals

[Eric Hellman <eric@openly.com>]

Google changes everything.

Up to now, the key to the internet has been directories and search 
engines. A mom-and-pop website that managed to get top position for 
the phrase "cell phone" in a top search engine was generating 
$1,000,000 of sales per quarter, earning 10% commissions from 
affiliate programs. What this website did was to figure out the 
combination of keywords and phrases that the search engine liked- 
nothing else.

The current trend in search engines has been to start putting a lot 
of weight onto the frequency and quality of sites that link to a 
particular web page. Led by Google, the new breed of search engines 
get astoundingly good results, at least in part because they're very 
hard to rig with keyword stuffing and the like. Slowly but surely, 
the economic power of sites with rich, properly presented content is 
growing back up to where it should be, and the days of the keyword 
sharpshooters are numbered.

Having other sites link to your web site is now of growing economic 
value. In order for a site to have value in link-based search 
engines, it is important to:
1. Have a lot of freely available content.
2. Expose the site to indexing robots.
3. Receive links in ways that don't confuse robots. This can be 
tricky and engine-dependent. An example relevant to this list is how 
robots deal with redirection as done by the doi proxy. Send me a note 
if you want details, or if you want tips on how to put your site on 
top of google.

It is instructive to look at the google site rankings, and really fun 
when your site comes up at the top:

KEYWORD             GOOGLE'S TOP RATED SITE
"research"           The Materials Research Society http://www.mrs.org/
"science"              Space Telescope Science Institute Home Page 
http://www.stsci.edu/
"nature"               Nature Medicine: Home http://medicine.nature.com/
"medicine"            Nature Medicine: Home http://medicine.nature.com/
"physics"             Dept. of Phys. and Astro., Univ. of 
Pennsylvania http://dept.physics.upenn.edu/
"chemistry"         Journal of Biological Chemistry http://www.jbc.org/
"semiconductor"   MRS Internet J. of Nitride Semicond. Res. 
http://nsr.mij.mrs.org/
"psychology"        Journal of Pediatric Psychology 
http://jpepsy.oupjournals.org/
"mathematics"      Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics 
http://www.siam.org/
"engineering"        mechanical engineering home page 
http://www.memagazine.org/

paid links for the keywords "semiconductor", "engineering"  and 
"medicine" point at a chip company, office.com and drugstore.com, 
indicating real value of the top placement.

In the long run, I believe that many well-designed, free-to-read 
e-journals will derive substantial operating revenue from their 
ability to capture and influence top spots in the new breed of search 
engines.

Eric
Eric Hellman
Openly Informatics, Inc.
http://www.openly.com/           21st Century Information Infrastructure
LinkBaton: Your Links that Learn     http://my.linkbaton.com/

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