David A. West

What if You Had No Control At Your Website

As social media and the onslaught of “free-for-all” user contributed content storms the web, until recently one of the few areas you had complete control over was your own website. That recently changed.

Google has launched it’s new “Sidewiki” as a portion to the Google Toolbar. Now as people surf the net they are being encouraged to comment on any website that they visit.

From the moment I upgraded my toolbar to give this “sidewiki” a little go, I can see there is certain degree of anxiety based on the postings on Google’s own sidewiki own  page…

Travis Claridge wrote “How will this affect business and advertising? – this is a very scary tool from the aspect of a business and advertising. How deos a buisness prepare for the PR onslaught and respond to issues brought up through this service? Worse yet… if they don’t adapt quickly they will never even see content written about them.”

Kevin Fox wrote, “Promising, I’m glad to see Google try this… As Google explains their algorithm for comment position – irrelevant or unhelpful comments should sink to the bottom.” He also wrote, “I’m curious how Sidewiki will impact SEO, or will it be a whole new venue for SEO?”

It begs the questions also, when will Sidewiki “comments” be returned as actual relevant search results that then link to the related page?

Skye B wrote, “This is a place for “word of mouth” so to speak. Hopefully with the help of majority of surfers it will be spam free. No more websites or blogs that don’t offer a chance to readers to speak their mind. Some websites don’t post your comments if you don’t agree with them, but those days are gone! Freedom of speech for everyone! Thanks Google”

Interesting that this person, under an alias name, is also the one most concerned about freedom of speech – but won’t put their name to it.

A little shoot over to YouTube to see what viewers of Google’s sidewiki video are saying… and wow, some very interesting comments.  Of course, comments that are welcomed at YouTube may not be so welcome at your marketing website. At YouTube when you post a video you have the option to moderate comments and you can decide which comments should be public… Google Sidewiki does not give website owners the ability to moderate user contributed content.

MrSaxaman1973 wrote, “Those talking about “Freedom of Speech”. This has nothing to do with YOUR speech. It has to do with the website owners Freedom of Speech. You need to be a website owner to really understand. We assemble websites the way we do on purpose. To provide info and services that YES, make us money, but its our money that we are putting on the line & our decision on how to use it. SideWiki is taking that away by enabling random users the ability to direct visitors ($) away from our investments! “EVIL”!!!”

Over now to the seroundtable.com forums to see what the search optimizers are chatting about. Ah, they are chatting about blocking users from accessing websites if they have the Google toolbar installed. Interesting.  The chatter here is to either convince Google to allow webmasters to opt-out on a site by site basis or to simply block users or redirect them somewhere else, like maybe Bing.com for example.

Whitenight commented at webmasterworld, “…this is a lawsuit waiting to happen.”

Just like with Twitter, my jury is out on Sidewiki. I am not sure how this is going to pan out. I can safely say, it is causing a bit of a stir online.

David