For people doing research on the power of weblogs, watch this: I have written a small review of the Belkin Media Reader 12 days ago and a search on Google for Belkin Media Reader returns it on the first page as the 4th or 5th result today.
The first result pointing to the Belkin web site is on the 11th page! And it's not even going to the product page, only to a press release which itself does not point to the product page. I've given looking after the 25th page on Google. On Belkin.com, the only way to find it in less than two clicks is to use their search engine, which will show a result that says "coming soon"!
And since my review is not positive, I guess it won't please the marketing folks at Belkin. But that's neither my fault, nor Google's, not even weblogs'. The fact that weblogs have such a high ranking in Google is more due to the spectacular gap between the craptacular job done by clueless marketing people and the astonishingly simple but fruitful job done by weblog software editors who helped people publish content using web standards.
To the marketing folks around: you don't need a weblog to achieve high ranking in Google (I know this doesn't sound trendy). All you need is to stop producing content-free sites with pages that sport less than 10% text for 90% bandwidth-wasting images, animations and other HTML tag soup. And the best support for achieving a good content/noise ratio is to use web standards. And if you can't switch to web standards right now, there are two little tags you may want to focus on: <title> and <h1>. And it shouldn't take you a marketing degree to figure out what to place between those tags.
; "googlecertificateexpired.png")
; "wellbebacksoon.png")
; "sarkozysarkozysarkozy.png")
I totally agree, I have launched a joking-website just for fun some months ago and it provides a proof about the fact, that the most important thing is content. I started uploading about 6000 jokes I found and they are found in google now nearly all, just because they are content. On some shops I'm running it's the same, good product descriptions are the A&O and bringing the right visitors, not bogus technics like guestbook/blog spamming and so on. But we all know too, that spam will not stop at all - but on the other site people are not staying stupid and ignoring spam even more if it becomes "popular" I think. That's my 3 cents, hope my english was not to bad for you, greetings from Germany, Dave.