When someone links to something online, they “give it juice” in the lingo of search engine optimizers – the SEO experts. If you are an expert on the armadillos and link from your website to someone else’s webpage about armadillos, you give juice to that webpage. The search engines know you know something and the link from you to the other webpage tells the search engine spiders that the other webpage is a respected resource about armadillos.
In his excellent book Big Switch about what is happening on the Net, Nicholas Carr has a chapter he calls “A Spider’s Web.” He begins that chapter by recounting how two New York Times reporters used the keywords she had entered in AOL (and gathered by spiders) to identify user 44317749. Carr writes (page 186): “Number 44327749 turned out to be Thelma Arnold, a sixty-two-year-old widow living in Lilburn, Georgia. On August 9 [2006], Arnold woke up to find her name and picture on the front page of the national edition of the Times.”
What happened to Thelma Arnold can seem scary, and it most certainly is spurring the development of more and more sophisticated methods to protect online privacy. That is well and good. But there are huge findability opportunities here. The education industry has pretty much held the Net at arms length for years, and one of the main excuses has been that it was difficult to find things in the profusion of online materials. Finding something very specific turns out not to be hard at all. (Just ask Thelma.)
It is not hard at all to give juice to the good nodes so they will be at the top of the searches made by students and teachers. In fact, a lot juice is already going to this fine armadillo website that comes up at the top of the SERPs (search engine results pages): Armadillos Online! (which is the source of the image with this post.). Joshua Nixon, who has hosted this website since 1995 is careful and generous with is juice as is clear on his Other armadillo resource on the web page.
