This year I turn 55! Quite a milestone when you think about it. I can tell you a number of things go through your mind when this event occurs and I’m guessing everyone goes through some sort of “right of passage“. Having been a tennis player most of my life, I decided that 55 was my opportunity to join the 55-and-over tennis tournament circuit. I imagined filling my trophy case with hardware from my triumphs.
In my first tournament, the draw had me play a first round match late in the evening, followed with a meeting with the number 2 seed early the next morning. This didn’t seem fair, but as a newcomer I didn’t feel it was my place to complain. Well, the good news was that I won my first match, but the bad news was that I resembled a pretzel the next morning. Needless to say, I went down in defeat, but on my drive home I had a bit of an epiphany on tournament draws and search linking algorithms.
What I realized was that search algorithms actually use a similar process. You see, as an unknown, the tennis tournament directors could not credibly seed me; similarly, search engines don’t rank newly found URLs very high in their listings. Now, if I would have won my match against the number 2 seed, I’m sure the Colorado Tennis Association would gladly seed me in the next tournament. Likewise, search engines start recognizing URLs when other prominent (seeded) sites point to you.
The lesson here is that “talk is cheap” in both sports and web search. I plan to continue my quest for Colorado tennis stardom, but in the meantime we’ll plan to get as many valuable links (from seeded websites) to Viewmark as possible.
