Compuvision

Google's PageRank algorithm was a revolutionary improvement in determining the relative importance of pages on the internet.  The simple description of PageRank is the more sites that link to your site, then the more important your site's pages are considered to be.  I lack a nice, polite word to describe this site, but it is really my site, describing me as I wish to be described, limited only by my own web development skills.  If I were a public figure, then the unofficial sites might be better sources of real information about me, but I'm not, so this is the best there is.  Even so, a Google search for "Steven Kovitz" will link to a number of sites before this one.  The mentions of me in Wikipedia are good, but the link to WhitePages.com is almost useless and the Steven Kovitz listed on a Classmates.com-type site isn't me.  Why does this happen?  Because those three sites are generally considered more important than this one.  What would happen if I put content on FaceBook, LinkedIn or Twitter?  Then those pages would come up before this one.  This one might even get pushed to the second page of Google results.  If I liked fitting into the standard templates of those other sites, that would be fine, but I want to retain control of how I am presenting myself.  I'm using Weebly to produce this site because it gives me a lot of flexibility, without sacrificing ease-of-use.  It's not a mindless, fill in the blank(s) type system, but it's not DreamWeaver either.  This site could look a lot better if I simply put in the extra effort into making it better.  If I have even more time, then I could look into better Content Management Systems.  Right now, the quality of this presentation of myself is limited by my own time and effort.  If I decided to use Twitter, I would have no control over it's limitations and it would always rank higher than this site in search results.

I hope that this is obvious to anyone reading this, but this is a pretty serious flaw in Google PageRank!  They need to modify their algorithm to take into account how many other sites link to the exact page that they are trying to take you to, rather than the site that they are trying to take you to.  They also need to give higher weighting to hand-generated content over canned templates.  This is why, when you search for information about a specific, hard-to-find product, most of the first ten results are links to "holding pages" at shopping search engines (shopping.com, eBay and downhill from there) rather than links to real information about the product itself or real places where you can buy the product.  i.e. a boilerplate page on a high-traffic site is considered more relevant than an actual page on an obscure product fan site or a listing of the product for sale on an obscure site from a small business that may still have hundreds of leftover units of the product that you are looking for.