Google’s speedy indexing of pages not always a good thing

(For those of you who are not Realtors or bloggers associated with real estate – the general theme of this discussion is freedom of speech, governmental intervention, property taxes and assessments and blogs. If you care to catch up, you can start here.)

Especially if your name is “Todd Kaufman.” Read this story:

Google paid a big price when it started to index pages faster and show them in the search results minutes after they’re published. The problem is that you can’t rank a page that has just been created because it has no backlinks so Google artificially inflates the rankings of the recently-created pages based on historical data and the few backlinks that are detected.

And this one (no longer available):

And to think…all you had to do was comment on this blogger / REALTOR’s post and you could have actually ENHANCED your online reputation. Now you did it in REVERSE.

And these two comments –

From Jay (no longer available):

No kidding. Google stuffed this post into the #2 spot for that search (Todd Kaufman assessor) – 11 minutes after I posted it…

From Merv:

The public wants transparency in this industry that has been missing since dirt. Real estate Bloggers are bringing transparency and consumers love it.

The unnamed government official is making a name for himself that he really doesn’t want (actually, his name is all over the planet).

… This is going to be a watershed debate.

This all hit the proverbial fan on 29 December; Jay has a great recap (no longer available).

English posts via Technorati, a blog search engine, that contain “todd Kaufman” per day for the last 30 days.

I wonder when there will be either true main stream media coverage or an official response.

Update 2 January 2007: Seth Godin has a timely post (for the assessor and us all) – The first thing to do this year – Google yourself.