How do Librarians Assess Website Quality?
Via Gary the second issue of Google's Newsletter for Librarians was released.
In A Librarian's Guide to Finding Web Sites You Can Trust Karen G. Schneider, the Director of Librarians' Internet Index, wrote about what she looks at in deciding weather or not a resource is trustworthy.
The main criteria are:
- Availability (reliable hosting and free information)
- Credibility
- Authorship
- Link Rot
- Legality
With this site I have not got much love from the librarian community. Likely largely because of the following:
- bad spelling
- going way off topic
- sometimes expressing opinion that may be taken as fact
- focusing on a topic that is generally hated (SEO) contained within a link rich loved topic (search)
- selling a marketing ebook at a fairly high price point
- having no credentials (in part because there really are none in this industry - though I should make an about page!)
You don't have to have the love from librarians to succeed on the WWW, but if you are in a field where competing channels do it is going to be an uphill battle unless you focus on a niche or get lots of link love and attention love from people within your industry.
It is really worth looking at how librarians review websites, because if you fit their guidelines it should also be easy to get many other links. If Google is sending out a message to 20,000 librarians then maybe they will use that information, and maybe Google likes many of the same things that the librarians do.
One curious question remains: how can Google not use a page title on their newsletter for librarians?
Comments
Your site is so informative, i like ur site very much. thanks for your information.
I assume that was supposed to say "assess" rather than "asses" ? :)
Did you look at the page before you made that comment? Or am I being uber tired and missing something?
I think that was wrong and corrected almost immediately...like an hour ago.
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