Google Sidewiki Comment Links With An Attitude

Google Sidewiki Comments

Truth be told, Google Sidewiki is MORE THAN just a commenting system. It is a system for annotating pages across the web and is envisioned to become a community where experts can offer/share their expert opinions and high quality comments.

Launched on September 23, 2009, the Google Sidewiki enables people, or more specifically those who have the Google Toolbar installed on their IE or Firefox web browsers, to make and share comments about websites and web pages with other people, particularly those who also have the toolbar installed on their browsers. The Google Sidewiki comes in the form of a browser sidebar which, when expanded, shows comments as well as blog posts that Google has deemed appropriate and/or related to a particular web page.

Yes, you read that right. Although Google Sidewiki enables anyone and everyone to leave their comments on the websites they visit, not all their comments get displayed. Who’s In, Who’s not? So, which comments get displayed and which do not?

Well, Google has yet to release an official and clear-cut guide/statement regarding the factors involved in determining which comments will end up on the Google Sidewiki. What Google did say is that Google Sidewiki uses multiple signals based on the quality of the comments, the authors’ reputations, as well as user-contributed signals (i.e., voting and flagging) in determining which comments get displayed and in which order. This selection process, according to Google, ensures that only the highest quality and relevant entries will appear in the Sidewiki.

So, how does Google gauge a comment’s quality? Determining a comment’s quality is generally based on the language used. Note that “language” here does not pertain to the various languages of nations and people but rather it pertains to how the comments/entries are composed/constructed. It looks like Google has in its disposal a language sophistication detector of some sort that can gauge the degree of sophistication of statement constructions in 14 different languages. And, apparently, Sidewiki gives more weight/credit to entries that use sophisticated language. To illustrate, “This page sucks!” and “This site rulez!” are not considered as sophisticated languages.
With regards to author reputation, Google takes into account the consensus about a particular entry based on the votes and flags given to it by other users.

In addition, Google also takes into consideration how long a particular author/user has had a Google Profile and how long he/she has been commenting. Google Profile We may not see it, but Google ranks profiles just as it does web pages, as far as Sidewiki is concerned. Simply put, people who has higher profile ranks have better chances of having their comments appear on Sidewiki. Unfortunately, there is very little information available on the topic of how to “improve” one’s profile rank.

According to Google, there are no hard-and-fast rules (yet) on how to improve one’s profile rank as they expect the system’s ranking criteria to change (still) over time. Generally, for now, Google ranks profiles on the basis of what Google feels or considers to be “comprehensive”. In other words, the more comprehensive a profile is, the higher it is ranked. Page/Site Owner Comments

On Sidewiki, site/page owners are given the privilege to claim the first comment slot for himself/herself. But before a site owner can do that, he/she must first verify his/her ownership of a site through Google Webmaster Central. Once ownership has been verified, a site owner will see a notice on Sidewiki saying:

“As the page owner, you can write a special entry that will remain the top entry for this page.” right under which is a tick box labeled “Write as the page owner”. All a site/page owner has to do is to click on the tickbox and submit his/her comment. No matter if there are already some existing user comments on Sidewiki on his site/page, the site owner’s

However, this privilege is only given once, for one comment/entry only. If a site owner were to make another comment, that comment will already be subjected to the selection/ranking process that comments from other users go through.

Embeded Links in Comments Google Sidewiki allows links to be embeded in user comments by using HTML code. In addition, it also allows the embeding of YouTube links into comments which is not entirely surprising considering YouTube is under Google’s corporate umbrella. By the way, embeding a YouTube link into a comment generates a video embed frame in the comment. How cool is that? Anyway, links posted on Sidewiki are given the “nofollow” attribute.

As such, the links on Sidewiki have no bearing or effect whatsoever on the linked page’s PageRank. In the Beginning There Were Blog Entries As can be expected of anything that’s fresh and brand new, Google Sidewiki has yet to be filled with a considerable amount of user entries. But, instead of leaving it blank while waiting for entries to come in, Google is currently using blog posts to fill up the void.

According to Google, the algorithm they currently use in determining which blog entries will appear on Sidewiki is the same one they use in ranking user entries. But, in general, Google selects and ranks blog entries based on their relevance to a particular URL. In addition, sites that serve out full text feeds of their stories have greater chances of having their articles/entries displayed on Sidewiki as compared to those that do not. Furthermore, articles that have high user feedback scores are ranked higher than those that have lower scores.

First, you need to install the Google Toolbar. If you haven’t done yet or if yours is an earlier version (one that does not have Sidewiki yet), go to http://www.google.com/sidewiki/intl/en/index.html and click on the button labeled Install Google Toolbar with Sidewiki.

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