Links to additional articles

Is it a coincidence that all those links provide PageRank for your site?

All of the articles published (at least until the time of my grand-parent comment here) -- including the one by TheRegister linked to by LWN itself -- resulted from my flagging the verdict to journalists. If you want to check, you can see that even TheRegister links to the Scribd.com page to which I uploaded the verdict form. Since I use Scribd.com to publish many documents (such as smartphone battlemaps), you might say I got "[SEO] juice" for my Scribd stuff from TheRegister.

While Google's algorithm isn't known, it's a safe assumption that for optimizing "juice" it would have made more sense for me to place a direct link to my blog here. The indirect effect of LWN linking to sites like CNET or NetworkWorld (who in turn link to me) is probably small. It may simply converge to or equal zero, depending on how the unknown ranking algorithm works, simply because those sites already have countless backlinks and, as a result, a very high rank.

In other words, this was a gratuitous attack on me. I drew attention to this verdict, which actually resulted in Google making a pretty good statement (though it unfortunately stops short of advocating the abolition of software patents).