An open question about Search.
Well, it seems as if Facebook wants to own the web. But this blog post is not about Facebook or their plans. In reading the news item regarding their plans, however, Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook's founder, made a comment that web pages linking to each other was a good model, but that more is needed.
I have often contemplated the idea of using links to rank web pages in the search results. No doubt it was a great idea, and still has a large degree of merit. But like any other great idea, once it's discovered that there's money to be made, us savvy business folks get busy making sure we swing the votes in our direction. That is, we get more links to outrank the competition.
That, of course, means that what you're seeing on page one of the search results is often (even usually) the result of businesspersons' efforts, not Google's ideal of pages that were "voted" there by other webmasters.
Maybe that's the way it should be. Maybe who's on top should be the result of who puts the most effort into making sure they're on top. After all, as I've stated in a previous post, just having a great product is not -- and should not be -- enough to make you successful. You have to get the word out. Right now, with Search, that means getting more links.
Of course, the idea of a democratic web is appealing. If a majority of folks believe Site A is the best, then Site A ranking number one is probably a good thing for most people. If Site B is liked by another large share of folks, then it being number two makes sense, and so on. But that's not what any of the major search engines' results look like right now for most queries.
Honestly, though, with all the time, thought and energy I've put into trying to discover a ranking "property" that cannot be so easily manipulated, I haven't been able to. Today, the ranking "property" that wins the game (especially in Google) is links. But links can be manipulated. Maybe "manipulated" is the wrong word. Maybe, as I stated earlier, it's right and good that those of us who put more effort into our rankings should be number one. So perhaps I should say that links can be "engineered"?
The problem, of course, is that it's just as easy (or hard) to rank a mediocre site as it is to rank a great one -- especially in small niche markets that don't get a lot of attention from human reviewers. It's those spammy results that I believe fuel the SEO Puritans belief that any "artificially" acquired link is "black hat", or morally wrong. I, of course, completely disagree with that assertion, but I can at least see that side's point of view.
Since I've failed completely to come up with any great idea on my own, I thought I would put the question to you -- my readers. Do you have a better idea about how search should work? Some understanding about what's wrong with the way it's being done now? Or is everything right in the world of Search, and should it stay that way?
After all, before Google came along, links were not a part of the search equation at all. After Google discovered that links were a great way to rank sites, now all search engines use links as a major part of their ranking equation.
So, dear reader, what do you think is the next "big thing" in Search?
Please post your thoughts in a comment below.
Enjoy this article?
August 23rd, 2010 - 01:35
I think Backlinks will eventually lose their importance as time goes by. Google and others will still place value on them, but I think there will be other variables they will place more emphasis on.
August 23rd, 2010 - 01:21
Jonathan,
Great Post. I think eventually Google will place less importance on Backlinks. It will NEVER totally be out of the equation but there is too much manipulation. And Google seems to be getting tired of it.
But I am with you as far as the person who works the hardest should be No.1 !! I just dont think Google sees it that way.
They are too concerned for the relevance to their End Users !!
Robert Andrew
August 23rd, 2010 - 01:07
Jonathan,
Great Post. Although I might disagree a little with you on the assertion that the person who works the hardest should be number one. To me thats irrelevant because in the end Google wants the Sites most relevant to their end users. Thats bottom line.
But I do agree with you in that a person who works hard should be rewarded. I just dont think Google would agree with you !!
Robert Andrew
May 12th, 2010 - 00:57
Searching results are the output of your SEO work. If you will get higher ranking in searching it means you have done well.
May 11th, 2010 - 13:11
Believe you me, I am all for human editors to help in ranking sites. Why not? That was why the DMOZ project was so popular… but it somehow fell out with google. Zuckerberg is on to an idea, but am not sure he’s clear about how to go about it!
May 9th, 2010 - 15:59
There is no perfect system that can be put into place to ensure that the most relevant websites always rank highly in Google. The only way to do that would be to base it on pure content, but in my opinion that would still not ensure quality, it would just mean that only websites with hundreds of pages on content could rank high.
More often than not, readers are not going to sift through hundreds of pages of content, which is why simple websites with a few pages of relevant content should prevail.
Is the current emphasis being placed on link building perfect? Probably not. However, it is what it is and all in all I think it is a pretty good system.
April 30th, 2010 - 04:27
I agree with Brad
Personal ranking algorithms may be the way forward where the search engine learns what we think are relevant results. So everyone will get different search results.
There could be a large set of parameters such as size of site, ratio of images to text, informative/commercial, thin/dense content, new/old content etc.
Some new ways to present the search results are being made available too via the options link which presents the Wonder Wheel.
Andy
April 28th, 2010 - 14:16
I think what’s next for search is being able to determine what somebody really wants based on the search terms and giving it to them. In other words, being able to determine the INTENTION of the searcher. This is definitely an intangible and also an art.
Brad
April 25th, 2010 - 15:29
I think this post has let the thought of the people who own some of their space on the internet to be prepared for the next level that some top search engines is likely to adopt. But the main problem is what might be that next level. No one is sure of that.
April 25th, 2010 - 10:28
I may be missing something here, but why – oh why doesn’t Google use ‘time on site’ per visit (along with other metrics in an algorithm) as THE major part of their ranking equation?
…Because no matter how many or what “quality” links are pointing to the #1 site in a search result, for example, if visitors are leaving site #1 after staying less time than site #2, why is site #1 listed #1?
Visitor time on site would be very hard to manipulate; unique IP addresses visiting a site for a recorded amount of time and compared to all other related sites, for example.
I know this is a simplistic example, but time on site is a helluva good indicator of how good a site is.
I’m sure the Phd’s at Google could work out the variables – like the amount of text and other potential ‘time-consuming content’ on site A as compared to site B, C, D, (along with other not-so-obvious variables that I can’t think of at the moment) in order to make the time-on-site ranking competition fair.
Any thoughts on this?
Chuck
April 25th, 2010 - 10:16
Bog “G”s algorithm is always a headache to all website owners or webmasters. We get informed that we need good links from similar sites to rank well and then we come across sites that just have a load of ads on which are not relevant to the search and they get high ranked than a site with good content, keywords and good backlinks….
It baffles me…..Perhaps its time for a change in direction and Facebook takes over the number 1 spot for ranking sites but not in the hands of Google though…
April 25th, 2010 - 07:10
Facebook is growing as a strong man and it is clearly a competitor of Google. I think google will buy over Facebook. else, google will need to fight the Facebook age.
April 24th, 2010 - 19:23
I have never liked the fact that getting the most links or most relevant links moves a site to the top. Ever simply clicked on page 30 or something? Some great sites with tremendous content and yet they are not ranked very high because they don’t know seo or how to get links or spend so much time putting out great content they have no time to play the search engine game.
The search engines want you to write content that benefits the readers yet they reward you because you toss in keywords and spend money to get links from PR7 sites.
The problem? I don’t have a solution. How can the search engines rank you by good content? I get tired of clicking on a site and going to a page full of links with no content.
April 24th, 2010 - 15:15
I don’t have the how, but I have the why; we all do. It’s about context and value. If I want to know about gardening – more specifically, how to plant a [whatever kind] tree, then what site or sites is best for finding out?
It’s the one that gives the best guidance. There could be dozens that answer that same question equally well.
How would a search engine algo determine this? I don’t think it can. I’d say for the first 1-3 pages of SERPs, the rankings should be human-driven.
Maybe it is “likes” on FB Plus RT on twitter plus…who knows?
Right now, the “results” we get when typing in a search term are so crappy that almost anything could be better.
Problem right now is everything is subject to “flavor of the day” – itis. Today, google. Tomorrow, Facebook. Next year, whatchamacallit.com (I made that up).
Sorry, not really helpful. It’s almost like there should be a mega (meta?) search site that reels in all the results from the major SEs and ranks those results based on other factors.
April 24th, 2010 - 07:20
This has been an interesting read.
I think links will live on, they do improve the results even if they can be manipulated.
I use a system myself where a link has to be valued at $1 or more to be counted, that’s someone paying domain registration and hosting fees and that cost distributed over the pages of a site. It does favor folks with money but it work better than not having the system in place.
Have anyone tested if Google looks at links inside of emails to gmail accounts?
Could be a good measure of popularity. If an email is unique (not part of mass mailing/autoresponder and from different senders) the taget site of the link would get a popularity point with weight to the topic of the email.
Of course this can be gamed like so much else….
Simon Byholm
CEO and founder,
Secret Search Engine Labs
April 24th, 2010 - 01:58
This topic has certainly generated some terrific content for this page Jon!
Ha ha. I am not sure what the solution is either, but when my non techie mates talk to me about SEO one of the misconceptions we discover most of all is that they think the more people that click on a search engine result the higher up the ranking their site goes.
So perhaps this would actually be a good thing to combine into the results, the way AdWords works, the more your link gets clicked the more it is ‘trusted’ as a relevant or attractive result for that search term.
some sort of randomiser could be combined withthe natural results so that the top ranked sites dont get top listings all the time so that other sites can get some of the traffic.
you could also infere how good a site is by looking to see if the same person comes back and clicks on somehting else after a click, and how long it is between the two clicks, suggesting the first click did not find relevant content if it came straight back and made a second click.
obviously, the google gods could be really naughty and if a site has analytics installed, get a ton nore infdormation about the traffic after it has left google and what happens to it when it get to your site, even tracking conversions pehaps, but i am sure there are all sorts of privacy issues with that!
thanks though Jon for stimulating content, please don’t stop doing what you are doing, but if you know how to help my 60+ exact match domain name adsense 1way links websites make more than £200 a month i’m very interested to hear about it because I’m 40 this month and done working for a living!
Bests
Rog
April 24th, 2010 - 01:20
The SEO industry is still very young and right now I think we have not reach the peak yet, so we can expect radical changes in the future on how a search engine will determine who should fall on number one spot.
I think in the future keyword relevancy would play a bigger role as well as the links in every page.
That is why it is really important to keep reading and experimenting on different approach in terms of optimization.
April 23rd, 2010 - 21:33
Walt:
Some very interesting concepts you’ve put out there in your comments. Lots of food for thought.
You’re right — it’s the intent of the link that SEs fail to determine. And most of the real “votes” are hidden behind private walls like email or private messages at forums, etc.
Great comments.
April 23rd, 2010 - 17:32
I dunno. I suppose the only true gauge of a site’s value truly is user experience as measured *after* a visit to the site. Additionally, revisiting the same site should count for something.
I believe that was the original concept behind counting links as “votes”. Word of mouth. If someone likes your site they are invariably going to tell someone else about it, which Google (and others) decided would be a good way to determine your sites “true” value. The preferred forum for this has shifted from what might have been personal sites to the social networks, but they can be manipulated as easily as anything else.
The place where this “vote” is actually taking place has never been measured – the area of personal communications (email, IM, microblogging, text messages, etc). That is where the “true” word of mouth referrals take place – when someone has no vested interest. It is also (mostly) private, which automatically takes it out of the mix.
I suppose – long shot – if there was a way to determine the linker’s true intentions (“Hey, Joe, check this site out. I found a really great [whatever] there…”) as opposed to just analyzing and indexing anchor text (which would be the death of us all
), there might be an answer.
I guess that’s where the search engines really fail. They are unable to determine the *intent* of a link when they encounter it.
Maybe – and this is absolutely blue sky – if the history of an IP could be associated with a link…. In other words, if that IP has actually visited a site and then links to it, then the link is counted. If the IP has never visited the site, the link is disallowed (bye bye linking networks
). However, the infrastructure required to do that would be mind boggling (can you say exabyte?)
April 23rd, 2010 - 16:36
No matter what you do, some smart alec will dream up a way to ‘engineer’ the rankings and sell that for $xxxxxx.xxx.
Social sites will rule solely eventually….these places are where real people dwell. A small population do look for merchandise to purchase but the majority seek other people to interact with and happen upon advertising…the meat that drives those seeking to make $$$…(hint) Big G. Google is $$$ driven and they know the value of social sites hence You Tube acquisition and Google wave.
then that gets ‘engineered’……..on and on it goes…
If they can’t be beat…Join ‘em
April 23rd, 2010 - 11:57
Hello Jon, you just sparked another fire of discussion with your post.
Good Job!
How does Google know what I really want or what sites I like better?
Now I think this is what Google was thinking about when they started the personalized search option. I’m not a big fan of it and I made sure I turned it off but it at least would explain why. If I look up 10 times for something similar and check out a few websites then I do not want get the same results over and over again if I look for something that is only spelled similar or because it just might come close to my search history google has collected about me.
Internet users are not that limited in their use of the www.
Now what concerns a large amount of backlinks or lots of quality (and most likely very expensive) backlinks Google requires for a good ranking, doesn’t mean it makes a site a better site and that site offers exactly what I’m looking for.
But it surely opened the door for all those people they take advantage of this backlink hysteric era and try to sell links left and right. And this even Google itself does not recommend to buy links and could even penalize a site for buying links. Every PR1 site owner is scared the hell to link out because it might cause losing a little bit of the PR1 “strenght” and every PR6+ site owner hopes to become millionair by selling links because quality backlinks from authority sites are so important to rank in Google’s SERP’s. Google becomes more and more commercialized and it is harder and harder for the smaller companies and not so wealthy site owners to rank competitive.
But maybe that is what Google wants. The more expensive they can sell their adwords.
Also I would like to agree with Rick Hendershot who says certain things you just can’t use Google Search for. I haven’t found any really good search engine yet that would provide me with search results for what sometimes I am looking for, very similar to Rick Hendershot’s experience with Big Google.
Google changes their rules and algorithm on a regular basis. (I guess so the all the SEO guys won’t get jobless LOL) But IMHO, with all those changes they make, they don’t improve the quality they would like to provide and for sure not for the benefit of site owners for their sites to be found easier without they have to pay a lot of money or to have thousands of backlinks from sites Google thinks they are authority sites. Google’s own “rules” have caused it is harder and harder to still get a backlink from those sites.
I am almost about done trying to optimize for Google, since the traffic coming from Google anyway has a much higher bounce rate than any other traffic I have to my site from other sources. I am looking more into getting real targeted traffic from people they are willing to buy and not just to check out a site for fun.
If Google ever wants to send me more traffic, that’s fine with me but I won’t get more gray hair about trying so hard to please them.
For the normal and less SEO experienced dude like me, it is anyway almost impossible to compete on Google’s Serp’s.
April 23rd, 2010 - 11:40
I’m so glad to read this post – I was just writing related articles for my local newspaper column and the one I’m writing TODAY is about hiring an SEO company.
SO yes, it’s about “links” right now – and finding ways to get those links that won’t get you into trouble – but your comment “it’s just as easy (or hard) to rank a mediocre site as it is to rank a great one” really struck me.
It’s really not about clicks – it’s about relevance and effectiveness – about sales, in one way. Maybe there could be some correlation between conversion ratios monitored in Google Analytics – I’d see some sense in that, anyway.
Thanks, will go back now to reading more answers!
Diana
April 23rd, 2010 - 10:16
Linking is a popularity game the same as social networking. It’s a part of the game that the search engines want us to play. The human visitor is the actual deciding factor based on how long they stay on a site, return or what action is taken, something I call (visitor validated response). I think this information tells the search engines yes this is a site that provides the content that the search engines want to deliver. A prime example, I own a site which is rich in unique content, targeted visitors stay an average of six minutes or more soaking in knowledge. Being a new site (2 months old) I have very few links but my traffic is steadily growing. If we only had a glass ball that told us the answers.
April 23rd, 2010 - 09:42
Well Jon this is a question I’ve thought for a while myself,
The main problem with Google is that it wants to be everything to everybody… a recipe for disaster.
For instance, Google assumes now that local results are more relevant to me than international sites… is it? what if I’m researching for a solution anywhere in the world? they just reduced my options!
?, a vacation resort where you can see mammoths??
Type a “hard to guess” word like “mammoth travel” and you’ll see Google sweat it, are you looking for a travel agency called “mammoth”? are you traveling to a place called “mammoth”? are you interested in how mammoths traveled
This is probably a dumb example, but I just want to make a point, wikipedia does it, it offers a disambiguation page first to know exactly what YOU want.
The future of search will have different flavors, specialized searches for different needs. A specialized search for health, another for fashion, one for local news, other for brands etc.
The main problem comes from the search itself. The idea of just typing a few words and hoping to get the EXACT information you want is unrealistic.
The search engine should ask a number of question to produce a better result, but if they keep “guessing” they will always get it wrong. My wife surfed on my computer the other day and wondered why, while she was in a fashion site, all the adds (the site had google adwords) were related to Internet marketing… well, that’s Google guessing again.
If there are several ranking recipes out there, it will be harder for people to manipulate them, but as long as there is only one major player, it will be too tempting to optimize just for those rankings.
Let’s say one search engine counts incoming links a certain way, another has a different algorithm, a third one does not even include links but weigh site content, another one looks at social popularity, another at the site’s authority and yet another at the author’s prestige (this are all just wacky ideas)
but if they all owned a 10-20% of the web’s search traffic, it would make it harder or cost effective to develop a ranking strategy for all.
April 23rd, 2010 - 09:32
This is a hard question. However since the web is about access to information I can understand the more inbound links a web page has the higher it should be ranked in search engines results: those links are not just “votes” but also doorways to information access.
But as we all know links can be manipulated and we all do that with some degree of shade between white and black hat SEO: heck we are not perfect so why should any human endeavor be perfect then?
In my opinion however the best measure of a site/web page quality as related to a given search phrase in the Search Engines is the bounce rate. It’s harder to manipulate. Most web sites has Google Analytics installed these days and Google can use those metrics (if it hasn’t done so already) to measure the quality of website/ web page.
The more time a person spends in a web site the more probable that website has what s/he is looking for. I said “probable” because sometimes you are looking for one thing then another thing shows up. You get distracted and end up focusing on that new thing.
However this scenario can also reflect that the site has some interesting stuff the visitor did not think about at the beginning of his/her search: it’s a new discovery.
So the time spent on a website should be used a rating factor for that website because time is the most precious commodity we mortals have.
April 23rd, 2010 - 09:30
people presume Google is honest…
honest in their count of clicks, ranking, link count.
tests have proven me they are not, sorry
THEY ARE NOT you read that right.
-ad clicks
lets not even count paying adsense clicks but only the views,
my counter and their counters are sooo out of balance.
There is also some wall you bang agains if you complain.
resistance is futile we are The Google we don’t answer.
-indexed pages
My blog has 900 indexed pages from Google
and 6000 from Yahoo
1.7 % indexed by Google and 80% by Yahoo from 8000 posts.
MSN/Bing has a lot of indexed pages too 5200
I used to work with copernicus, a software that aggregated speciality searchengines with some neural A.I. contextuall wizard
giving bias weight.
Jonathan about
Future search
- local
- opinion from friends
- mobile
SEO Themelis Cuiper
Social Media – market analyst
April 23rd, 2010 - 09:27
Fresh Content, Quality Content, Good Products!
I think that (William on April 22nd, 2010 12:53 pm ) is right on the mark.
Cept’n one thing. If you are the author of your content, then the spinning of that content, for marketing purposes, can reduce effects of duplicate content in search engines. This is a viable and totally straight up venture. The search engines have promulgated this issue, themselves.
Other than that, success in an online business, like all markets that are maturing, is a function of being in the right place at the right time, and doing a good job with the tools that are available.
-As to the amount of time a user is on the site, and its effect on Google Ranking, is spurious. It can and will, negatively compound an already lacking search result system.
I thought about expanding upon this point, but I do believe I will write an article on it instead. So fill in some blanks and think about how, this, in fact, could be the case!
April 23rd, 2010 - 08:27
Hi, Jonathan,
Successful Internet Marketers such as Yourself are Brilliant. Your creativity and innovations make cyberspace a revealing mirror of human motivation and behavior. I’m very grateful for the marvelous Gift of our Internet, it’s characters, algorithms, analytics, sciences, developments and evolutions, etc. How else could I better enjoy the profound Freedom of Solitude in Limitless Universe, while still remaining comfortably ‘connected’ with the mindless masses; present company excepted from the latter, of course.
Maybe ‘search’ is evolving as it should. Could it
somehow learn to discern Intention? It seems
to currently encourage too much of the same
behavior, expecting different results.
What is That? Eh?
Thanks for asking.
Sincerely,
Norm Abbott
April 23rd, 2010 - 06:47
Hi Jon,
Two things about this discussion bias the responses towards a certain (fairly predictable) type of answer. First the question seems to be assuming that search engines (“search”) will continue to be the major driver of traffic.
Second, most of the people (like me) responding have a vested interest in gaming the search system because they are involved in fairly narrow forms of internet marketing.
Internet marketers have become so inundated with strategies for manipulating Google – so SEO/SEM-focused – that they have a difficult time imagining the relevance to their business of anything other than “what is the best way to manipulate Google”.
It is much more interesting (and forward looking) to reflect on the way people actually spend their time online. I think we have seen a significant maturing of the web where large, specialized, information-intensive sites are developing their own “brands” and do not rely on the Googles of the world to be their primary source of traffic.
I know Facebook users, for example, who almost never use Google.
Yesterday when I was searching for a used lawn tractor I went immediately to Kijiji and then to YellowPages. Searching in Google for this kind of information brings up all kinds of outdated and irrelevant listings, as well as the usual garbage Adwords sites created by the search engine gamers.
If I want information about the forced migration of the Cherokees in the 1830s I start with Wikipeidia.
If I want information about trends in mortgage rates I go to Yahoo Finance or the Wall Street Journal.
Searching on Google for these things is pretty much a waste of time. As far as I am concerned the more important question here is “How can I get useful traffic to my site(s)?” And increasingly, finding better ways to manipulate Google is not the answer.
April 23rd, 2010 - 03:44
I’ve often considered this point and have asked myself just how search is going to develop in the future. I agree with your point about ‘manipulation’ especially in niche markets. However, at the other end of the scale it actually works quite well as the number of ‘manipulators’ is less.
One factor that webmasters can’t control is the length of time spent of a site. I can see things moving in a direction where Google uses stats related to the amount of time spent on a site. It can already measure bounce rate (see Google analytics). By using time, you know that the user has probably found content that they like. This approach would less prioritise spammy sites where the content value is poor or minimal.
April 23rd, 2010 - 02:03
I don’t think Google gives a stuff about the number of links you have, Google is only interested in it’s own affairs by generating it’s own income.
On one of my sites I did the everything the way it should be done, write articles, bookmark, etc, etc but did I get decent ranking because of this? No.
Why? Because the Google rewards sites with decent rank according to the amount of quality content that is added on either a weekly or daily basis.
I believe that over the past few months Google has changed how it ranks sites.
I don’t think the old methods have died but think we should change and evolve the way Google has and always be on the lookout for new methods.
April 22nd, 2010 - 23:39
hi..i am not technical & hence cannot comment on links, adwords, etc..& all the above discussions on what search engines companies would/should do – i agree that content should be the most important factor..but while all this development is happening from the companies – what is actually a bigger problem is “HOW DO YOU SEARCH” – how do you make the user search well – content, key words etc assist the seller – we don’t know the key words – we don’t know the “RIGHT” words to key in to get an accurate search result..
So i guess the next big thing for search engines should be to help the user more than the advertiser…anand
April 22nd, 2010 - 23:30
Hello Jonathan,
Leaving a comment so you would know I do read your emails.
That is the one concept I have as yet to understand! Although I have managed to get 1st page 10th slot on Google Search with my Affiliates Promotions. lol Another Great reason to join it! (Marketer’s never miss a shot at a plug.) forgive me =)
But other than key words IDK.
April 22nd, 2010 - 23:26
I’d like to say that Google has already starting discounting backlinks. I don’t have any proof of this other than I follow some of the spam links I get on my blogs, and surprisingly, a lot of these sites have tons of backlinks and are nowhere to be found in the SERPS.
Today I got a spam comment from someone touting findfreetrial.com
This site has 10,600 inlinks but is not on the first 3 pages for “free trial” (quotes or no quotes) on Google.
There is a lot more than just backlinks involved in getting good rankings. Recently I bought a keyword based domain, threw up a blog, put an affiliate RSS feed. Just 1 post, and left it there to work on other stuff. A few weeks later, I check and it’s ranked #1 for it’s keyword with 2 million plus results.
I think relevant domain and “fresh” content can often trump backlinks.
Got to go, got to get some more backlinks.
April 22nd, 2010 - 22:49
Maybe the web will go full circle into a human directory – though the economics will not work for less traffic keyword terms. I think a social component will play a part – Google already has a way to mark whether you like a site in their search results. I dont think they will adopt Facebook, but implement their own system.
April 22nd, 2010 - 22:48
I made a website about seven months ago. It was my first attempt, and it is just butt ugly. It has adsense on it, amazon links, and I even threw in a cpa banner. But it was in position one on google, for the keyword “black picture frames” for about four months. Now I have slipped to position eight on page one, and could probably get back to position one with a little effort.
The site that is now in position one is more ugly than mine. This keyword has 14,600,000 websites, broad match. What is google looking at, to put either of us on the front page?
I have done practically nothing for linking, and they can’t be happy with my site. I have several sites like this, that I can’t explain.
Then I have a few sites that are done to perfection, and I can’t get them past page 10. I don’t think we will ever truly figure out google’s methods.
April 22nd, 2010 - 22:43
Something very simple in the browser – maybe just “thumbs up” and “thumbs down”. When visitors some to a site, they can quickly rate it. Over time these ratings would accumulate and provide a human “eyeball” rating. I don’t know if this could be protected against abuse, but if so, it would provide a valuable addition on onsite SEO and link building.
April 22nd, 2010 - 22:34
According to Randfish, as of this moment it is still unclear as to where link building is going next, but it seems that we’re in a world now where real-time, social, and traditional web references are all playing a role in the rankings equation. Because of this, link building MAY eventually become less about links and more about brand building and participation.
April 22nd, 2010 - 22:17
Well, I think one thing that would be important is to not use the same formula for every website.
Take for example a blog verses a static website. The blog is perceived to be “better” if it has content that changes often. On the other hand, an archive site should not have a screen shot of a page as it was on 12-1-05 ever change. History is history.
That is just a simple example of the kind of concepts that could point to manipulation (or “engineering” if you prefer that term as Jonathan mentioned).
April 22nd, 2010 - 22:16
There is not a single aspect of SEO that cannot be manipulated.Lets say you buy an aged domain and promote your page.Isn’t that manipulation as well ? Or how about getting getting diggs ?
April 22nd, 2010 - 21:59
I think the way people search for information is quickly evolving and in some ways overshadowing the typical keyword-based method. Web surfers are looking for immediate interaction to solve their problems. This is why Yahoo Answers has become so hot and why even dinosaur interactive sites such as forums are more popular than ever.
Case in point, if I write and submit an article to Ezine Articles targeting a specific keyword in the title, I may make the first page of Google for that keyword, However, when other articles are submitted to Ezine Articles using this same keyword, my article is likely to get crowded out over time, dropping off page one.
Believe it or not, the articles I have with the most views and that remain on Google’s first page are those which include titles I wrote based not on keywords, but rather on common questions or statements I read on forums or Yahoo Answers. If you run these article titles through a keyword research tool, they usually display little to zero monthly searches.
April 22nd, 2010 - 21:55
Interesting… I think.
When I first started assaulting the net some three years ago I eagerly bought into the sucker stuff. I blindly jumped into the PPC adword thing, not realizing that the sites at the top of Google’s page one had outbid me by three to four hundred percent.
That’s a lot of bait to throw at a market but who cares if it brings in masses of targeted traffic, the click thru and CR are acceptable? Lesson learned: Big money pulls in big money… if you know what you are doing.
I believe in massive baiting using automated publishing tools.
I also believe in the theory of ‘Bottom Feeding’.
For me, nuts to Google and all their whelps!
My business model is simple if not very easy, but, I have CllickBank, a source of really good potential niche markets, and a good article writer. I don’t need to be clever, just persistent and focused.
Why am I not filthy rich yet? The one element I lack is uninterupted time; time to publish articles, manage my list building and all the other tiresome but necessary chores linked to this business.
Why don’t I have the time? Fair question and for those of you who would care, I am sole provider of a little lady of seventy six summers who is drifting slowly, like a melting glacier, towards the total anihilation of Alzheimer’s Syndrome.
Now if any of you ladies and gentlemen out there think I have got off onto the wrong track… feel free to drop me a note telling me how to do it better. I mean that. I am arrogant, to be sure, but I have learned a lot from criticism.
My goal is to make enough cash to give her a dignified passage on this long journey home.
Best regards on your journey…
Sam I Am
PATHFINDERS 2010
April 22nd, 2010 - 21:12
I’d like to see Google “hanging” sites that get a lot of backlinks in a short amount of time. They should use some kind of a realistic time frame where x-amount of links can be expected to appear within that time.
Next, I’m not sure if Google is doing this now, but it would be great if they could make sure that what ever is being linked is relevant. An example: Some one writes an article on acacia with an anchor link to “training your dog to speak” or some other “non-relevant” material.
I’m just saying that the more relevant the links the more ‘value’ should be given them. There should be nothing wrong with writing on one topic with an anchor link to another topic website…they just should have a lower ‘relevance value’.
Apologies if this has been posted. Kind of in a hurry an didn’t have time to read all 66+ comments
April 22nd, 2010 - 21:05
When I am doing research I look at the major search engines and
integrate the nuggets.
Software that would do this for me would save a lot of time,
April 22nd, 2010 - 19:35
This is an extremely difficult question to answer honestly, mostly because the internet is different things to different folks.
However, I appreciate your enthusiasm for finding solutions to the questions that this raises.
April 22nd, 2010 - 18:34
im a beginner , im sure im not optimized at all. i have maybe 20 back links. but my website name gets me my traffic. i have no real links or content.
April 22nd, 2010 - 18:28
In the beginning…………in the days of the Wild West………
There is always the ability to look back, as long as it doesn’t get used to determine what lies ahead!
Having said that, and making it perfectly clear I would still be considered a rank novice compared to most of those whose responses I glossed over, the whole idea and appeal of the Net in the first place was because it was an equalizer!!!
Sure, money can always be dumped into something and results “engineered,” but that didn’t always work….in the beginning.
So now we have the issue where the playing field has been slanted in the direction of whoever can dump the most coin into advertising to produce links wins! Fair? Unfair? Depends on one’s definition.
It’s just like the political word used whenever change comes about at a huge cost to those it affects most. It’s called “progress.”
I don’t know if we have progress with the current ranking system but it seems like that’s where the rules are being made. Until such time as a greater “Force” comes on the scene to remove the “Godfatherly” status, and this amatuer has no clue what that is, we have what we have, and it is what it is.
It does say “speak your mind” and you did ask Jon! I’m afraid all you got was a feeling, and not much of anything towards a solution.
April 22nd, 2010 - 18:22
For me if you want to buy your links to get to the top of G then this is wrong as it is manipulating the best relevant results.
I think there should be more merit given on the content of a page. Also Google should change the way they look at aged domains as this seems to be a big factor in staying within the top 10. I cannot remember how many times I have typed a search on something topical that changes daily only to be served an old blog post that is 5 years out date as well as the information now being rendered useless.
April 22nd, 2010 - 18:13
Overall I think Mother Google has it pretty well….nailed down. Some pretty good thoughts and ideas in the previous posts. Albiet everything could be improved. I do have the ideas to make it a perfect search world, but rather than blab it around simply…..
send me a check for 100 million dollars and let you in on it!
Den
April 22nd, 2010 - 17:58
Ideally the search engine’s purpose is the “help” the visitor find what he or she is looking for. The fee paid for this service is “exposure” to advertising. It is puzzling to me why so many have the view that advertising or commercialization is evil. Perhaps those who have this view should be required to join a fee based search service and pay for their searches themselves. Wonder how far that would fly?
April 22nd, 2010 - 17:58
Jonathan L, asks “Links work pretty good at determining an overall value of a site. But is there something better?”.
Yes, I think my site is.
The web community has given way to much credibility to centralized search. When a search brings back results numbering in the billions what possible criteria could there be to differentiate site 500 million as “better” than 500 million and one? There aren’t even that many pixels on a screen.
There are no such criteria but the search engines have pulled off that deception that their list is, in fact, so precise that those billions of sites are, indeed, in order of their relevance. What a bunch of hogwash!
My site is a web directory. My major goal is to get the website into the most RELEVANT category. Sorting, categorizing, recategorizing (from better, more relevant sites joining) is a never ending and laborious undertaking. That’s where automated systems such as search engines have the advantage. Their limitations are there, however, and so their reliance on links which is nothing more than a pseudo set of human eyeballs inspecting a website for them – gratis.
To me, the key consideration isn’t whether search vs. directories is better but rather which gives a better Return On Investment (ROI) of one’s advertising spending. After all, discussing search without discussing Pay Per Click is looking only at part of the issue. PPC is what you are left with when a search brings back millions in your main keyword.
My system attempts to raise ROI by adding advertising income to a website in order to offset advertising expense. It is built on the idea that content is king and not search. Webmasters use many methods to get traffic to their websites and many of them are brick and mortar. My system provides a tool to “recycle’ that traffic that otherwise brings little or no return to a website owner.
April 22nd, 2010 - 17:58
If Google would not use the links factor, then in the SERP we would see garbage, irrelevant search queries sites. The owners of these sites do not invest a lot of money in the promotion of the site, and therefore do not appear in the top of Google … Who are they needed?
April 22nd, 2010 - 17:32
I read through most of the comments and I agree most with Brock. He said,
“The first piece of evidence is the recent update in google’s webmaster tools. They are now counting, and reporting the Click Through Rate on natural search results. Which tells me that a site with a high click through rate will outrank a site with a low click through rate, no matter how many backlinks it has.
Secondly, and this theory was shared with me by someone else, but that the motive behind google, firstly promoting firefox (with the google toolbar) then going so far as to develop chrome. Is all about giving google the ability to study user behavior.
So things like, how long people stay on a page, how many people bookmark it, how many click the back button etc etc will all become the metrics that google judges a web page by. (Along with all the current factors)
At the end of the day, google wants to give searchers what they want. So what better way to rank sites by, but by actual user interaction with the site.
Just my thoughts anyway.”
I think this is what will win in the end – human behavior. Natural looking organic linking, low bounce rate, high clickthrough from the search engines, length of time on the site… Why WOULDN’T this be the case?
April 22nd, 2010 - 17:25
I like best the notion of a reading committee and I doubt any kind of ‘democratic’ vote such as link or buzz can approach the quality of this judgement.
If you look over the last 200 years (or more) all good encyclopedia have been made that way.
Sure, a reading committee is not perfect. It is appointed unilaterally by the publisher and historically, we have examples of nasty judgments (think of the Nazis or soviet union for example). But over the long term, reading committees have prevailed.
Reading committees already exist. For example, a link from Sun, Oracle or IBM provides a 100% credibility factor to any page and gives an enormous boost in G. Pages one link apart keep perhaps only 50% credibility and so on.
My guess is that such as system is likely to prevail, especially if it’s well organized.
The main draw back might be the commercial limitations. Reading committees do not care much about buzz, but the public does and they are ready to buy. Let’s imagine Michael Jackson’s death reported only by a reading committee … Commercially, it would have been a disaster.
April 22nd, 2010 - 16:40
I don’t really like the fact that links are the biggest factor to site ranking but I don’t suppose it will change any time soon. I would like to see sites evaluated based on the quality of their own unique content and relevance to the website theme – so more LSI etc and less linking.
At present, you would be wiser spending your time on getting links, when really, for the good of the world wide web and quality standards, we should all be spending our time on improving our websites for visitors.
I think in time, the value of incoming links has to diminish.
April 22nd, 2010 - 16:21
As for rankings: original content, related site specific phrases, repeat traffic, time spent, and unique traffic bookmarking you while they are at your site, is a true representation of importance.
All other methods are advertising and marketing. But, thats what drives the internet.
Here is something to make you wonder about. I bought a new niche phrase domain name, two weeks later installed wordpress on it. Titled it by the niche domain name and subtitled it with another related keyword phrase. Nothing else, no content, no categories, nothing else, but added a stats plug in. Had to go out of town for 10 days. I came home and signed in to start working on it and it was already getting 5-10 hits per day, three days after setting it up. No content, I repeat, no content, and no links. Huh?
I then added 1 original article and traffic doubled. Its new, fresh, not promoted, not linked, but is being found. Must have picked the right phrases i guess. A good keyword + wordpress – content = traffic ? Teach that theory. LOL
April 22nd, 2010 - 16:12
I’ll be game and take a stab at what the future may hold
Can it be categories? After all Google has already started;
Images, videos, maps, news, shopping. The only real way to measure the quality of anything is to categorize and sub categorize it first…very complicated to do at the moment but who knows where technology will go.
April 22nd, 2010 - 16:05
Jon,
Great, thought-provoking post, as always.
I think the only way that you could rank SERPS without the system being easily gamed is to rank them based on the quality of the content.
This does, of course, raise the question of how you define quality, and can it be done algorithmically.
Additional factors might include how long people stay on your sit e(which could be gamed, I suppose) and backlinks from sites / directories that are known and trusted and only add sites based on human reviewers (not that I’d want that job).
I don’t think it should be based on size of site (after all, a simple one-page site may give you all the information you need to answer your question or solve your problem) or the site load speed (a site containing one lengthy video might have the best solution to your problem, but it may not load quickly).
It’s debatable too whether they should use on-page stuff that’s easily manipulated. Clearly, they need to analyse a page to see what it’s about, but should a site rank better just because of the Title tag when another site with a lousy (or missing) Title tag actually has more relevant content?
I guess no real answers here – just more questions.
Mark
April 22nd, 2010 - 15:54
Reading all these posts has got me thinking. I thought a nice way to rank sites would be time spent on them. But the point that this can be manipulated as well is so true.
Makes me wonder if google can apply any rule that cannot be manipulated. Probably not by the looks of things.
I guess we need more advanced technology to decipher the site’s content better.
April 22nd, 2010 - 15:54
Unfortunately there is no 100% way to ensure that high quality pages rank higher than those which are spammy in content or have nothing but crap on them with a sales pitch tapped on the end.
The rules can be changed to try and counter this, but the internet marketing love it when the rules. It starts a new round of software which promises to help influence your ranking ability by manipulating the rules and only at a low costs of $197 and buy now and get all these bonuses.
Take Facebooks new idea, I can gaurantee right now, someone is developing automated software where you can target fan pages/groups by specific keywords and phrases and automatically send friend requests. In return Facebook will probably change the rules, to many requests from one IP address will be deemed spam and the account closes so someone will come along and tap a proxy parserone.
To be honest I don’t think the Seach Engines would want to have a sure fire way to stop us from doing what we love, from trying to rank at the top of the search engines, if they did we wouldn’t be able to make money, in turn we wouldn’t build the hundreds of thousands if not millions of niche targetted websites we do today ensuring that there is always a healthy supply of new websites flitering the internet every year or spend the billions of dollars on advertising every year.
I would say it would be a case of “quid pro quo”, between the website designers and SE’s.
April 22nd, 2010 - 15:48
What’s wrong with the search engines? They never find me what I want! I don’t care about high rank, (at least not at first) I just care about finding what I want. Once I have found what I am looking for THEN, I will be interested in how reliable the site or seller looks and in maybe comparing sites or products.
I HATE searching for something and not finding anything of any use. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a product or a place or a service, or even an academic article. Some of those comparison shopping sites really turn me off. You search for blue widgets and everything BUT comes up. The sites appear to be trying to sell you whatever they have got, never mind what you are looking for! I no longer even look at comparison shopping sites – I don’t believe them or trust them. Even when they come up with the product you are looking for, the pages you click on don’t have it, or you can’t find it easily. That really turns me off. I don’t use ebay an awful lot, but when I do, I generally find what I am looking for, or a straight forward, “sorry we haven’t got one of those”. That’s good. Now, those items on ebay don’t have any back links, so how do I find them? They have been indexed by the sellers and I compare the sellers or prices AFTER I have found my item. Some of the items have marketplace adverts below the ebay items and those are useful too because they also are indexed by what they sell, so I am STILL being given results in an area in which I as the BUYER have expressed interest.
If the seller’s page or item description is good, I might well browse their other items, but FIRST, I want to find what I want and SECOND, I want to compare pages or sellers of what I want, so I can get someone or something reliable.
April 22nd, 2010 - 15:47
Great pondering Jonathan. From a searchers point of view I wish the search engines would go back to the good old days when I began internet marketing and give top placements to the sites with the most relevant content on their page and site to the keywords searched.
I often have to waste my time crawling through pages for certain keywords to get what I’m looking for because the top positions are taken up by giants who have sites that are semi relevant but not what I’m looking for.
From an internet marketing perspective I think content should still be king with static sites, getting no traffic after 6 months or so, being kicked to the bottom.
I think it would do a lot to clean up the share weight of junk that is on the internet and give the small business guy and individual entrepreneur with real content, real products and services the ability to compete equally with the big gun, big budget guys.
The internet use to be an even playing field where the little guy could make a decent living and find wealth. It has quickly become a game of domination according to who has the most money to spend on internet marketing, advertising, research into SEO, staff etc.
That’s a big shame. Google after all started out as the little guy.
April 22nd, 2010 - 15:47
I would like search engine giving more importance to content instead of links.After all internet is about information and the best for the searcher is to actually get the most relevant information about the topic he is inquiring for.
April 22nd, 2010 - 15:42
Hi Jon,
there is something weird happen last night, my blog post got indexed by google very fast! after I press the publish button, actually Im using you bestspinner software, then I copy one of the paragraph of the article and paste it in google search to check wether there is any duplicate or not but the result that come out is my blog post that I recently updated. wow!
is that how new search engine work?
April 22nd, 2010 - 15:35
i need to put something else here. In my site i put my own content and i write my heart out, i put all my knowledge to work on my site so as to help my readers. In order to get my readers i need to rank high on google becuse well you know why!What i find i am doing is trying to link to others in a relevant way so as to beneifit my readers, plus to get the elusive pge1 why should that be like that?
now i need to put my content, spin in other words for other article directories and ezines, so far i haven’t but i feel like i am being forced to becuase of the back linking going on. I don’t want dilute my material just so its out there, i want it to be relevant for the people that i write for. I don’t have the answer but it needs to be better than it is now. It needs a human to tell if its good content and if its relevant, sorry to take so much space, just trying to explain my journey in this quagmire of seo.
April 22nd, 2010 - 15:34
My opinion, for what it is worth, is that backlinks rule!
About a year ago, not sure of the exact date but around the time that Jon sent me a mail stating that backlinks were king, I set up two almost identical sites.
One had loads of content, all well spun PLR that I haven’t seen copied anywhere else yet, original graphics and a well structured set of pages.
The second was IDENTICAL apart from the content being a different spin.
The first was promoted on two of Jon’s linking programs and has built up around 250 incoming links, nothing more than that.
The second was added to my social bookmarking and search engine submission program.
Site one is now PR3 and ranks first page for a host of search terms.
The second is PR1 and may be found on page three or four on a good day!
Guess what I spend time on now? Backlinks!
And as for Facebook, about as useful as Twitter for SEO purposes, which is about zero.
Don’t get me wrong, I use Facebook every single day of the week, but only for entertainment purposes and contact with friends and family.
I’ve paid for advertising with Facebook, loads of money, loads of ‘hits’, very little action… sounds a bit like Adwords to me!!
So until someone comes up with a better alternative I will continue link building, at least my paying clients are happy with the results
April 22nd, 2010 - 15:19
I’m a late comer to these link wars and seo.
From where i stand the best site should be the one that is the most relevant, the closest matching to the key words that you choose, unfortunately that doesn’t work that way. Who ever get the most links wins. t doesn’t matter how relevant or cutting edge you information that seems to be secondary. I have gone to google to look something up and i get total garbage because that is what was for that key wood, that makes me as a consumer angry and frustrated, at one time i thought it was google’s fault but its what is being promoted. If it was a level playing field but its not, but i do praise google for trying to make it so. There is much more i could say buit this comment is long enough already.
Dave
April 22nd, 2010 - 14:55
Content…Content…Content. Google and its linking crap can go and fly the proverbial kite in a thunderstorm!
April 22nd, 2010 - 14:53
Hi Jon:
First thing, as always, is that I need to get products from you that work in native mode (OSX) on my Mac!
Links do make sense, so the next step for weighting purposes is just to differentiate somehow between links with great value and links with little value.
Terry
April 22nd, 2010 - 14:34
Relevant links and quality content.
The SE’s will come up with a way to rank the links.
April 22nd, 2010 - 14:34
I think a perfect search engine would give the highest ranking to a site with the best content, forget links altogether
Then it could further evaluate the quality of the site by the way searchers act when they land on it. If they hit the back button right away, or start a new search lose some “points” if they stay for awhile click nav links or click off on out bound links or ads gain “points”
This would insure that the best sites stayed on the top.
Now Johnathon if you wanted to make a better engine I think an engine should help you dig deeper.
The big three will will give you choices of synonyms when you search. I would prefer a search engine gave you options to dig deeper.
If you were type “car” into google the related search at the bottom are
car pictures
car games
car magazine
cartoon network
carmax
smart car
car rental
Better alternative would be
used car
new car
sports car
import car
etcetra
Hope this make since, an engine should help you dig deeper not give broader related searches.
Hope I helped, I am a big fan.
Dean
April 22nd, 2010 - 14:33
Re the local businessman with “chrome plated whatnots”: No problem – if you are trading on a local basis and people want to buy on the same basis, then including the local place name will serve both parties well. I dont expect the whole world to be interested in our holiday cottages why should Google be ?
As to social networking: I’m not interested in the tastes of under occupied American teenagers and would hate my search results to be biassed towards them.
April 22nd, 2010 - 14:31
A better ranking system would be to match the search term against the actual content of the site. Links can be “stuffed”, keywords can be “spammed”.
Does the number of links to a site really indicate how accurately the content of the site reflects the desired information the search term?
If I’m searching, for example “The Hot Rocks” rock n roll band website. Why wouldn’t the top listing should go to the website http://www.thehotrocks.com, if 1) it exists, 2) has content that a band would have, like discography, member bios, .mp3 demos, shorts of music videos, fan reviews…. If the site domain has been taken and a “search” page is in place then the content is usually just links. This content would not match what is expected of a band site, it doesn’t fit the context and would be ignored in the results.
The concept of context could be the next search engine breakthrough.
I think the relevant content of pages returned for a given search term should be how the content fits the context of what is expected. This may become the greatest priority of search algorithms.
April 22nd, 2010 - 14:11
I believe that links do not mean as much as they once did. I think google is looking for other things now. They are looking for trust, unique content, outbound linking to other related sites, and a lack of affiliate links.
I have about seventy blogs, with between one and four pages, that are all pr0 or pr1, with between 5 to 20 links to them, and they consistently get to page one or two of google.
I out rank sites all the time that are pr4 and 5, with thousands of links. That tells me that links are not king anymore.
I do buy exact domain names for the keyword, which helps, and a few other methods, like cloaking my affiliate links, but it tells me that google is considering more than links these days.
One of my sites besthostingservice.org has been on page one. Now I see it is on page two for that keyword best hosting service. I will put a page of content up, and it will move back to page one for a month or two.
Glenn
April 22nd, 2010 - 14:08
I’m quite confident that the future of search rankings lies in content quality. The question isn’t “How can a machine determine the quality of a site’s content?” but “How can a machine STREAMLINE the content review process?”
The human involvement needed to review each and every site will demand the use of social/collaborative leverage to some degree, probably in the form of user ratings of some sort. This would be quite difficault for an SEO to engineer, as most users have a unique search profile, whether they like it or not, and search engine algorithms could easily screen for geographic and user diversity among submitted content quality scores.
Of course traffic is still a necessity for any of this to be possible, which will result in highly dynamic search results that adjust depending on the content quality scores it receives for that ranking, for that keyword, and possibly for that location. At this point SEO will be more PR than anything else.
For the sake of user experience, you can bet that search engines want the best and most appropriate sites to be ranked the highest, NOT the sites that work the hardest to manipulate rankings. Companies that want their sites to rank better will just have to deliver more value and better content.
April 22nd, 2010 - 13:59
Google uses 200different factor on there algorythm, and you want o compete? Prepare to spend some serious money, or apply the same tactic as Goole used when they started. They did just the opposie off all othe search engines (remember altavista and the Yahoo directory, ) and showed a clean page, but also most important, they had some kind of HERO, the TWO SMART UNIVERSITY GUYS to tell they found the key to mimic peoples preferences – Link Voting- in the main time so much changed.
One of the last items they will add to the algo is the time factor. The fact that I stay so long on your sites page and type this text means, your site is interesting for me. And Google can track that to.
Good luck in making the impossible search engine.
I once found a search engine that mixed all results together from Google showing you first result number 256, than 76, than 711, etc… it was much more exciting than to see always the same results.
April 22nd, 2010 - 13:50
How did we do it in the good old days?
we had yellow pages, and we looked in the right part of it.
I you wanted to eat out, you looked at the ‘Restaurants’ section. Then you made a selection based on the street/neighborhood and the type of food.
No search engine offers this.
when you type ‘restaurant amsterdam’ it is a lot of work to find something that you might like.
Same with ‘hardware store new york’.
The old yellow pages are better for a “product search”.
Search engines should go back to the yellow pages model for products.
April 22nd, 2010 - 13:45
…I think you’ve already summed it uP best with…
“…But like any other great idea, once it’s discovered that there’s money to be made, us savvy business folks get busy making sure we swing the votes in our direction…”
Money is the root of…’all’…end of story…
google, like your uncle bill has made it clear that they want to rule…has gmail ever come outta beta…no it just keeps adding on to itself…it’s real time destructive testing for complete internet dominance.
no one else has the resources or the desire to compete with google on a **level field…so everyone that wants to play must pretty much play by their rules…if you wanna be a player in the game.
**sure your US government can compete…but not on a level field…they control the money…and therefore as we all know…play on their own private field…leaving the crumbs and whatever else is left for us…the government…how ironic don`t ya think…
April 22nd, 2010 - 13:44
I think Google is getting better about determining whether web page content is good and relevant. SEO and lots of content are good indicators of the value of a site. Domain names that match good keywords are another plus factor in the equation. Number of visitors to a site could also be used, although new sites might have difficulty in the beginning until they get enough traffic driving links out there or use PPC.
It’s a tough question as to what is best, and the way Google operates, it will likely be an ever changing formula of how they determine their rankings.
April 22nd, 2010 - 13:37
I have thought a lot about how a search engine could be designed differently without links as part of the score. In the end I think us webmasters would find a way around method.
Frank
April 22nd, 2010 - 13:36
I agree with Mark that a site can rank well without links – I have one site that’s in thetop results for its targetted term with about 3 links in total – it’s a fairly competitve niche as well with about 5.6 million search results in Google.
However, for most sites, it’s links that count. It’s unfortunate as the serps can be easily manipulated, especially where big money is concerned but there really is no alternative. Until now anyway. With the social aspect taking more part in search engine results, it should help the best get to the top – but it’s by no means guaranteed.
April 22nd, 2010 - 13:36
Very interesting post.
It is not only linking, it is keywords, lsi, content, frequency of updates and internal linking.
April 22nd, 2010 - 13:32
A few years back Google used humans to review Millions of photos and give them a proper name. They had this ‘game’ that two people saw at the same time a photo and had to give it a description. If both gave the same description they both got a point. (Those points where later could be transfered to money).
In that way Google used millions of human surfers work hours to ‘know what people SEE in those pictures’.
I think human review of sites (or pages) either by google toolbar or some other way (maybe browser application) could help sites get real grades from real surfers, and those could be blended into the Google alogaritim.
April 22nd, 2010 - 13:31
Personally, I am totally confused with how they are and should be ranked in the first place. One person says submit your site to as many directories and search engines as possible to get the back links. Another person says this is a waste of time, that you should only be submitting your site to directories that pertain to your niche.
I have been spending a lot of time trying to get the back links, but it is not bringing me any more traffic. Yes, I am getting more inbound links, but It’s the traffic that I need, regardless of where I am in the search engines and my traffic is not increasing due to my efforts! I have a small niche.
April 22nd, 2010 - 13:27
Whenever humans and money are involved any system for ranking will eventually be fathomed out as far as possible and engineered for the best results and the largest purse.
After all search engines are designed and made by humans for human interaction and that means money.
The concept that search engines are designed to provide good information has long gone with the big players in the IM business manipulating the search engines at will.
April 22nd, 2010 - 13:25
Jonathan, I’ve been subscribed to you for quite a long time now, plus a few other people who I regard as being authorities on SEO.
I’ve been doing SEO for over 5 years with over 70 sites and the one thing I’ve learned above all, is you can do everything right and still get it wrong!!! For example…I’ve got a competitor with the same keyword in his domain who rips off my original content verbatim, has got less quality back links, his site is only half the age of my site and still he outranks me in Google. But having said that, doing good SEO usually wins in the long run.
Being the person who spends more money on back links .,etc and has a quality site should in my mind be the person rewarded with P1 in the search engines but unfortunately some sites just get overlooked.
April 22nd, 2010 - 13:22
Almost everyone who discusses SEO tends to think as if we were all trying to sell each other the next traffic generating scheme or some such. In that world content and links seem to rule the day, but is this really relevant to, maybe some local small business in your neighbourhood?
If that local businessman is trying to sell his chrome-plated whatnot he is unlikely to be able to find many sites wanting to link to his, and he is hardly likely to want to encourage his visitors to go look at his competitors.
How does this man get a good listing on Google? Should he expect to give up the first couple of pages to a bunch of folks all pushing the same Clickbank ebook on how to make a chromium whatnot in your back yard?
If the search engines really do put as much effort into looking for links, perhaps they are taking the web in the wrong direction.
Mike
April 22nd, 2010 - 13:21
Wouldn’t it be nice to figure this one out? I like the comment from “Mike” pondering Google’s use of their analytics data as a measure of a sites worth.
Interesting topic as are the comments that are being made.
Cheers,
JB
April 22nd, 2010 - 13:21
The whole problem with this internet marketing and trying to rank on Google boils down to who can do it better. Those who can use the tools available, such as outsourcing where labour is cheap and where content can be any garbage. A point is content spinning…Take one article and spin it a100 times.. The search engines do not seem to care. Take a look at ezines articles or any of these article directories.. Some of the articles seem as though they were written by kinder garden students..where has grammar gone ..
Could this system be changed… it is hard to say as in an automated world good substance is not a criteria for success.. Attention span is limited as there is so much information around today that to be a success you have to use the same tools as the rest of the world. So this just adds to the overload of nonsense information that the web is producing . Remember that there are no borders when it comes to internet marketing…
April 22nd, 2010 - 13:19
With Google placing value on the backlinks being the name of the game. Maybe there is a better way to purify the process rather than change it. Maybe a better process that is more controlled in getting the backlinks. Getting backlins today is more a process like girls-gone-wild!
You can just buy backlinks, exchange backlinks or beg for them it is a process that is just gone out of control.
Changing the process to something more realistic would affect the masses for sure but it may be the answer. One thing for sure any answer will be painful for sure.
Maybe the facebook connection can provide the answer if it is managed fairly. You do have a big enough group of people to draw a PR conclusion from based on popularity repeat visits.
Thinking like a salesman we must do what works for the largest percentage of people because there will never be a way to satisfy all.
One real answer that would never happen would be to put the heads of the biggest players social networks and search engines together and put a new system together that would provide the most benefit possible for the largest numbers of people as more of a group effort.
April 22nd, 2010 - 13:18
The bizarreness of search results is that it is equally true that you can build a tightly themed content site with great internal linking and minimal or no external links and rank – quickly. Or you can build a less focused content site and get tons of relevant and less relevant links and rank – typically not as quickly… but it will still rank.
To me that indicates that SE algo’s are on the right track but have a long long way to go.
More intelligent theme recognition (some call latent semantic indexing… meh) and more intelligence on the link ranking will help get rid of the crap. Any system can be gamed – content generation, link building, social commenting, likes, etc.
Meanwhile many of us still generate “crap” (as in less than highest quality content) cause it works and generates cash. (geez sounds like the rest of the business world…)
April 22nd, 2010 - 13:17
I appreciate your concern in finding out a better way to rank sites.
We really need one but the question is, we can’t think of something better than links.
Google has a complex algorithm that analyzes more things than just the links. One option could be a better way to use cookies, maybe the invention of a new thing similar to cookies that can analyze what users do on a site, how much time they stay and so on.
Or maybe, all browser makers could be mandated to show the data to search engines. This could be done in an anonymous and secure way.
Btw, it is good for many of us if links continue to be one of the major factors in ranking well. It is helping us all and will continue to help.
April 22nd, 2010 - 13:16
I think many do not see how widespread “cheating” is by the big name competition using gray-black hat methods.
I have some work being done by the outsourcing company Odesk. Every workers previous and outgoing jobs were listed. You would be shocked how many giants were using linking, false hits, and other techniques for introducing new products.
Example: I want to sell a new product. I get 50,000 fake leads/hits by cheap outsourced labor. Now I show as a major internet source. People think I have a hot product and start buying, plus I have the big name brand.
What is your take? I say when Major Companies are using false methods, where is the ethics line drawn. Surely we know how to make big fires, Should we do so?
April 22nd, 2010 - 13:15
Hey Jon,
I’ve been in SEO for over 5 years now and recently started my own SEO business so here’s my view..
When you use PPC to drive traffic (in Google) the no#1 spot goes to the highest bidder (IF they have optimised their site correctly but that’s another subject) – It has nothing to do with the quality of the site as such.
When you see an Advertisement on TV – The PRIME slot once again goes to the highest bidder (and the most relevant ad’ in-line with what program is showing at that time) – not the best product.
So quality is not the issue here…
As you said, this is business – The REAL key here is relevance. Search engines should favour the most relevant result for the search query – NOT the best website out there. Site A might be far better than site B, but if site B is more relevant it should be on top.
To a large extent this is how things are and how they should be. Organic results are one of the few places where those who put in the real effort are actually rewarded and not favoured simply because their pockets are deeper, (although I’m sure big businesses have complete SEO teams working for them).
If a webmaster makes sure there site is highly relevant for a particular keyword (partly by engineering their links) then they should be rewarded with a high-ranking. So what if it’s engineered – Isn’t all advertising? When you engineer a link you’re simply placing an advertisement to your website on another website.
The only difference is that search engines use relevancy and almost all other forms of advertising use currency.
Thanks for reading my long-winded ramble
John.
April 22nd, 2010 - 13:14
Google is going to put more emphasis on linking pattern as they accumulate more behavior data. They will perfect their natural linking model and that will become the standard. Do you thinks natural backlinks come from article directories or from bookmarking most of your pages on your site? Of course not. They come from blogs and sites with content published by a single or small group of authors, and from social bookmarks to one or two pages on a site.
Learn to write linkbait to survive.
April 22nd, 2010 - 13:12
I think that content should matter more than links, but I guess it’s mainly a technology isssue – to figure out what’s the best, most relevent content for a search. I hope think makes sense.
April 22nd, 2010 - 13:12
Unfortunately dwell time (I like that word) and bounce rate are “engineerable”, too. You just need a large network of bots which will click through your site and generate artificial user traffic…
Hard to say whether there will be something that can’t be manipulated…
Mike
April 22nd, 2010 - 13:11
I think Lee was on the right track. What SHOULD count the most is how useful the clicked-on web site was, and a reasonable measure of that is stickiness. If you click on a junk web site (no content, just ads), most people immediately click BACK and try another site. The longer you stay at the site reading content, the better that site must be. If the search engine kept track of stickiness (as measured by whether or not the user tried another site and in what timeframe), then THAT would be a valid measure, and difficult to spoof for a large web site. My own site (www.galleries.com) gets 300,000+ visitors per month, and that is a lot of votes, especially for those visitors that stick around for a while.
April 22nd, 2010 - 13:10
Hi Jonathan, I’ve pondered this question myself a few times and can’t think of anything better than links at this time.
It’s true that incoming links can, and do, get built by the website owner, but we also get links to our website popping up completely without our knowledge. That simply wouldn’t happen if we didn’t have important, useful content on our website
You have a quality site so I’ve no doubt you have incoming links pop up organically too. So although some votes are ‘manufactured’, some are also ‘genuine’ and organic, so I guess the system works pretty well.
It’s not perfect of course but I don’t think there’s currently a magic bullet to replace the ‘links as votes’ model. Very interesting question Jonathan, keep up the good work! ~ James
April 22nd, 2010 - 13:09
Last year on my blog, I had a page rank of “4.” Without knowing better at the time, someone paid me to put their link on my blog. Within a month, I lost my page ranking – down to “0″.
I immediately made the link a no-follow because that’s what Google recommended. However, I refused to take the link down because I have a contract to keep the link up there until March 2011. After that comes down, I will never sell a link again.
Today I still don’t have any page rank. What I don’t understand is I see websites/blogs all the time with a high page rank and it’s obvious that they have paid links on their website.
Can you please explain why I was penalized but others can get away with it? Is it because the links are a no-follow?
Thank you.
April 22nd, 2010 - 13:06
Hi,
I agree. I think ‘dwell’ time and the ‘bounce’ rate will play increasingly important roles. Of course, you will stil be able to ‘spam’ your way to the top but if visitors don’t hang around for any length of time, then Google will know that the site is not worth the ranking for that particular keyword. It’s probably already happening and that’s why they purchased Urchin a few years back, to get at the Analytics data that comes with it. My 2c worth. All the very best, Allen
April 22nd, 2010 - 13:03
Remember when, in the old days, if you gave your computer too much information it stalled. Just sat and you had to restart to get it going again.
I think too many backlinks is going to have the same effect. Giving anything too much food/information. and you have overload.
A good web site is worthy of spending time in. Buyers come from
Lookers and Learners.
April 22nd, 2010 - 13:03
I had second thoughts on the topic.
Google tells they don’t do this, but it might be a possibility:
Quite a lot of sites use google analytics these days. By that google knows a lot more about the quality of the websites participating in google analytics,
For example a site where 80 % of users leave 5 seconds after arriving on the landing page might ultimately rank lower than a site that has much less links to it but whose users in majority don’t leave the site after seeing it but rather browse through at least 10 pages and stay 10 minutes,
As I said google states they don’t use that data for ranking and it would be unfair because not every website in the world uses google analytics, but they could if they wanted…
Of course there are other ways to obtain user behaviour data, like the alexa toolbar or any other brwoser toolbar. Once a toolbar is used by a large enough user group it will deliver data that is statistically relevant…so this could be a way to tell good sites from bad sites…
Mike
April 22nd, 2010 - 13:02
Googles method although not perfect is a starting point, long term the fly by night sites not maintained will fade and the real content and people driven sites will, still be plugging away! adding more content and getting better.
Readers and visitors will only go back to sites that are worth the trouble, long term is I believe, is the only real way to play this game and the search engines will find you, and recognize the diamonds amongst all the dross.
Yes I still believe the good guys win! and persistence is a virtue.
Sean.
April 22nd, 2010 - 12:59
Sam:
LOL. That’s the problem, isn’t it? How do you judge programatically what really amounts to opinion? Who’s site is better? That depends on who you ask.
April 22nd, 2010 - 12:56
In the absence of a way to accurately judge the actual quality of each piece of content (everything being based on personl opinion rather than fact), and given that basing on links is now old hat and can be gamed so dramatically, I suggest that the best way for the search engines to rank sites is by putting all my sites at the top of all the keywords that might apply for my sites. That then leaves quite a large amount of space for everyone esle to fight it out amongst themselves.
Seems like undoubtedly the fairest system thus far proposed, from where Im looking anyway.
Sam
April 22nd, 2010 - 12:56
William:
First, thanks for your insightful comments.
I don’t disagree with your position that quality content should be the main focus. The simple fact is, though, that machines are very bad at deciding what is quality and what isn’t.
As soon as there’s an algo that marks one page as “quality” and another as “junk”, somebody will figure out that algo and find a way to formulate “quality” content that’s really just junk.
April 22nd, 2010 - 12:56
Perhaps Search engines should offer various kinds of ranking and let users choose which suits them best after fiddling around over time – after all, users will probably be able to determine after a couple of weeks which ranking algo gives the results they prefer. So you could choose to set Google to default to your preferred ranking eg number of links; social links; recent links; or whatever other way of listing they/we could come up with.
I’m not a programmer, don’t know if this makes practical sense for a search engine…
April 22nd, 2010 - 12:55
We have to remember that the layers of algorithms search engines apply to the data gathered up by their spiders goes well beyond just links. Links? Just a crude way of measuring relevance in the marketplace. Counting them up is a form of social voting — asking and answering the questions what is the unwashed public’s response to this content? How big is that response, and where does it lead to? Dozens of algorithms will be needed just to follow after these questions.
Perhaps the Facebook or Google app of 2100 will have SEO guys and gals sitting around counting eye blinks and galvanic skin data and brain wave measurements coming in live as website visitors view their pages via corneal implants projecting HUD or holographic displays in front of them as they stroll down moving sidewalks. It will still be just a way of measuring social voting — asking what the hoi polloi are doing today.
So social media, which is social voting (which is what social media really amounts to) is already deeply part of the search engines. It’s just becoming more prominent of late, to the public. Some wiseguys and whiz kids are hoping to build whole businesses like Facebook et al upon this new prominence. That is not the same as inventing the wheel.
People vote with their eyes on the web, and always will. Following after their eyes to the next site and the next site is the next wave of ranking on the web. What circles do people travel in? That gives you their social strata, pretty accurately. That’s marketing gold, yes?
Much in our modern world points to a highly stratified society in our future, full of furious movement within well known, well defined boundaries. This current thrill with social media is just one aspect of this evolution.
April 22nd, 2010 - 12:55
It’s really ironic the Goliath search engine Google has the idea that it is the decider of what is good or not with the content it thinks is important. It never did create any of it’s own content until the last few years. Google just aggregates information and sells advertising.
What makes a site popular? Traffic incoming which includes the backlinks to the site from PR 5 and above sites. Content and keywords are important, but Google had to figure out a way to override the site from a person naming it all the one keyword to rank high.
I’m not sure how to create a better search engine…one man’s idea to the behemoth Google minds.
Thank you for your passion and analytical mind on this and getting ideas from the community.
Brad
April 22nd, 2010 - 12:55
The current strategy of search is not sufficient.
It needs to be pruned effectively for the effective search results.
April 22nd, 2010 - 12:53
The next big thing in “search” will be a return to the fundamentals of what the search engines did originally. Namely seeking out those webmaster who are creating educational, entertaining and enlightening content that is well themed with good quality content.
If you watch Matt Cutts videos and read the webmasters updates from Google you can clearly see the direction they are signaling. The social media linking and other linking strategies can and are being manipulated. The only way to keep their search engine viable is to look for and rank well quality content when they locate it. When they can’t they go with the best they can find, even if it is sub-par.
That is what search engine users want – that should be what we all want. Except, we get lazy, we look for a dodge, a way to manipulate the system anything but creating quality enlightening, educational and entertaining content. Anything but good quality original three e content.
Can you imagine spending $29.95 for a book that has been spun with synonyms from another author’s work. What would that be called? Hint – it starts with a p and ends with an “ism”.
The search engines (especially Google) have been and will continue to improve their algorithms to ferret out quality content that is well themed to the topic and will rank that the highest.
The search engines have no other choice as quality well-written original content is the only thing that can not be manipulated or faked. No offense to the spinner crowds but the search engines are too smart and the algorithms too strong to simply change a few words with synonyms and try to fake that as original content.
So stop trying to fake the search engines and always create three e original content and do it right and you won’t have to worry about links. I have been doing this for years and almost all of my sites rank in the top five for almost all of my pages,year after year – even when I don’t add any new content. I never pay for traffic, never have. And I make very good money so I have plenty of time to spread the quality content idea like I am doing here. Thank you.
April 22nd, 2010 - 12:51
Mike:
I agree that until there is more human-based ranking, things will look pretty much the same. As you say, social networks are easily engineered as well.
From what other commenters have said, and what I’ve heard before, Facebook is just as spam-laden and rigged as Google. Twitter is FLOODED with spam.
I’m just wondering if there’s another magic-bullet to replace, or at least supplement, links.
April 22nd, 2010 - 12:50
Hey guys,
I personally believe google is already 3 steps ahead of this. As Mark has stated above, the most links doesn’t always win the rankings.
However my theory is that google are now trying to factor in actual user behavior.
The first piece of evidence is the recent update in google’s webmaster tools. They are now counting, and reporting the Click Through Rate on natural search results. Which tells me that a site with a high click through rate will outrank a site with a low click through rate, no matter how many backlinks it has.
Secondly, and this theory was shared with me by someone else, but that the motive behind google, firstly promoting firefox (with the google toolbar) then going so far as to develop chrome. Is all about giving google the ability to study user behavior.
So things like, how long people stay on a page, how many people bookmark it, how many click the back button etc etc will all become the metrics that google judges a web page by. (Along with all the current factors)
At the end of the day, google wants to give searchers what they want. So what better way to rank sites by, but by actual user interaction with the site.
Just my thoughts anyway.
April 22nd, 2010 - 12:49
Hi Jon
I never really thought about whether the was a better way for the search engine to determine rankings.
I read about the rise of facebook and it’s share in traffic generation, too. But in my opinion the social network can be “enginieered”, too.
Just have a look at all those current products that deal with how to use facebook, twitter and all the others for business purposes.
One possible solution could indeed be more human review. Maybe a wikipedia like way of voting rankings?
Mike
April 22nd, 2010 - 12:48
Dave:
“Search is not just about incoming links – they have over 200 other factors”
Sorry, but those 200 other factors amount to maybe 1-2% of results. You can rank for anything if you get enough links. That’s just the reality in Google.
April 22nd, 2010 - 12:47
Linda:
Here’s the problem with using “human” behavior to influence rankings. I could hire a bunch of low wage folks at a dollar a piece to go search for my keywords at Google, find my site, click through and stay there for a while!
It’s as easily gamed as links I’m afraid.
April 22nd, 2010 - 12:46
Search is not just about incoming links – they have over 200 other factors that they rank websites on including some pretty nifty anti-spam mechanisms as well as sophisticated content recognition.
But, the real point here is facebook is no.2 most visited website on the internet, that says a lot – they could easily take over Google any day now.
At the end of the day, Google has no real metrics and user participation statistics for websites – with facebook you can see at a glance (when you search) how many people have joined a group or become interested in a page etc. when you are searching on a subject.
Google really looks a big clumsy compared to facebook now, its only now people are beginning to catch on.
Take for instance, adsense – it sucks, costs too much and hardly anyone clicks on those ads. The facebook ad system allows you to target by detailed demographics and is a fair price per click – you can target by interest so they don’t have to be searching for anything specifically.
Then there is the results in Google, sometimes they are good but most times they include junk websites with duplicate content linked to other sites.
So there are some big changes in the future, and a big battle between Google and Facebook (with twitter as the underdog)
April 22nd, 2010 - 12:45
I think have a pretty good thing going now. I think those that work harder should rank better (as long as the content has merit).
Again who is to say what site is better – very subjective. I think a combo of links + social activity can give a pretty accurate determination of which one is best.
Education to user might help too. If the search engines invested in education to community policing this could potentially help. I don’t think spammers can out do the masses. This way if people understand how social activities effect rankings and how it’s beneficial to them they may get more involved.
The masses caught onto things like wikipedia pretty quick and they see the value there. It is for the most part pretty accurate.
Still the smartest thing to do as a marketer is use many different avenues to market and to build list and to build a strong relationship with your list, clients/customers etc.
Just follow what Jonathan Ledger does –
he has a very loyal following and because he created that bond he now has a license to print money. 
that’s my 2 cents for the day!
April 22nd, 2010 - 12:45
I’ve sometimes wondered, and worried, about a coming change like this. It would potentially be changing the landscape significantly.
I guess traffic measurement may be part of the equation (I don’t think it could be ALL of it). Sure, I appreciate that traffic is often related to position in SE rankings, but perhaps ‘proportionally’ speaking according to position may be a measure of sort.
Add to that ‘time spent on site’ or ‘stickability’ then you may be forming a useful yardstick of sorts. Google Analytics has ‘Bounce Rate’ which is a similar measurement.
So using proportional traffic and stickability, you may be able to come up with a weighted measure of popularity. It’s generally difficult to generate real traffic (without using say ads) and I guess you can’t really create stickability (without using a bot to emulate a real visitor). Possible? Can’t really say.
It’s interesting to me though that I’ve discovered I’m already trying to think up ways I’d ‘deal’ with this situation if it arose. So I’m already guilty of trying to manipulate or engineer results, LOL.
April 22nd, 2010 - 12:45
The problem with search today is Google. It has a virtual monopoly and the sooner it is broken the better. I want to see at least a half dozen “search” channels. Facebooks idea offers one approach and will be successful but there have to be more.
Power needs to be returned to the people and not some corporate giant milking it for every penny. A more democratic web and innovative search models are a must and they will evolve.
If I ever have a great idea I’ll be sure to develop it!
April 22nd, 2010 - 12:44
Hi Jon,
When I find a good and informative site on the web I bookmark it in my browser. This is like a vote for the site.
I use Firefox as my browser. What, if firefox could collect this information and hand it over to google? Nobody bookmarks a bad site.
I think this would really be a good method to get good content sites to the top.
April 22nd, 2010 - 12:44
Jen:
I agree that it would be great to judge a site’s value by the quality of its content, but how can a machine do that?
Mark Dulisse:
I am constantly amazed at the results I see — low quality sites ranking for top-dog queries despite how obvious it is that they have been engineered to be there. While on the one hand I’m glad to see that — because it means I can continue to do the same — on the other hand it astounds me how much Google isn’t seeing with their algo.
April 22nd, 2010 - 12:43
This is a great post to inspire thought. Kudos. While I understand the merits of rewarding “effort,” I think the focus has to move away from that because it’s very easy to substitute effort with cash.
When “effort” (ie; pursuing links) is the primary barometer, it opens the door for scammy sites to rank better than quality sites. Those doors are already open wider than they should be. There is no effort involved in hiring someone from overseas to work for a few dollars an hour to pursue links. There’s already an abundance of companies overseas that will provide 50 or 100 links for $25 or less. That’s not effort anymore.
I think we’re going to see more focus on user behavior to correct the linking mess. How fast do users hit the back button? How many leave as opposed to how many stay? How long do they spend on the site? How many pages do they view? I think those metrics will (or should) increase in importance in the ranking algorithm. Google already looks at those values. Hopefully, they’ll start giving them more weight.
Great blog… this is my first visit and first comment.
April 22nd, 2010 - 12:43
I think you answered your own question. It used to be about getting more links, and now perhaps it’s going to be about getting more likes.
Facebook will have the likes data. And a new search box based on likes with check boxes for likes from friends only, or all likes.
Maybe I should register http://www.ImAllLike.com and jump into the like manipulation game, but probably someone already has! I predict some Internet Guru message will show up in my email box within a week with the system to beat this system, for only $99/month.
It will automate the creation of fake Facebook profiles, and then in the dead of night, automatically rotating ip addresses, go out and like your site a lot. No, really a lot. 1000 likes in a week, it will say.
It will work for about a year, and then will go away. Replaced by the Love system. Like, version 2.0.
Ain’t the Internet Great!
April 22nd, 2010 - 12:42
Good post Jonathan,
Regarding your question, I could think up a number of ways that the Search Engines could rank sites in a way that might better reflect the real popularity and usefulness of a site.
Unfortunately, I’m challenged to come up with an idea that can’t be influenced by humans using artificial methods (money always works best
Traffic can be purchased as can linking, ratings, comments, votes.. and considering all the millions upon millions of websites online today.. I don’t believe there’s really any other way to do it than the way Google and the other Search Engines presently do it.
It’s an evolutionary process where the “manipulators” will probe and seek to find the weak spots, and the Google’s will continue to tweak their algorithms to expose and penalize those manipulations.
April 22nd, 2010 - 12:41
Great post Joe! I could never understand why it is back links that get you to rank high. Anybody can try to submit to a ton of directories. I think it should be good quality content that make you rank higher. Just because you have a ton of links does not mean you have great quality content.
April 22nd, 2010 - 12:36
Jon,
It’s hard to say where SEO is going, but it seems that Google’s got the best system around. I think Google is getting better at weeding out “engineered” links and giving them less credit. They seem to be able to spot computer generated content in most cases.
No matter how perfect a ranking system becomes, there is always to going to be group of individuals smart enough to find loopholes. I believe it’s more of challenge than anything else.
I am all for a system that ranks the best website first, but like Pete said, what makes one website better than another?
April 22nd, 2010 - 12:34
Hey Jon, great topic. I’ve followed your posts religiously. This is one of the best ones, it definitely peaked my interest. I’ll be monitoring it for sure as it is very timely for some issues I am facing.
April 22nd, 2010 - 12:34
I think I agree with the idea that the people who put the most effort into being number 1 should be number 1. Thats how it is in the world of marketing, the company who invests the most time and energy into advertising will have the most sales. Take products like Sham Wow and The Graty. These are products that have been around for decades but someone was smart enough to invest lots of intelligent marketing into them. Those products sell exponentially better then their nameless counterparts that accomplish the exact same task.
April 22nd, 2010 - 12:32
Facebook for me, has offered a form of social ranking or friend rank and even this is manipulated by savvy marketers who are able to “out rank” their competition by recognising and moving with the changing algorithms.
Google and the other search engines should avoid friend rank in my opinion and here’s why…
If google friend connect is a way to rank sites (i.e. the more members your site has the higher it ranks) what will follow will be thousands of fake profiles across the Google network (if they are not there already, as they are in Facebook and Twitter).
Links may not be perfect and can certainly be manipulated but I would rather see a more refined and constantly changing algorithm based on linking factors than social factors.
I notice recently, Google has offered you the chance to comment (when signed into your gmail account) on sites and posts – this again can easily be manipulated by marketers, so whatever way you look at it there will never be a perfect solution.
A quality site, established over time, with a range of targeted backlinks and a level of social involvement (facebook connect, GFC etc) is about as balanced as you can hope for I guess.
It’s getting interesting out there alright.
April 22nd, 2010 - 12:31
I’m not sure what I have to say will change search engine ranking,but just the linking having so much weight it can be tweaked. And it has made a lot of people money selling links. AS to ranking this domain
was registered 3/31/2010 fishaquariumdecorations.net/ is ranked #1
no links?
April 22nd, 2010 - 12:29
I think the true worthiness of a commercial site is not the number of hits it receives but the number of click thru’s for a sale. If site A has more hits or links because of engineering but a less worthy product then site B, site B should be able to come out on top in the search process.
April 22nd, 2010 - 12:29
Jonathan, great idea for a post. As a business owner I’d love to know what the SE’s are thinking so I can be ahead of the curve rather than following it. SEO has become so difficult to master in comparison to a few years ago – yet in other ways it remains so obvious. I don’t know how it will change but I’m sure the following will become even more important:
- Local
- Personallzed
- Quality (not just our perceived quality of our own sites, but some measurable attributes of visitor patterns).
April 22nd, 2010 - 12:28
Actually, having the most backlinks is not necessarily the surefire way to get on the top of Google.
Do a test: Site A has lowsy content but a ton of backlinks and no internal linking. Site B has little backlinks, but excellent and RELEVANT content and awesome internal linking.
You’ll be amazed at what your findings will be.
I think the next big ranking qualifier for Google will be more intangibles: Trust ranking
April 22nd, 2010 - 12:27
“Cutting edge content.”
April 22nd, 2010 - 12:26
I don’t think there’s going to be a better way. Using social media posts is still getting gamed.
Ideally, people coming to your site and staying there should be a big part of the decision but that can be gamed as well.
I have sites that people stay on for an average of 4-5 minutes that don’t get much attention from Google.
Oh, well, it’s about how many people buy and refer their friends that counts for me.
Bottom line is that no matter how they do it, spammers will figure out a way to game it.
April 22nd, 2010 - 12:26
Thanks Pete. And I agree — it’s a very difficult thing to determine for everyone what makes Site A better than Site B. It’s such a viewpoint question. My opinion may not be the same as yours, but that doesn’t mean either of us is wrong.
Links work pretty good at determining an overall value of a site. But is there something better?
April 22nd, 2010 - 12:19
Jon – First, I love how passionate you are about trying to make things better! Love that…
I think we’ll be seeing a convergence of social and SEO. Yes, it’s easy to “manipulate” or engineer links to rank better in the search engines, but I think the answer to actually getting site A to rank higher (presuming it’s “better” by whatever definition that is) is by combining somehow the SEO data PLUS a social component. Links from personal social profiles/walls, etc? I don’t know. As I’m thinking through this right now though, you’ve got to first determine why and how site A is actually better. That could be pretty tough to do.