After extensive gaming, Google’s algorithm (it is assumed) shifted from using the quantity of links as an indicator of source authority, to measuring the quality (reputation) of the linker in order to determine relevancy. Gamers are still there though, this time with bigger budgets, and things may be about to change again – most likely to a much more complicated game.
Is Link Authority Dead (Dying)?
A month ago, SEObook.com author Aaron Wall blew the whistle on relevancy problems in Google’s SERPs. Big name sites, like eBay and Yahoo, set up “infinite” subdomains, addressing various topics, while others bought websites that already had high rankings in Google’s index.
So, in essence, the big brands, who already had tremendous authority and presence, were leveraging that status to rank for as many high-paying keywords as possible. And if that weren’t enough, they began buying other slots in the SERPs – a strategy that gets your online property appearing three or four times in the top ten results.
“The practice of measuring online influence by links is truly dead. Link authority, as it was called, was good while it lasted,” suggests Edelman’s Steve Rubel. “The main reason link authority is dead is that there are so many places where people can publish and connect with peers.”
And that presents a prime moment for change in how rankings are measured. But how would they do that?
Enquiro’s Gord Hotchkiss recently interviewed usability guru Jakob Nielsen, who also notes that things will have to change to better serve the end user.
“I think that with counting links and all of that,” said Nielsen, “there may be a change and we may go into a more behavioral judgment as to which sites actually solve people’s problems, and they will tend to be more highly ranked.”
How that would be done is still not abundantly clear and Nielsen doesn’t have a lot of faith that personalized search will actually lead to it. From the artificial intelligence side, personalization has to do a lot of guesswork.
Jeff Jarvis notes Nielsen//NetRatings’ announcement that they would no longer measure page views, and instead would measure the amount of time users spend at a site. While that may be a part of the next equation, Jarvis thinks that won’t be good enough in an age of instant messaging and other widgets that are always on, but not always used.
In fact, with so many widgets out there, it is impossible to know total audience numbers in terms of popularity, traffic, attention, or engagement.
“I’ve often said that Google’s audience is many times what is reported because Google distributes itself as widgets — ads, maps, feeds….” writes Javis.
“There’s a very long list of applications — RSS, widgets, mobile, apps — and kinds of content — video, podcasts — but also of new sorts of measurements — such as influence, meme-starting, involvement, creation, engagement, popularity — that aren’t even being tackled. And there are new dimensions that need to be explored, such as measuring a person’s trust, influence, or even fame across many platforms, sites, applications, and so on.”
In other words, it’s complicated.
David Brain, CEO and President of Edelman Europe, is working on a formula for a social media index, the likes of which we may see embraced by Google and other search engines in the future.
“When people talked about on-line influence in the past they were often referring to bloggers and Technorati scores,” Brain said, “though obviously influence was always more complicated than that.
“But now with the increasing mass adoption of Twitter and Facebook and favourites listings like Digg and Del.icio.us things have moved on. Bloggers Twitter and Facebookers Dig. Many of us are multi-platform users and so our online ‘footprint’ is much more dispersed.
Brain suggests a multilateral approach that includes PageRank, inbound links, subscribers, content focus, update frequency, comment numbers, numbers of friends, number of Twitter followers, number of LinkedIn contacts, photos and videos uploaded.
And if so, life on the web just got a whole lot more complicated, hair is about to become whiter, or fall out, or be pulled out, especially if you’ve invested the last decade in traditional SEO.
But it hasn’t changed yet, and there’s no guarantee it will. But with all the industry experts talking about it, you can bet something’s about to happen.
