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Getting Ranked In Google News

The Google News Team has an interesting blog post about the "truths and myths" of how Google includes and ranks articles.

Some of the facts that stand out include "Having an image next to your article improves your ranking MYTH. While having a good image with your article does improve your chance to get your picture shown, it has no impact on the ranking of the article itself."

"Updating an article after posting it will create problems with Google News TRUE
Currently, the Google News crawler only visits each article URL once. If you make updates to the article after we’ve crawled it, they won’t be reflected on our site."

Google says it is working on being able to re-crawl articles that have been updated but currently does not re-crawl update articles.

It’s a myth that timing of an article improves ranking. Google says," Whether you publish before, after, or in the midst of when other publishers post articles won’t affect your article ranking. Our algorithms take a number of factors into account when choosing the best articles in a cluster."

Having a sitemap will not help your rankings but there are reasons to have a sitemap. "First, sitemaps give you greater control over which of your articles appear on Google News; they tell us specifically which articles to crawl."

"Second, sitemaps allow you to specify meta-information about individual articles, such as their publication date, or keywords that help inform which section of Google News the articles should appear in."

Redesigning a site could affect coverage in Google News. "If you drastically change the structure of your site or your page layout, the crawler may have trouble navigating the new design. When in doubt, check out the section in our publisher help center about changes to your site or contact the Support team."

Using AdSense on a site will not improve article rankings." We try to stay as objective as possible, and giving sites with our ads product a boost, well, that wouldn’t be very objective!"

 

Google Explains Meta Tags

Search engines pay attention to some tags, and none to others. Remember when the ‘keywords’ meta tag mattered? Ah, the good old days.

John Mueller placed a useful post from Zurich on the Webmaster Central blog at Google, where he delves into the issue of meta tags. Back in the day, meta tags like ‘keywords’ helped webmasters get their sites indexed appropriately.

It took next to no time for spammers to start clogging ‘keywords’ to the point where they became useless. As Mueller reminded everyone in an answer to a comment, Google isn’t looking at them for indexing purposes:

(W)e generally ignore the contents of the "keywords" meta tag. As with other possible meta tags, feel free to place it on your pages if you can use it for other purposes - it won’t count against you.

Plenty of tags do work favorably for pages, as do Sitemaps, which enjoy support from Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. Meta tags can control robot behavior, or in the case of an individual crawler like Google’s Googlebot, affect a single robot’s actions with certain directives like meta name=robots or name=googlebot:

Google understands the following values (when specifying multiple values, separate them with a comma):

noindex: prevents the page from being indexed (see "Block or remove pages using meta tags")

nofollow: don’t follow links from this page when looking for new pages to crawl (also see "Block or remove pages using meta tags")

nosnippet: don’t show a snippet of this page when displaying it in the search results (see "Prevent or remove snippets")

noodp: don’t use text from ODP (The Open Directory Project a.k.a. dmoz.org) to generate a title or snippet for this page (see "How do I change my site’s title and description?")

noarchive: don’t display a "Cached" link for this page in the search results (see "Prevent or remove cached pages")

unavailable_after:[date]: remove this page from the search results after the specified date and time (see "Robots Exclusion Protocol: now with even more flexibility")

Mueller noted the default rule is "index, follow" when this meta tag is not in place on a page, or if it is not targeted to the visiting spider when it arrives.

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Getting Ranked In Google News

The Google News Team has an interesting blog post about the "truths and myths" of how Google includes and ranks articles.

Some of the facts that stand out include "Having an image next to your article improves your ranking MYTH. While having a good image with your article does improve your chance to get your picture shown, it has no impact on the ranking of the article itself."

"Updating an article after posting it will create problems with Google News TRUE
Currently, the Google News crawler only visits each article URL once. If you make updates to the article after we’ve crawled it, they won’t be reflected on our site."

Google says it is working on being able to re-crawl articles that have been updated but currently does not re-crawl update articles.

It’s a myth that timing of an article improves ranking. Google says," Whether you publish before, after, or in the midst of when other publishers post articles won’t affect your article ranking. Our algorithms take a number of factors into account when choosing the best articles in a cluster."

Having a sitemap will not help your rankings but there are reasons to have a sitemap. "First, sitemaps give you greater control over which of your articles appear on Google News; they tell us specifically which articles to crawl."

"Second, sitemaps allow you to specify meta-information about individual articles, such as their publication date, or keywords that help inform which section of Google News the articles should appear in."

Redesigning a site could affect coverage in Google News. "If you drastically change the structure of your site or your page layout, the crawler may have trouble navigating the new design. When in doubt, check out the section in our publisher help center about changes to your site or contact the Support team."

Using AdSense on a site will not improve article rankings." We try to stay as objective as possible, and giving sites with our ads product a boost, well, that wouldn’t be very objective!"

 

Google Explains Meta Tags

Search engines pay attention to some tags, and none to others. Remember when the ‘keywords’ meta tag mattered? Ah, the good old days.

John Mueller placed a useful post from Zurich on the Webmaster Central blog at Google, where he delves into the issue of meta tags. Back in the day, meta tags like ‘keywords’ helped webmasters get their sites indexed appropriately.

It took next to no time for spammers to start clogging ‘keywords’ to the point where they became useless. As Mueller reminded everyone in an answer to a comment, Google isn’t looking at them for indexing purposes:

(W)e generally ignore the contents of the "keywords" meta tag. As with other possible meta tags, feel free to place it on your pages if you can use it for other purposes - it won’t count against you.

Plenty of tags do work favorably for pages, as do Sitemaps, which enjoy support from Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft. Meta tags can control robot behavior, or in the case of an individual crawler like Google’s Googlebot, affect a single robot’s actions with certain directives like meta name=robots or name=googlebot:

Google understands the following values (when specifying multiple values, separate them with a comma):

noindex: prevents the page from being indexed (see "Block or remove pages using meta tags")

nofollow: don’t follow links from this page when looking for new pages to crawl (also see "Block or remove pages using meta tags")

nosnippet: don’t show a snippet of this page when displaying it in the search results (see "Prevent or remove snippets")

noodp: don’t use text from ODP (The Open Directory Project a.k.a. dmoz.org) to generate a title or snippet for this page (see "How do I change my site’s title and description?")

noarchive: don’t display a "Cached" link for this page in the search results (see "Prevent or remove cached pages")

unavailable_after:[date]: remove this page from the search results after the specified date and time (see "Robots Exclusion Protocol: now with even more flexibility")

Mueller noted the default rule is "index, follow" when this meta tag is not in place on a page, or if it is not targeted to the visiting spider when it arrives.

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1 DIN Car DVD Player Is DIY Fan And Resellers Delight

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WLS week 18 Post Op Updates: Meet my goofy boys!

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Facebook Testing New Ad Format?

Update: I contacted Facebook asking for more details on the testing, and I was given only the following official statement from the company:

Facebook recently began testing a module that appears periodically in the right-side ad space that show relevant content in addition to the ads that would normally appear there.  This content includes Facebook Pages of which a user’s friends have become a fan, Events that a user’s friends are attending, and people who are friends of a user’s friends. While the advertisements are paid placements, the content is not, and is part of Facebook’s ongoing efforts to surface relevant content and friend information in more places on the site. As with all tests, Facebook will evaluate user responses and make ongoing modifications to the features of the module.

Original Article: AllFacebook’s Nick O’Neill received a screenshot of what is supposedly a new advertising layout Facebook is testing that shows 5 ads instead of 3 and has a wider layout.

When I browse Facebook, I see combinations of ads ranging from one at at time to five at a time, but they don’t look quite like what AllFacebook received. Here are the two side by side. Allfacebook’s screenshot is on the left, and what I see is on the right.

Perhaps more interesting from what O’Neill has to say is that advertisers are telling him they "are seeing much higher conversion rates despite lower click through rates" compared to Google ads. "The result is that advertisers keep coming back and continue increasing their ad expenditure," he says.

I said before that perhaps Facebook should be considered Google’s greatest threat as far as where advertisers spend their money. The gap continues to narrow between the two in terms of unique visitors:

It is not my opinion that Facebook ads will kill AdWords. I think they can put a dent in Google’s ad revenue, but the two are too different for them not to co-exist. Google ads target what searchers are looking for. Facebook ads target users who don’t know they’re looking for anything until they realize they see something cool being served to them. That has a lot of potential given that they’re tailored to users’ specific interests.

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1 DIN Car DVD Player Is DIY Fan And Resellers Delight

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WLS week 18 Post Op Updates: Meet my goofy boys!

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Facebook Testing New Ad Format?

Update: I contacted Facebook asking for more details on the testing, and I was given only the following official statement from the company:

Facebook recently began testing a module that appears periodically in the right-side ad space that show relevant content in addition to the ads that would normally appear there.  This content includes Facebook Pages of which a user’s friends have become a fan, Events that a user’s friends are attending, and people who are friends of a user’s friends. While the advertisements are paid placements, the content is not, and is part of Facebook’s ongoing efforts to surface relevant content and friend information in more places on the site. As with all tests, Facebook will evaluate user responses and make ongoing modifications to the features of the module.

Original Article: AllFacebook’s Nick O’Neill received a screenshot of what is supposedly a new advertising layout Facebook is testing that shows 5 ads instead of 3 and has a wider layout.

When I browse Facebook, I see combinations of ads ranging from one at at time to five at a time, but they don’t look quite like what AllFacebook received. Here are the two side by side. Allfacebook’s screenshot is on the left, and what I see is on the right.

Perhaps more interesting from what O’Neill has to say is that advertisers are telling him they "are seeing much higher conversion rates despite lower click through rates" compared to Google ads. "The result is that advertisers keep coming back and continue increasing their ad expenditure," he says.

I said before that perhaps Facebook should be considered Google’s greatest threat as far as where advertisers spend their money. The gap continues to narrow between the two in terms of unique visitors:

It is not my opinion that Facebook ads will kill AdWords. I think they can put a dent in Google’s ad revenue, but the two are too different for them not to co-exist. Google ads target what searchers are looking for. Facebook ads target users who don’t know they’re looking for anything until they realize they see something cool being served to them. That has a lot of potential given that they’re tailored to users’ specific interests.

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SEO Copywriting: How To Write For Publication

Many metaphors have been offered up to describe or explain the Internet, but calling it "an ocean of words" is as accurate as any other. In 1998 the first Google index counted 26 million pages, by 2000 it had reached the billion mark and by 2002 it had more than tripled again to over 3 billion. In July 2008 the company’s Web Search Infrastructure Team announced that it had counted 1 trillion unique URLs on the web at once. At an average 1000 words per page, that means the web contains an astonishing 1 quadrillion words. That’s 15 zero’s.

Obviously, writing for publication on the Internet and standing out from all the rest of the verbiage presents a seemingly insurmountable challenge. Yet web professionals know from the ever-improving metrics and analytics that certain articles and specific kinds of writing do, in fact, perform better at their assigned tasks.

And make no mistake – writing for publication means setting (and hitting) targets, not crafting a follow-up to The Great Gatsby or concocting clever rhymes. In fact, fiction and poetry together account for only some 15% of web writing, which means the overwhelming majority of articles in cyberspace are non-fiction, imparting knowledge to educate the world.

Intentions and aims of writing for publication

There are many reasons to write for publication, and the reader can be served well no matter what your motivations. You may want to "get your name out there," or that of your company, for increased exposure. You may wish to establish yourself or your firm as the leading expert in a certain field.

You can easily load up your own domains with scores of great articles, injecting them with the authority of your knowledge of your vertical. The positive side of this is the creation and positioning of your own site as the informational go-to resource for your industry. The risk is that since you are writing for your own site, no matter how good the information is people may wonder if it is self serving, and you could be perceived as essentially "blowing your own horn."

Another good option is placing an article on a popular blog, or in an e-zine that has attained a certain level of respect within a certain industry, or even in a popular print magazine. This third-party publishing can dramatically boost your perceived authority. You want to avoid appearing as a self-promoting windbag, and one way to do that is to have other sites and publications promote you instead.

Conversely, you will want to avoid certain venues, as well, to safeguard your reputation. Investigate the various "post your article" sites and avoid the ones that do not have excellent content up front, as people will generally not waste much time looking for something good on a mediocre site. For "good" content they will likely gravitate to sites they see as having "good" information.

How to stand out from the crowd of content

The overarching goal for writing web content is to be informative, entertaining, task-oriented, clear – and above all, useful to the demographic. Rankings in the search engines are a by-product of good, focused content, and should not be the goal. Frankly, it is entirely possible to serve a niche audience, and do it quite effectively with a high level of satisfaction, without setting any ranking records. But typically when you write an authoritative article full of information useful to your demographic, people will naturally cite it as good and link to it, thus helping your article move up the natural listings. Consistently write helpful, informative articles, and the effects of these citations will not just add up, they will multiply. But, again, this happens if your focus and goal is to reach and affect a target group, small or large, with well-written, concise and usable information.

Most people think of fiction when they hear the term "creative writing," but writers know very well that writing for publication on non-fiction topics requires tremendous creativity. You do not simply "do research" in preparation for writing an article. Rather, you immerse yourself in the subject, study it from all possible angles, take it apart to understand how it truly works, then put it back together again and explain it to others in your own, unique way. The first step (of many) in learning to write content that reads well is "owning the topic" – knowing the subject inside and out. There is no other way to write with authority than to have, in fact, that authority.

Reaching the reader

Just as important as knowing the subject matter is knowing your audience. Not only do you have to understand the target reader’s point of view, of course, but you also need to speak in a common vocabulary. Equally as important as the content is the tone in which it is presented. A motivated reader, eager to learn, does not respond particularly well to condescension, and certainly does not want to be "talked at" or scolded.

In addition to speaking in their vocabulary, you have to choose the words that will motivate them to the goal of the article. Want them to walk away with knowledge that will help them? Choose language that will intrigue them to read more, and word your concepts so their brains soak them up like a sponge. Want them to buy something? Choose words and language that will elicit the emotional buying response. If you want to accomplish your goal, you not only have to use language they will understand, you also have to use language they will connect to.

In a sense, the reader should feel that you are working with them, approaching the material together. This is one of the most powerful ways to get the reader "invested" in the article and lead them, without seeming to, toward any possible call to action you might have at the conclusion.

You will find that you need to write various articles for various purposes, and although you may develop an identifiable style, on a practical level your writing will be meant to accomplish different things at different times. If you are writing to entertain, then keep it light and fun, and don’t lecture. If you are writing to educate, don’t bother with a "Sunday magazine feature" story introduction, but get right to the lessons. However, whether it’s for fun or for some other goal, being informative is not a side effect or a bonus – it is the very foundation of your writing.

The ultimate aims of publishing your writing

With the information you impart, you are seeking to change what readers think or how they perceive something. For the reader, it should be a journey, a process of discovery that proceeds deliberately and convincingly. Columbus did not make any side trips on the way to the New World, and you must avoid the temptation to digress, embellish or confuse matters. Do not pile on words, especially of the "10¢ variety," in an attempt to impress (or increase arbitrary word count). Persuasive writing is lean without being mean, vigorous without being aggressive, concise without being dry and informative without being a mere list of factoids.

Yes, there is a lot to crafting a persuasive piece of writing for publication. It is both art and craft, requiring both creativity and skill. Every word must earn its place, do its job and contribute to the overall effect and meaning, or it should be deleted. If you can say a lot with a little, do so. Vigorous writing is concise. If you have done your best and still have a long article, just ensure the reader comes away with copious amounts of usable information.

Read and consider all feedback you get on your writing, as the only definition of success that counts is the reader reaction. The more you write, the better you will become, if you pay attention to what your audiences are telling you. Writing is a process, not a product, and is a tool for you as regards your business endeavors.

A note to non-writers

Even if you don’t write yourself, you should know how to assess writers who are working for you, since their output will represent you and your firm to the world. In fact, in this day and age, work-for-hire arrangements may result in your putting your name on an article you paid someone to write. This makes quality control even more important.

Next Week

Next week we’ll be releasing Part Two of the series – Writing For Search Engines.

Tons of Tips for Ranking in 5 Other Google Engines

It’s not all about traffic. It’s about conversions. But it’s hard to get conversions if you don’t have the traffic, and while Google is one of the best potential sources for traffic, Google has other search engines besides web search that people use all the time, and it will not hurt to rank in them too.

Conversions are the goal. Visibility is the strategy. Unfortunately, like most strategies, they take effort and paying attention to detail. The web may be taking a huge turn toward social, but search isn’t going anywhere. You need to be found where people are looking.

1. Ranking in YouTube

As you may or may not be aware, YouTube is the 2nd largest search engine behind Google. Those businesses using online video are going to want to maximize their YouTube efforts by employing some easy strategies to gain more visibility.

A few tips mentioned a while back at SMX West include:

- An accurate and descriptive title

- Make sure your description is just that - descriptive. It should be accurate and unique, and use complete sentences.

- Descriptive keyword tags

- Avoid keyword stuffing

More WebProNews Videos

It’s best not to overlook the social element of YouTube as well. Active participation on the social level will contribute to your views. And let’s also not overlook the fact that YouTube can actually help you rank in Google itself. Other tips discussed at SMX were:

- Use Keyword Rich Descriptions and Tags

- Include the word "Video" in your titles because people do search for it.

- Use a link for the very first thing in your descriptions.

- Make sure and utilize your thumbnails. YouTube pulls these from the 1/4, 1/2 and 3/4 marks. Make them count.

 - Encourage participation by enabling everything.

- use meta data

- use captions and subtitles

- use watermarks

- use Google Maps integration

There is plenty more info about ranking on and with YouTube here, and more tips on how businesses can use YouTube in general from Product Manager Tracy Chan here.

More tips for ranking in YouTube? Please share.

2. Ranking in Google Image Search

Dev Basu at Search Engine Journal has a great post up about leveraging rich media for SEO. He talks about video, presentations, and other things, but he also gives some good tips for images. He notes that one in five searches are image searches, and that alt tags and file name optimization are key. He says, "Other tips to double dip in image SEO include":

-  Add images to your Google Local Business profile

- Enable Google Image Labeler in your Google Webmaster Tools account.

- Add images to local business citation sources.

- Add images to blog posts or news articles for syndication in Google news.

The following clip has a lot more useful information about Google Image Search:

 

More tips for ranking in Google Image Search? Please share.

3. Ranking in Google News

Covering a recent Search Engine Strategies session, Virginia Nussey with Bruce Clay notes, "News page views are up to trillions monthly." More and more people are getting their news online. That’s why the newspaper industry is struggling. I don’t have the hard numbers, but I’m willing to bet a significant amount of people are getting news from Google News. She pulled away these things to keep in mind for Google News:

- Only indexes articles three days old or less

- Only indexes it once

- Read Google News Help for Publishers

- Google News XML Sitemap and monitor it

- Section names (keywords in News XML Sitemaps)

- Host "most popular" and "breaking news" sections on your site

- Sub-headlines or beginning of article copy is pulled in as Meta description

Google itself posted about some facts and myths pertaining to ranking in Google News searches about a year ago. In the interest of not making this article excruciatingly long (or at least even more so), I will just link to it. But you should definitely read it if you are serious about incorporating Google News into your strategy.

More tips for ranking in Google News? Please share.

4. Ranking in Google Maps/Local Search

While this one may seem fairly obvious, you need to think about terms a local searcher would use to find your business. They’ll most likely use the city and state in their search, so you’ll want your site to be optimized for those as well as business-specific keywords. 

For example, if you run a record store in Nicholasville, Kentucky, you’ll want to optimize for phrases like “Record Store, Nicholasville, Kentucky”, “CD Store, Nicholasville, KY”,  “Music, Nicholasville KY”,  and so forth. If your business is located in a small town, you may also want to optimize for the nearest larger city. Ryan Caldwell at Search Engine Journal discusses some other tips like:

- Anchor Text + Authority Matters, But Less

- Local Groupings

There is some good advice in a thread at the Small Business Brief forum, including a post by A.N.Onym who suggests the following tips for ranking in local search:

- have pages, mentioning your area of service

- your phone number

- your physical address

- directions on how to reach your office

- use landmarks ("after you pass the Street A and Street B intersection, you’ll see the Eiffel Tower" that’s three landmarks altogether)

- have links pointing to you from local websites and directories

- have a domain hosted locally (if locality is your primary concern)

- have ccTLD (country-specific domain - google.ca, for instance)

Bill Slawski of SEO By the Sea has a great article about Authority Documents for Google’s Local Search that is a must-read in this category.

More tips for ranking in Google Maps/Local Search? Please share.

5. Ranking in Google Blog Search

Back in ‘07, Slawski started a thread in the Cre8asite Forum looking at positive and negative things that can have an affect on your Google Blog Search Rankings. Among the positives he included were:

- Number of RSS subscriptions
- Clicks on SERP post links
- Blogrolls
- number of "high quality" blogrolls the blog is in
- ability for visitors to tag posts
- whether or not people are tagging them
- References to the blog by sources other than blogs
- Pagerank

Some negatives he mentioned:

- if posts come in short bursts or predictable intervals
- if post content differs from feed version
- If content includes a lot of spammy words
- duplicate content
- if posts are the same size
- Link distribution
- If posts mostly link to one site

ProBlogger’s Darren Rowse also looked at Google’s Blog Search patent application and pulled some takeaways from that.

More tips for ranking in Google Blog Search? Please share.

Wrap Up

It’s important to note that results from other Google search engines often turn up in regular Google results, in case you need any extra incentive to pay attention to them. This is part of Google’s Universal Search. There are lots of opportunities to get your site found in Google other than just regular web search. And this is just organic stuff. There are certainly paid search opportunities to think about too.

Landing Pages: Think Simple, Think Specific

It took a long time for big companies to enter the world of search marketing, and once they did there was sudden fierce competition for the moms and pops out there eking it out online. Now, as then, those same moms and pops can outmaneuver the big boys by capitalizing on bigger company weaknesses. Today’s advantage: landing pages.

Landing pages, for uninitiated, are where customers end up after clicking on a search ad or search result. Ideally, they serve as a sort of sign on the window, or an important step on the way toward a sales conversion. Remarkably, big companies are still getting this part of the process wrong.

Last summer, using a particular digital camera as an example, we explored how companies like Wal-Mart, Target, Circuit City, and other retailers embarrassingly blew their chance at selling that particular camera. Clicking on their ads (because they ranked incredibly poorly in the organic results for the products they carry) appearing with the very specific search term led to pages that were either unrelated promotions, lists of every camera but that one, or to pages that were so irrelevant that they weren’t even in the electronics category.

(The most ridiculous was from now out of business Circuit City, whose digital camera keyword ad led to a listing for a pet odor removal product.)

If you’re like me, you find it very annoying to search for a product, believe you’ve found a link to information on that product, follow it, and then have to search again at the destination website. That, my friends, is dropping the e-commerce ball.

What they lack, obviously, is specificity, a very important element of the landing page.

Content management company CrownPeak contacted me in advance of the launch of their new Landing Page Management tool, which they’ve debuted with a free 30 day trial. The company’s VP of marketing and strategy, Robert Rose, described the landing page as a kind of brochure for what a business is selling. That makes it a content issue, but historically landing pages and websites have been viewed (incorrectly, in his opinion), as an IT issue.

“Content changed from being driven by IT to being driven by marketers, and that has led to the resurrection of the brochure site,” he said. “The brochure idea is about content marketing. It really enables marketers to do more with their websites and create a hub for their marketing.”

Nissan, for example, hit up CrownPeak about better ways to pump content out to regional dealership landing pages. With seven regions and fifteen or so models of car, delivering that type of specificity to searchers was no doubt difficult. In addition, Zimmerman, Nissan’s agency, wanted to be able to track the response to various campaigns by model and region. The Landing Page Manager is designed to do just those types of things.

 

It’s that simple specificity, says Rose, that gives CrownPeak’s new tool an advantage over free tools like Google Analytics. “What Analytics doesn’t show is which people were actually great leads and filled out forms, which were visitors and which were customers. “A lot of people are just tire-kickers,” he said.

So, besides specificity, what makes a great landing page? “Simplicity is best,” says Michael Weiss, CEO of web-marketing firm Imagistic. “Be as simple as possible. A blurb, a form, a submit button, and you’re done. It should be a short form, with an explanation of what you’re going to get for that form.”

For example, referring to my digital camera example, Weiss quipped, “name and address and we’ll knock $20 off the camera.”

Weiss also recommends big, clean images, and not a lot of text. “I think that’s where a lot of people fail. You go to Google AdWords, and when you click it, it takes you to a site.”

Naturally, being a CrownPeak partner, Weiss recommends the Landing Page Management tool. “What’s great about this system, you just copy the URL for the right page and put that right into AdWords.”

Regardless of methods and tools, the lesson is the same. Small and medium sized businesses can get an edge on bigger competition via great landing pages that are specific to the searcher’s needs and simple to understand and use.

 

 

Is Link Authority Dead (Dying)?

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.

Links And Content Need Each Other, For NowI can’t help but think this is a silly discussion, like an argument about whether or not Lois Lane could really have Superman’s baby, but I’m diving in anyway to wrap my head around it and, in the process, take you with me.

Links And Content Need Each Other, For Now

Over at Media Post, David Berkowitz (of 360i, not Attica prison) writes about a Web where links don’t matter in SEO. You can read that article here, if you don’t mind a half an hour of the third degree to get the content (Media Post hasn’t ascribed to the concept of registration-free content, yet).

Berkowitz writes:

Content is SO 2006, as far as search engine optimization goes.

Everywhere I turn, the SEO discussions center on linking and link development…

Instead of just extolling the value of links, I started to wonder what would happen if links weren’t so highly valued. Imagine if, in this “Twilight Zone” exercise, you woke up one day to find that the major search engines no longer used inbound links as a way to rank Web sites or other types of online content. The effect would be calamitous, on par with the Department of Treasury one day saying that greenbacks would no longer be valued as currency.

From the first line its difficult to tell if Berkowitz is downgrading the role of content or criticizing the SEO world for not focusing on content enough. The concept that inbound links are a sort of online currency is a fascinating one, but as a content creator, my knee-jerk reaction to naysaying the role of stellar content is, hopefully, forgivable.

That first line was troubling enough, but in his summarization of "Content" and its sudden importance in the absence of valuable links was a lid-flipper:

Content would really become king. Keyword density, the imperfect science of including just enough of the most important keywords on any given page without spamming the search engines, becomes more important than ever.

Now here, we have a fundamental conflict in regards the concept of content, what it is, its purpose, and understanding what readers/viewers/listeners seek as opposed to what marketers (who ensure the bills are paid) want them to seek.

Berkowitz is a strategist. I am a writer. And the two of them, writers and strategists, in the real world, must work together. We could get into a philosophical discussion of backgrounds and approaches to content (I’m the indignant artist, pursuing a Master of Fine Arts in Writing, hoping all of us can join hands in a haze of patchouli and sing the praises of perfect prose), but that’s a discussion for later.

The real truth here is: one doesn’t exist without the other.

What good is content if nobody can find it? What’s the purpose of linking if there is nothing in which to link? Content drives linking and linking drives content, the two of them working in perfect symbiosis.

And all that’s great until the crafty weasels (strategists excluded) out there muddy the pure waters of relevance with keyword stuffing, link spam, et cetera. Suddenly we’re reminded why the brick-and-mortar world needs law, and why the Web needs Google as a police agent as much as organizer. Penalties are instituted, and concepts like link quality are born. Suddenly it matters who links to your content, and why.

So this is where SEObook’s Aaron Wall pipes up:

But links are openly gamed today and there are an increasing number of affordable marketing techniques that allow virtually any site to garner hundreds or thousands of quality links.

One day Google might come up with better ways to determine what to trust, but if they do, it is going to be based on who humans trust more, and who amongst those trusted sources does the best job of providing editorial value and noise filtering on their site.

Shorter, Google’s going to have to get better at understanding intrinsic end-user desire. They’re working on this, according to some patents and recent forays into personalized search. When that happens – when digital robots suddenly understand your innermost thoughts – the power of the link is not destroyed, but it is weakened.

And what do you think is left when that artificial intelligence revolution takes hold?

Content, content, content, forever content, driving the masses online to find it and share it with each other. Everything else, the noise that prevents those masses from finding what they want, either disappears or is pushed to the periphery of the page, the frame of the content. And then, quoting Berkowitz, "Copywriters’ salaries skyrocket."

Or at least, such is the hope of the content creator.

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