Search Engine Rankings New Signals Indicate Google is Using…

Posted • January 22, 2010 • 1 Comment

As Jake Blues said “Do You See The Light?” The Signs are There if We Just Listen to Google

In my last post I quoted Eric Enge’s article as I discussed page load times. Now I am going to discuss the rest of his article “Four New Signals in Search“.

The article is published in the SES January 2010 print magizine as well as being presented as a blog post on SearchEngineWatch.com.

The Topics of Today’s Discussion are:

• Social Media
• Clicks
• Web References

(Post from Search Engine Optimizician.)

Social Media

With the popularity of Facebook and Twitter there is plenty of signals available from the social media world. There is the pretty good chance the search engines are using them as a type of web reference. Because of the real-time relevance of today’s social media there is a real good chance the current “hot topics” can be gleaned from their postings and discussions.

We can get a window into these “hot topics” by using the specialized search tools for the new social media. I actually have LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter search plugins installed in my Firefox browser.

Clicks

In an interview Eric had with Google News’ Josh Cohen, Josh indicated that Google News uses click data as a ranking signal. The important click data is that which is outside of the realm of what is considered normal.

Data leaked by AOL in 2006 suggested that the first result would get 42 percent of the clicks, the second would get 12 percent, the third would get 9 percent, the fourth result received 6 percent of the clicks, and so forth. But, if one particular result gets 10 percent in the fourth position instead of something closer to 6 percent, this could be a sign that the fourth result needs to move up in the search engine results pages.

Josh also pointed out that Google News doesn’t use links as a ranking factor.

Just like we concluded that if Google AdWords is using page load time for “Quality Score”, Google would start using it as a part of their organic algorithm . We can also conclude that eventually begin using click data in the algorithm as well.

Web References

We have known for some time that Google Local uses web references as part of their ranking factor. A web reference is defined as a business mention on the web that is not part of a link.

Web References are counted as votes. These “votes” are similar to a link in the algorithm. Using our logic from the above conclusion we can also assume that web references will also find their way into the Google search algorithm as well.

Since we are talking about web references and the Google search algorithm, what about nofollowed links? Does it stand to reason that if a web reference has some weight, a nofollowed link should carry some weight as well?

My opinion is that a nofollowed link will have more weight than a web reference. Of course not all nofollowed links have the same value.

Search Engines

The thing to remember is that a search engine’s job is to return relevant results to the searcher. If they don’t the searcher will migrate to another search engine.

The search engines make their money with paid ads. If no one is searching on their site there will be no clicks on the paid ads. So on and so forth…

If your site is relevant to visitors it will be relevant to the search engines as well.

See the Light?

Late,
Gary Pool

Comments