On occassion, I feel that my blog posts here may make it seem that I’m an insufferable know-it-all in the realm of SEO, which certainly isn’t the case. To illustrate the point, I thought it would be revealing and worthy of discussion to bring up several questions to which I don’t have good answers. Here goes:
- The Diminishing Value of Anchor Text
The theory goes that if a page is linked to multiple times on a single page, the subsequent anchor texts (assuming they are unique) will carry less weight, or perhaps no weight at all in the rankings. For example, if I linked to this groovy thing on utensil art, which is coolerific, the search engines would give more weight to the anchor text “groovy thing” than “utensil art” and “coolerific” – true or false? - How Far Does Synonymy Go?
In a search like this one for Bryan Gumbel (purposely mis-spelled), note how Google appears to treat the search as though it were the more likely phrase, “Bryant Gumbel.” In this situation, assuming I really did want to optimize for “Bryan Gumbel,” could I conceptually rank well by having a stronger page than the top few for the mis-spelled phrase, or is Google giving weight to listings that have the proper spelling? - Can Link Removals Hurt Rankings?
Let’s say you have a site that an editor adds at Wikipedia. A few weeks later, another editor decides to remove that link – the search engines spider and discover the addition and, later, the removal. Will the temporal loss of a high quality link affect you more adversely than if the link had never been placed at all? Is removal from Wikipedia (or other high authority sites) a factor in hurting rankings more than simply taking that link’s juice out of your site/page’s strength? (note – Wikipedia might not be a great example, since links are often added and later removed) - Does Sharing Registrants with Spammers Hurt You?
Matt Cutts recently alluded to the idea that Google knows about all of your domains. Since this is the case, would they be inclined to penalize a high-quality, white hat site if they noticed that dozens or hundreds of other domains from the same registrant were manipulative, low quality spam (assuming you had never attempted to use the spam domains to build link pop for the legit site)? - How Much of the Original PageRank Formula Still Matters?
Obviously, the toolbar PageRank is barely worth watching, but what about that original formula? This very well researched page on the subject recently made the top of Digg and shows through example how PR would be calculated in several linking examples. But, what I’m curious about is what role that portion of the “over 100 factors” PageRank plays. I had been a skeptic for a long time that it was anything more than 5-10%, but recently, I’ve been wondering if there might be a bit more weight to it than that (possibly a full 20-30%). - Yahoo!, MSN & PageRank
Let’s say that Yahoo! and/or MSN decided to adopt an exact replica of PageRank in their algorithms. Yes, I know it’s patented, but how would Google ever know or find out so they could issue a cease and desist or lawsuit? Do you think they could puzzle it out to a degree that it could serve as hard evidence? Even if it’s not happening now (and I doubt that it is), is it possible that years ago, a major search engine did decide to copy Google’s patented methodology? - Text Placement Weighting
Remember Michael Murray of Fathom’s quote from last week? While I’m not a big believer that text placement in code is given any significant measure of weight in the algos, I do wonder about how the content structure of a page might impact rankings. For example, let’s say you had three unique article pages with three paragraphs each and each had one paragraph on lemmings. If the first article had the first paragraph on lemmings, the second made the middle paragraph on lemmings and the third used the last paragraph for lemming discussion, which one would rank best, or would it matter at all? - Higher Links = More Weight
Take a page with 6 outbound links, all to different, never-before crawled web pages, and use images as your links (thus giving no anchor text). If all of those pages were targeting exactly the same nonsensical KW phrase and each had precisely the same degree of rank-worthy content (though not duplicate), would the higher-placed link (link 1 of 6) from your linking page carry more weight than lower-placed links (link 2 or 3 of 6)?
Obviously, I have my own opinions on many of the above, but I’d love to hear your thoughts on each (before I try to weigh in). And, if anyone has done research (or cares to do research on these), please point to it (though be aware that “removing all other factors,” a critical part of any rankings research test, is exceptionally difficult). If you’ve got stumpers of you own, feel free to post those, too and we’ll “have at ’em!”
Wow… Russ Jones of Virante has got answers to many of these (and shows his research) on his blog – thegooglecache. That blog is going straight onto my daily reading list; very impressive stuff.
