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Fascinating post here about how years ago cinematic images affected two young men, Sergey and Larry whose destiny was to become the founders of the greatest monster of the internet – you guessed it right, the almighty Google. Both born in 1973 were only 21 years of age when a movie described by Wikipedia as a modern comedy classic was released in 1994. Read here for the connection to Matt Cutts, shagging-wagon and corporate jets.
Google wants to promote a better web experience for readers. With the growth of spam site and other SEO gaming techniques the majority of more recent sites are not high quality. Therefore, Google is weighting older sites more heavily in their algorithm, under the supposition that older sites are more likely to have quality content. This implies newer site will have to be more remarkable and add real value if they want to compete with established sites.
Matt praises WP 2.3 ; does a much better job of putting posts in one location even though can be seen in, for instance, home page and category archive. This is very important in not triggering Google’s duplicate content filters.
Matt stressed offering useful service like a demo or other training rather than just brochure-ware to score higher in index.
If you have a brick and morter location submit to Google Local business center. Free and will bring up map to your business.
Use a site map to help Google and other search engines spider you site.
Have navigation in HTML not Flash or JavaScript. Make it easy for search bots.
Finally some clarity on Google “sandbox” filter at Suntdubl
So what is search engine trust?
For the purpose of keeping things simple, I would identify a site’s trust by 3 different simple criteria:
Website Age - (most importantly the first time it was indexed)
Total # of backlinks and the overall age of those links
Total “trustscore” of other backlinks (How many .edu’s, .gov’s, high ACTUAL PR links, etc.)
Most trust criteria revolve around some dependence on age, which is actually a pretty good signal of quality. From things folks at Google have said in the past, the trustbox (or sandbox if you must) was the unintentional effect of some other filters that were implemented. Realizing that age was a great signal all the way around to defend against the overdependency on links, they’ve went buckwild with age variables ever since.
So this explains why new sites are taking longer to show up in search. Blogs are effected too but not as severely, being very well optimized and by nature putting out fresh content into the index, often daily.
Two or three years ago: SEO = Content + high PR links
Created: a micro-economy of link buying solely for google rankings
Now SEO = Crusty trusted domain + content
Will create: use your imagination.
So now an overdependance on trust will create new distortions. Go read the rest of his lengthy post. Its a keeper.
Danny Sullivan has a great article over at Search Engine Land about Google Webmaster Central’s new feature; being able to see the text link that links to you site gives webmasters a critical piece of SEO data. For example, <Danny Sullivan> is the anchor link in the previous sentence.
He gets to the point with this:
How They Link, Not How Many Links, Influences Ranking
As you can see, the data is great information. The text people use to link to you is one of the most important factors — often the most important factor — for how you will rank in Google.
Let me repeat that. The anchor text used to link to your pages often is the most important reason you’ll rank well for particular words.
People still continue to mistakenly think that doing well at Google is about getting as many links as you can. It’s not. It’s about getting quality links from important sites and ideally, very descriptive links — links using the terms you want to rank for in the anchor text.
If you’re trying to show up for some key phrase, the new data will show you if people are linking to you that way, as seen by Google. If not, then you understand that a lot more targeted link building work may need to be done.
