I worked this out in email this afternoon. It’s stone obvious, once you think about it, so I think it might be on the horizon now — if it’s not already happening.
What the hell are you talking about, Greg?
I think the next level of search engine algorithms is going to be based in an heuristic observation of end-user behavior to correlate keyword relevance to actual relevance.
Do you see? Google and other search engines identify patterns of keywords in static HTML documents to try to identify keyword-relevant content. They do this because it’s cheap. Before that, they used gunk like meta tags because that was even cheaper — because that had too little hardware and software and too many documents to index.
The hardware and software problems are gone, plus Google has a huge and growing database of user behavior that is has harvested from the many bits of Google software people load on their systems. Moreover, Google has learned to draw sophisticated inferences from user behavior.
So consider two web pages. One is very strong on relevant keywords, but weak on useful content. The other is not as strong on keywords, but it delivers an ocean of very useful data. When users click into the first page, they tend to click out right away — high bounce rate, short time on site, few pageviews per visit. Users of the other site stay for hours and read everything twice — low bounce rate, long time on site, many pageviews per visit.
Assuming Google or another search engine can measure all of this end-user behavior, which site is actually more relevant to real people?
This is so obvious that it has to happen. If Google doesn’t do it, its successor as the number one search engine will.
What does it portend for you? For one thing, dumbstunt SEO plays like Localism are doomed. But more importantly: Now and forever, content is king. A highly-passionate, well-written, deeply-informative weblog is going to kick the ass of any site trying to get by on money and high-gloss lipstick.
If you deliver the goods, the search engines are going to find a way Read more