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Google says “Links Are Only 1%” – WTF?
The jaw-dropping revelation from Google that I’m still digesting is that links are no longer the best metric and they represent only 1% of the algorithm. References: Search Engine Land live blog of Google press conference and TechCrunch live blog of Google press conference. (AllThingsD failed to grasp the significance of the details and did not include them in its report.)

What does that mean? I know many people in the SEO community would immediately say, “Well, it’s the MOST IMPORTANT 1%”. Well, certainly that 1% is more important to many SEOs than the other 99% but that argument will have to wait for another day. The fact that Sergey Brin puts so little apparent importance on links is significant. Here is how Danny transcribed the exchange (at the very end of the press conference):

Question from Erick at TechCrunch: Is PageRank long in the tooth? Are links the most trusted metrics still, as we’re on a web that’s not just data, how does that get into the results.

Sergey: No they’re not (links aren’t enough), and we decided that in 1999. We use various link algorithms, but they’re 1%. There are 100 signals that we use now. We have to continue to develop. Part is that there’s spam. The web also evolves. We’re able to do a much better job than we did a year ago. If we rested on our laurels and stuck with the paper we published in 1998, we’d be pretty stuck right now.

Here is the TechCrunch take:

Schonfeld: Is PageRank long in the tooth, are links the still the best metric?

Sergey: No they are not and we decided that in 1999. We use various link algorithms, including what pagerank has evolved to, links are 1%, 100 other factors we look at. Yes,there is spam, and the web changes. We are able to do better and better, can do a much better job ranking than we could a decade ago, if we had rested on our laurels and just stayed with what was in our paper we published in 1998 we would be in pretty bad shape right now.

Want immediate consumer trust? Buy search display ads
But that isn’t all I learned about search this week. For example, it appears (I am interpreting data) that users trust display ads over search results more than elsewhere. That needs further study and I hope I find some data relating to the topic. Do people really trust search engines more than other Web sites? That’s an enormous amount of consumer-guiding power which has been consolidated in the hands of a very small number of companies. What I read in SE Roundtable’s coverage which led me to this interpretation was: “The % that made a purchase on the advertiser site after seeing display only rose 43%, 121% search only, and Search & Display rose 173%”

Intuitively, advertisers have been struggling with the discrepancy between non-search display advertising performance and search listing performance for years. But to see the combination of search-and-display quantified like this opened my eyes. I was unaware of the influence of this bond between the two mediums in terms of consumer trust and confidence. They seem to be trusting search engines to vet their display advertisers on some moral or ethical basis (I hope that is really happening at some level).

Half of all SEMs want to pay higher advertising costs – WTF?
50% of poll respondents favor the proposed deal between Yahoo! and Microsoft. See the poll results here. I am on record about why I feel there is a significant antitrust issue between Yahoo! and Microsoft. The deal if it goes through won’t, in my opinion, take anything away from Google and will probably only help inflate the bogus market share numbers Google gets anyway. So who are these 50% of SEMs who want to see Microsoft and Yahoo! drive up the cost of acquiring paid search advertising? Are they the folks who don’t buy ads?

Google Web updates blog indexing faster than Blogsearch – Huh?
Google’s Jeremy Hylton, who oversees their Blogsearch (and has been nothing but professional with me in our online conversations) says “Google has become faster and faster at ranking new content.”. Jeremy, not to make you out to be the bad guy or anything, but remember my complaint earlier this year about Google throttling blogsearch? Well, I currently write content for about half a dozen blogs, including SEO Theory. I have yet to see the latest SEO Theory post appear in Google Blogsearch — its articles used to show up within minutes in Blogsearch. This week’s SEO Theory post showed up in Main Web Search within minutes as expected. What happened in Blogsearch?

Did Google Forget To Include Blogsearch in Blended Results?
Todd Friesen complained on Twitter that he couldn’t find any examples of Blogsearch injections into Google Universal Search Results. I sent him an email suggesting a query but I guess he didn’t like it. I’m not sure of what he was looking for, but I still think something odd is happening with Blogsearch. It’s just not as useful as it once was, prior to the October 2008 update. I fear Blogsearch now has a dual-index structure and if your blog stops posting frequently it gets dumped into the secondary index. Best SEO Blog, with only two updates per week (on average) seems to make the cut. SEO Theory, which still gets more traffic than Best SEO Blog, doesn’t make the cut. Go figure.

PageRank Sculptors rally round the … slides
Just when you think it should be dead, PageRank Sculpting raises its ugly head again. This is the post from October 5 that, as I write this post (early on October 8), still does not appear in Google Blogsearch. Jeremy, you hooked in to me still? But to get back to the point, people who did not notice that Google had changed the way it handles PageRank through nofollowed links have begun attempting to sculpt PageRank again. Since you cannot track and measure PageRank, attempting to sculpt it is equivalent to carving a bar of soap with a chainsaw — while you’re blindfolded.

Bounce rate should not affect your (Google) rankings
This item has not really been hotly debated but many people in the SEO community have taken a “better safe than sorry” approach to connecting bounce rates with search rankings. Xoogler Vanessa Fox says bounce rate doesn’t matter. Todd Friesen says you should still resolve your bounce rate (I agree you want a low bounce rate — but don’t get me started on Google Analytics’ bounce rate reporting, which is completely bizarre, in my opinion).

The takeaway here is that bounce rate, time on page, etc. don’t appear to be factors in the Google algorithm.

Yahoo! dropped the “keywords” meta tag
This came as a surprise to many of us. Yahoo! no longer supports “keywords” meta tag caused quite a stir and some discussion across the SEO Web. Google ignores the tag. Microsoft seems ambivalent about it. Ask and Yahoo! have not really said much about it but the last time any of us tested the tags Ask and Yahoo! were still supporting them. Well, that test (for me) was a LONG time ago. I have not been counting on Yahoo! to rank sites based on the meta tag so I don’t feel like I was caught flat-footed. I use keywords meta tags mainly for psychological effect (SEOs who think they know more than me usually snicker when they see I use the tags – it’s easy to fool a fool). A couple of people have announced they will test Yahoo!’s statement. This is one SEO test anyone can do without much chance of screwing it up, so if you’re curious go ahead and test it.

Google wants to crawl your AJAX
Frankly, I think this is a rather ambitious initiative from Google. They announced they want a standard to help search engines crawl and index AJAX content. There are many challenges which must be overcome. One downside of Google’s crawlable AJAX initiative is the threat that Google would probably deindex sites that cloak for AJAX. So what if they develop a standard that only 15% of Webmasters use? Does that mean the other 85% of AJAX sites can expect to lose their Google rankings because they don’t know about or adopt software that supports the standard? Think about this, Google. There is a public relations nightmare standing on your doorstep. Don’t invite it in.

Google also wants to crawl your CSS files. I block search engines from crawling my CSS files because they hit my servers with unnecessary repeated requests. Danny Sullivan suggests using 304-not modified to tell search engines CSS files are unchanged. He believes that will save bandwidth. BZZT! Not much, Danny. Search engines need to get over their issues with people spamming through CSS. There is more at stake than mere bandwidth — the server’s lifetime and performance are shortened by all those repeated requests and sending them 304 codes. On a small site that doesn’t amount to much. On a large site it amounts to a great deal. I would be willing to compromise on CSS file crawling if the search engines only fetched the files once or twice a day. Maybe a robots.txt line like “Crawl-1xday: /css/” would help us all.

Wrapping Up
I have browsed through a lot of blogs and tweets, gleaning little pieces of information from the conference. Even if I had attended the conference I would have browsed through lots of blogs and tweets because one person just cannot take it all in. I am sure there are other things I saw that made me stop and think but this article is already getting long in SEO Theory style.

Of course, it’s starting to look like Best SEO Blog will have to carry the Blogsearch load for SEO Theory. Come on, Google — you can do better than this with Blogsearch. Give us back our robust, quick indexing that we lost last October.

Thank you to Barry Schwartz and SE Roundtable for SE Conference Coverage
You know, a fair number of people publicly thanked Lisa Barone on Twitter for her live blogging SMX East. Not to take anything away from Lisa, I think Barry Schwartz and his team at SE Roundtable deserve the biggest thanks. They cover all the sessions (or most of them) for these search conferences, allow people to ask questions and chat back and forth online, and now even include the Tweets from conference attendees (a dubious value, I think, but at least they didn’t include all the Retweets). I cannot afford to take time out of my work schedule to travel to all these conferences. SE Roundtable’s conference coverage has been a God-send for SEOs like me.