(Note; the following is a guest post from my good friend Miss CJ)

How search engineers look for nepotistic links

Paid links are a bit of problem for search engine engineers because they can be misleading.  Some links are bought in order to boost rank and others are purchased for legitimate reasons, such as actually offering something interesting to a website visitor.  Not all links should be discounted but different weights can be given to allow less important links to get a full "vote". 

It's not easy to differentiate between these, but there has been a fair bit of research around it we can look at.  If search engines could discount misleading nepotistic links, their performance would improve.  In the SEO community, this would be received with mixed emotions not doubt.  Google uses methods to detect keyword spamming for example, and uses other text based methods, but their algorithm is open to link spam.

But what are search engineers doing to combat nepotistic links in modern information retrieval?

Where art meets science; the perfect marriage

(The following is a guest post by Ben McKay)

The Industry Mindset

I sometimes think that search engine optimisation is much too often approached with the wrong kind of mindset – almost a tick-box exercise, and one that limits opportunities for the success of great websites.  This brain cramp has important ramifications for the perceived professionalism of the SEO industry, but unfortunately it's not one that cannot be tackled with ease. 

In this meandering rant, I am going to address why this might be the case and (over) optimistically provide you with a way out!

The reasoning...

The reason I ask whether traditional marketing has been forgotten in SEO, is that so much of what we do as SEOs can and should be backed-up by the reasoning 'this will draw the right kind of visitors at the right time with the right intent'.  I believe that with market research, planning, implementation, creative flare, and an ongoing feedback loop of course, you can do just that – the same way you attempt to carry-out more traditional marketing campaigns.

Traditional Marketers have a NIGHTMARE measuring ROI

Previous generations of marketers were limited regarding the availability of information at their disposal, trying to justify advertising budgets when measuring the return on that nightmare investment was not my favoured task! 

The adage: 'You’ve got to spend money to make money' - Could have been more honest in saying: 'You’ve got to risk losing money to possibly make money'. -- Now that we have a chance to operate as marketers online, with all the tools and information at our disposal, should we not take advantage of this? 

Shhhhhh be very quiet, we’re hunting information retrievers

Let's bounce off in a new direction, begin anew as it where and look at what resides in the craniums that index the world’s information. I would like to introduce to you a concept, (much like page segmentation),that isn’t a new one. It has been in front you all this time, but like a black hatter at dollar domain bazzar, you were to busy to notice.

As the regular Trail riders would know, we’ve gone from extreme interest in behavioural metrics and personalized search to more tempered views of potential usage. Yes, it’s true, I seem to have a bit of a personality disorder and waffling seems the call of the day…. to the uninitiated that is.

You see, it is the regular index, where implicit feedback signals seem more difficult to grasp than tumbleweed in a tornado. Time and time again this wayward web wanderer has mused that it is far more likely these signals could find value within personalized search than out in the wild.

And what do we know from our counterparts from Google? We know they’ve called them noisy and spammable; which some research done here gives credence to the claim. We also know the mantra for 09 (and recent years past) has been ‘personalization’. OK, this makes some sense and maybe worth delving into deeper? But where do we look?

Putting behavioural metrics in perspective

Wise men don't judge: they seek to understand. - (Wei Wu Wei)

So here’s the question; are behavioural metrics being used in modern search? You do remember them right? Those warm and fuzzy little signals such as bounce rates that there all the rage in late 2008 in the search engine optimization world? Sure you do… but let’s take one last look.

Although bounce rates received the biggest attention, we would be remiss not to start by quickly listing some signals commonly looked at by information retrieval folks. The two elements include implicit and explicit data (actions and interactions) – examples can include;

Implicit signals

1. Query history (search history)
2. SERP interaction (revisions, selections and bounce rates)
3. User document behaviour (time on page/site, scrolling behaviour);
4. Surfing habits (frequency and time of day)
5. Interactions with advertising
6. Demographic and geographic
7. Data from different application (application focus – IM, email, reader);
8. and closing a window.

Explicit signals

1. Adding to favourites
2. Voting (a la Search Wiki or toolbar)
3. Printing of page
4. Emailing a page to a friend (from site)

Now that we’re past that let’s get a little geeky so those information retrievers don’t shake their heads to hard at us – the terminology. I am as guilty as the next Gypsy of flinging the term ‘behavioural metrics’ about over the last year or so, even performance metrics. If you want to research this more, start by using the term; implicit/explicit user feedback signals – because that’s what we’re talking about.

and thanks to Steve Gerencser for sending the pic