How Global Link Authority Will Lose Relevancy to Subscription Data

Search engines, especially Google, place a lot of trust on Global domain authority when computing their relevancy scores. If a page is on a trusted site it automatically gets a boost in relevancy scores. Premium content providers know that Google needs them so they take advantage of their market position. Lets look at a few examples of authoritative leverage in action:

How will Google minimize the media's ability to sell advertisements that rank in Google as though they had editorial value? They are going to have to start breaking sites and search results into pieces. If they do, it will not only minimize the downside potential of advertisements on popular sites, but that would also kill the .edu spam.

Personalization will lower the profitability of leveraging off topic broad nationwide ads by lowering their exposure by biasing search results to locally trusted sources. Matt Cutts has talked about personalization recently, not once but twice.

Given that some domainers control millions of daily page views, and there are plenty of cheap traffic sources I don't think raw usage data will be that strong of a signal of quality. Like links, usage data is easy to manipulate.

As the web gets polluted with low cost links, other low cost marketing opportunities, and recycled junk the key to Google's success is tracking attention data. They have the most popular feed reader, and their new homepage allows you to create topical tabs that show related feeds.

In tracking how people consume and share information they can understand local topical networks, while reinforcing the views of the local topical editors. It sorta creates a bunch of micro-Digglike communities, but more free-flowing, with less focus on free votes. Time is the one thing we are all limited on, and if you are paying attention to something then there is a lot of value in trusting that attention.

Published: April 2, 2007 by Aaron Wall in marketing

Comments

April 9, 2007 - 6:32am

Great Post Aaron.

I've had my own thoughts of this kicking around in my head. I can see Google moving from authoritative links to Subscription data (which overlaps with Personalized SERPs - with its emphasis on widget, Google Reader etc).

However, the authority links that Google can find include the whole Internet; whereas, the subscription data Google has access to are tremendously less. And I would venture to say that Google Reader and Google Personalized Homepage data probably skews heavily to early adopters and not mainstream users.

This would provide skewed data for more *general ranking* purposes (as opposed to for personalized SERPs).

April 3, 2007 - 12:01am

Hey Aaron,

a great post ... I like your visionary posts of this type... in fact I see no reason why google wouldn't have such thingie ready in the labs... or already active to some percentage in the ranks.

see you in NYC at the SES!

best,christoph

April 3, 2007 - 2:19am

Brilliant Aaron. This makes a lot of sense on several levels.

April 3, 2007 - 2:03pm

All Google has to do is roll back the algo to how it was 4 years ago. ;)

Add new comment

(If you're a human, don't change the following field)
Your first name.
(If you're a human, don't change the following field)
Your first name.
(If you're a human, don't change the following field)
Your first name.