MediaVision Blog : Search Engine Marketing

With several key bloggers commenting that link authority is dead, (or dying) it’s perhaps a good time to start discussing what could replace or enhance it.

Firstly is it dying?

At the moment link authority forms a large part of the sites reputation in Google. With their not-so-recent campaign to target paid links that are purchased with an intention to transfer page rank, Google, IMHO has really set their stall in making sure the link authority part of the algorithm is here to stay. I believe that while it isn’t the best way to evaluate a website’s reputation on its own it will still form the backbone of Google’s algo for a long time yet.

But what could enhance it?

Well for a start there will have to be some sort of metric that includes the social media performance of a brand. Could there be scope to reward positive comment and not negative comment, or will any comment act as a vote? At the moment any link counts as a vote from the social media environment and therefore a negative event in terms of PR will have a positive effect in the search rankings. Obviously the negative is that a brand name search will return several negative articles about the brand but the link strength of the company will be strengthened overall. This is surely a weakness.

It would certainly be interesting if Google entered the social media metrics mix. I think they could be one of the few companies to actually address the issues that natural language evaluation presents.

The second is the over reliance of DMOZ. Since issuing the patent on human interaction we have seen little movement above board. There has been speculation that certain penalties, for example the 950 penalty, are linked to that patent but my feeling is that a commercial human edited directory needs to be created by Google. This will allow them to have a vetted directory of sites that do conform to their webmaster guidelines. I don’t think it should be a start point for indexing, just another factor in determining quality. The result would be that fewer spammy sites would appear for long tail searches and that’s a very good thing.

There are obviously many opinions on what can be done to improve the Google algo. All we can be certain of is that it will change and any specialist search marketing company that places too much emphasis on link strength alone is going to be hit hard by the next algo update.