Writing in Search Engine Watch Aaron Shear explains that Google has shifted - and will continue to shift - its search engine algorithm to be based more on user behavior and less on other factors.

In other words, Google is increasingly seeking to align its organic rankings with how search engine users interact with such websites, and less with the traditional factors of site structure, webpage optimization and even authoritative back-links.

As you can imagine, this has MAJOR implications for Internet marketers. In particular, according to Mr Shear, Google is focusing more and more on the following indicators of user behavior:

• Website performance - the degree to which it loads and functions correctly;
• Bounce rate - the percentage of web visitors who bounce back to the search results. If 80 percent or more of visitors return to Google after landing on your site, your site will probably be demoted or delisted. Having a bounce rate of 50 to 60 percent is apparently enough to keep your site ranked, but if you can get your bounce rate to below than 20 percent, your site will be performing in the top percentile and apt to rank well. It’s also arguable that, all else being equal, if you have a lower bounce rate than your competitors, your site will rank more highly.
• Links - authoritative back links are still of the utmost importance. It’s just that with the growing significance of user behavior, they’re no longer ‘all-important’. Aaron Shear says you should continue using blogs, social bookmarking sites such as StumbleUpon, social chat engines, such as Twitter, and social networks, such as Facebook, for links.
• RSS - how many RSS feed subscribers you have. All else being equal, the more RSS feed subscribers you have, the higher you will rank. Mr Shear says that having at least 25 subscribers for an article (or page) is desirable, but if you can get 50 or more, it will be relatively easy to get highly competitive article themes highly ranked in the search engine rankings.
• Content - this is still highly important, but not enough. Aaron Shear says authoritative back-links trump great content and our experience bears this out too.

Okay, so what does all this mean for Internet marketers and what should you do? Well, the first thing to note is that junk sites (i.e. sites with worthless or redundant content) are less and less likely to rank well in Google. This is simply due to having high bounce rates and few authoritative back-links. Both of which derive from poor content.

On the other hand, having a perfectly functioning site with great content won’t be enough. You need to encourage people to sign up to your RSS feeds and/or actively attract back-links.

So, in a sense, nothing has changed. The formula for a high-ranking website is still great content and quality back-links. But what IS clearer than ever, is that Google is watching what PEOPLE are doing in relation to your site, and, as such, it will become less and less possible to use ‘black-hat’ and even ‘grey-hat’ technological tricks to fool Google into giving your site a high ranking. Of course, that’s not to say people won’t try…

Source: Aaron Shear, “Google’s Algorithm is Shifting”, Search Engine Watch, October 7, 2008

Heads up for Yahoo search engine watchers. Yahoo is rolling out changes to its crawling, indexing and ranking algorithms over the next few days.

According to Yahoo, we can expect to see some “ranking changes and page shuffling in the index.”

Source: Sharad Verma, “Weather Report: Yahoo! Search Index Update”, Yahoo! Search Blog, September 9, 2008

Interesting article by Patrick Altoft - he reckons Google may have reduced the weighting it gives to anchor text in its search engine algorithm.

Anchor text is the text that appears in website links. In other words, instead of simply displaying the URL of a given website, you might provide some descriptive text - this is known as anchor text. As an example, “http://www.kikabink.com/news/” is the straight URL of the home page of Kikabink News. But if I wanted this link to appear as “Internet marketing newsletter” I would write “Internet marketing newsletter” as the descriptive or anchor text.

According to Mr Altoft, anchor text is the “biggest flaw” in the Google algorithm. He believes that anchor text has no relation to trust for most queries.

“Just because a site has 5 million links with the anchor text ‘loans’ doesn’t mean its a good search result for the query ‘loans’. Currently there are two types of sites ranking for commercial queries - ones that rank due to the TrustRank of their incoming links (links from newspaper websites and quality blogs) and ones that rank because they have thousands of paid links with keywords in the anchor text.”

At this stage, the under-weighting of anchor text is just a theory… but certainly an interesting, and possibly valid, one.

Source: Patrick Altoft , “Google Changes Algorithm - Anchor Text Less Important”, BlogStorm, August 22, 2008

I won’t hold my breath just yet, but a new search engine, SearchMe, has emerged that may just change the search paradigm.

I can’t really give SearchMe justice by describing it. You’ll more easily appreciate its potential by trying it out for yourself (see link below). However, in essence, SearchMe provides a visual preview of the webpages that result for a given keyword search. In my opinion, this provides a much richer indication of what a given webpage is about than the text listings you find in Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Live.

SearchMe has also just released a swag of new features including new video and image search engines, as well as a new visual bookmarking tool called stacks, which allows you to bookmark, group and share sites with others.

If SearchMe’s underlying search algorithm is anywhere near as powerful as Google’s - and, as you’ll see, it offers some interesting search options – it may eventually build a serious market for – and dominate - visual search. Whether visual search itself will ever become preferred over text-based search is another question. However, with  100,000 - 200,000 queries per day and growing, SearchMe is certain a search engine to keep an eye on.

The only thing SearchMe will need to work on is a viable business model. Not particularly hard, given the examples set by Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. If it does opt for an advertising revenue model, SearchMe will just need to balance the interests of searchers with the monetization aims of Internet marketers. Alternatively, it may do well to emulate Google and focus on attracting and achieving a critical mass of users before it seeks to monetize them.

As a search tool, SearchMe does not anywhere near match the depth of Google’s data  but is still worth using. Also, note that you can submit websites that it hasn’t already indexed – perhaps a good opportunity for getting exposure among the “early adopters” in your market. Most of all, keep an eye out for the marketing opportunities that SearchMe may present.

Click here to try out SearchMe for yourself

Source: Michael Arrington, “SearchMe Launches Stacks, Gets Serious About Search Relevance”, TechCrunch, June 24