With the first day of SMX (Search Marketing Expo) Advanced passing, there were a few things that were of interest from an SEO point of view. The “SEO Ranking Factors In 2009” was one of these things. A lot of what we already know still holds true and other SMX events like the one in London covered some of the information, but there were some tweaks to how search engine giant Google is going to be looking at things. There is a lot of speculation into Google’s future algorithm concerning links: 47 percent of people believe that the importance of links will decline while of course, still retaining at least some importance.
The URL, Title and Alt text came up as the most important on-page factors according to Rand Fishkin. Images having alt text are not only better for page validation, but seem to have a correlation with high rankings. In their words though, “Correlation is NOT causation,” which is important to note. Personally, I find it funny that Outspoken Media has this bit of information on their site, and fails validation through W3C’s Validation Markup Service for not having alt text in their images. Even a blank alt text would have gotten them out of that pinch.
A bit of information that may interest people is the data from SEOmoz concerning their view of Google’s algorithm:
• Trust authority of host domain - 25 percent
• Link population of specific page - 22 percent
• Anchor text of external links - 20 percent
• On page keyword use - 15 percent
• Traffic and CTR data - 7 percent
• Social graph metrics - 6 percent
• Hosting and registration - 5 percent
What concerns me the most is trust authority of host domain. For those just getting into setting up their own site with the hope of getting on page one of Google, this list of just how trustworthy a host domain is definitely not readily accessible. Setting these hosting providers up with a numerical value seems like it would be something Google would just sell to the highest bidder. Those in the know of numerical values would abuse it, setting up where the authority was highest. Godaddy is likely on the list of one of the higher providers since they’re mainstream enough to have sponsored NASCAR.
Another bit of information that is sure to hurt a lot of sites out there such as Squidoo is the possibility that Google may change their Nofollow algorithm. SELand broke it down very simply:
“…if you have $10 in authority to spend on those ten links, and you block 5 of them, the other 5 aren’t going to get $2 each. They’re still getting $1. It’s just that the other $5 you thought you were saving is now going to waste.”
The sculpting that sites do to give more authority to certain things rather than others is going to lose effect. Making site owners modify their sites accordingly without sculpting, since it won’t hold as much weight.
On a final note, it seems that MSN’s new project Bing is sponsoring two of the time blocks for SMX. A small pittance for the trouble to have caused many over the personal and business tracking of ranks over keywords. Looking at Bing, it doesn’t seem any different from MSN’s old design when it came down to the submission.
Here’s a funny side note: When I had first heard of Bing, typing bing.com directly into the URL bar brought up nothing. But searching for Bing on Google and clicking on their link made it work. Good job Bing.
Not much video has been released from SMX Advanced 2009 yet, but there are other videos like this one with Matt Cutts from SMX events earlier in the year.
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