- isn't "being at the top of the ontology relationship tree" the same as what we have been doing all along, trying to get to no. 1 by fair means or foul? Or does it have greater weight now? I have noticed that sites of mine in that position have actually taken a HIT to their inner pages, you know, the ones with the content related to this main niche that I am supposed to be a super-authority on now? How do we explain that kind of thing - just tweaks?
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Yes and no. Authority site creation now, in my opinion, will require greater family tree awareness when setting up the content. I think when Google crawls through a site, the first page they hit is the main one, and that thing better be on point with what the site is about, giving off enough signals that it's an authorty (backed by other attributes found off page as well). As for the hit you've taken, not sure. We need to figure out WHY the sites ranked above you are doing as well as they are doing. I've got a thought on that later...
- are we saying that this is really what Penguin is all about? The Cuttster said in one interview that the name Penguin was meant as obfuscation ("For Penguin, we thought the codename might give away too much about how it works"). I don't doubt he is telling the truth, that would leave the way open for Penguin to be about quite a tangible algorithmic feature. Could many of the changes we are seeing with Penguin be explained by this notion of graphical relationships? Could an algorithm like this EASILY see fake patterns of linking, content etc? I wouldn't be surprised - all this talk of unnatural linking, non-contextual links, excessive anchor text etc. would be on the right track, but it wouldn't be seeing the whole picture, and the Google search people would be quite happy for it to stay that way, since as long as people continue to see the solution to Penguin as simply finding another backlinking scheme that works, they will not make significant headway in defeating it.
I think if we had a way to see the graphical representation, a lot of this stuff would make more sense. Bad link neighborhoods, profile links, guestbook links..Google knows where these links are coming from based on the type of site or PAGE the link is coming from. Really, all one has to do is start reading through a lot of the Google patents to see various ways to attribute strengths of a site in web rankings. It's convoluted as hell if your not used to reading programming schema, but they sort of lay it out in the patents. At the end of the day, they look to see at WHO is trying to game the system and honestly its not hard to tell when given the overall composite picture of where links are coming from for any given website profile. So what do we have to do then to get ahead?
I think it first starts with understanding WHY the top 5 sites (forget the the top 10), are where they are in the rankings. Most keyword tools will NOT tell you that. They're all still stuck in the traditional model of keyword analysis...which some of that still plays in understanding stuff, just not as much anymore. So if I had a tool (and I might try to find a coder for this), the tool would sort of do this:
1) Enter in a keyword phrase
2) Show me graphically (sort of like that tool I linked above) what other relationship keyword terms are linked to the keyword I typed in. I'm fairly sure the tools are scraping from the related searches function of google. Now, once we have a tree of connected terms start being built out, per term we can drill into the top 5/top 10 sites per keyword term.
3) Now, give me a breakdown of Page Rank, Domain Age, Indexed Pages, etc for each site for that given keyword. Also, give me a backlink profile for each site as well. Where are these links coming from, is there any input for others to also backlink off that page
4) Maybe a function to scrape the page of the top 5/top 10 site to show H1 Tags, keyword density as well
5) Also a function to show social mentions, how many social mentions a week/month breakdown
6) Also drill down into a graphical representation of how interconnected that site is to other sites within a niche too
That's the sort of tool that I think would help with understanding the current state of rankings? What do you guys think, am I onto something, or does a tool exist like that already the way I described it?
I was really hoping this tool would have funded via kickstarter..that would have gone a long way in this effort to understand..
http://www.gooey-search.com/
Thoughts, feelings?
I have no answers, but, I do have a perspective on this due to how long I've been in this game. There won't be definitive answers for awhile I think just due to the nature of how hardcore this new algo implementation is. All we can do is test for metrics and try to replicate. But first, if we can get some structured analysis into place, that might give us a leg up, hence the sort of tool I mentioned above.
