Proven Correlations between linking and ranking and other SEO factors.

[mikeb]

... Or perhaps it is just inertia and those who would say it should be hidden haven't managed to persuade those who say stay with the tried and true. In general Google has been much more open recently about what should appear in webpages of quality. This gaming argument for displaying PageRank would be quite counter to that.

However I come back to my key question. How does this fixation on continuing to use PageRank help Google to achieve its business goals? Google knows much more about how people are looking at and clicking away from web pages. All that data is a much better resource to determine which are the quality web pages. That would clearly help them to deliver better web pages in their SERP results, which would in turn help to grow their search audience and thus their advertising revenues.

Google came out and said somewhere (I put a link to a cutts video) that google does not use analytics data eg bounce on page in SERPS. I seem to remember he said "that the fact a user bounces can mean they got the answer immediately" or something similar.

The hidden back picture to this, I can only assume is they tried it and it did not work. They tried to correlate site useage metrics with subjective guinea pig tests of quality, and came away with little or no correlation. If it had worked, I am sure they would use it - they say they do not.

So they are stuck with the link authority (page rank) and content model and trying to improve that.

The biggest change of recent times is to penalize some forms of linking in order to actively penalize spam. Page Rank may help with that.

[bwelford]

So they are stuck with the link authority (page rank) and content model and trying to improve that.

I do not believe that is true. The personalized search results they now show for any individual searcher shows how much richer are the information sources they have on visitors and how they move around the Internet. My guess is that their major effort in improving search results are working on this.

Matt Cutts and his group are merely conducting a rearguard action to help preserve some credibility for the PageRank concept. It is a losing battle and I am sure at some time will be abandoned.

Clearly we have very different perceptions about what Google is doing in this area and only time will tell which perception is nearer the truth.

[mikeb]

I do not believe that is true. The personalized search results they now show for any individual searcher shows how much richer are the information sources they have on visitors and how they move around the Internet. My guess is that their major effort in improving search results are working on this.

Matt Cutts and his group are merely conducting a rearguard action to help preserve some credibility for the PageRank concept. It is a losing battle and I am sure at some time will be abandoned.

Clearly we have very different perceptions about what Google is doing in this area and only time will tell which perception is nearer the truth.

Personalized search is a tweak on the base content/link model, essentially superimposing history and location to the base.
It is not really an alternative to it.

In essence "social" signals and "news" are refinements of tweaking on content freshness, and link sources. Again a tweak. Because the content that gets shown in news has to be deemed "authority" to start with.

They are trying to add a new dimension with "author" and "brand", in the hope of giving traction to google plus - which is faililng lamentably. Only marketers use it. Although "hangouts" are good..

I think google's biggest problem is spamming the user senseless, that is on the average search page they break their own rules of quality with most of the first fold covered in adds. That will drive users away when the better mousetrap comes...

[bwelford]

I think google's biggest problem is spamming the user senseless, that is on the average search page they break their own rules of quality with most of the first fold covered in ads. That will drive users away when the better mousetrap comes...

I guess that is the 64,000 dollar question. Who will be bringing that better mousetrap. If it is Google, then I don't see it involving an even more refined version of the PageRank approach. If they stay fixated on PageRank and links, then it will be someone else, perhaps Facebook.