Is Link Authority Dead (Dying)?

A month ago, SEObook.com author Aaron Wall blew the whistle on relevancy problems in Google’s SERPs. Big name sites, like eBay and Yahoo, set up "infinite" subdomains, addressing various topics, while others bought websites that already had high rankings in Google’s index.

So, in essence, the big brands, who already had tremendous authority and presence, were leveraging that status to rank for as many high-paying keywords as possible. And if that weren’t enough, they began buying other slots in the SERPs – a strategy that gets your online property appearing three or four times in the top ten results.

"The practice of measuring online influence by links is truly dead. Link authority, as it was called, was good while it lasted," suggests Edelman’s Steve Rubel. "The main reason link authority is dead is that there are so many places where people can publish and connect with peers."

And that presents a prime moment for change in how rankings are measured. But how would they do that?

Enquiro’s Gord Hotchkiss recently interviewed usability guru Jakob Nielsen, who also notes that things will have to change to better serve the end user.

"I think that with counting links and all of that," said Nielsen, "there may be a change and we may go into a more behavioral judgment as to which sites actually solve people’s problems, and they will tend to be more highly ranked."

How that would be done is still not abundantly clear and Nielsen doesn’t have a lot of faith that personalized search will actually lead to it. From the artificial intelligence side, personalization has to do a lot of guesswork.

Jeff Jarvis notes Nielsen//NetRatings’ announcement that they would no longer measure page views, and instead would measure the amount of time users spend at a site. While that may be a part of the next equation, Jarvis thinks that won’t be good enough in an age of instant messaging and other widgets that are always on, but not always used.

In fact, with so many widgets out there, it is impossible to know total audience numbers in terms of popularity, traffic, attention, or engagement.

"I’ve often said that Google’s audience is many times what is reported because Google distributes itself as widgets — ads, maps, feeds…." writes Javis.

"There’s a very long list of applications — RSS, widgets, mobile, apps — and kinds of content — video, podcasts — but also of new sorts of measurements — such as influence, meme-starting, involvement, creation, engagement, popularity — that aren’t even being tackled. And there are new dimensions that need to be explored, such as measuring a person’s trust, influence, or even fame across many platforms, sites, applications, and so on."

In other words, it’s complicated.

David Brain, CEO and President of Edelman Europe, is working on a formula for a social media index, the likes of which we may see embraced by Google and other search engines in the future.

"When people talked about on-line influence in the past they were often referring to bloggers and Technorati scores," Brain said, "though obviously influence was always more complicated than that.

"But now with the increasing mass adoption of Twitter and Facebook and favourites listings like Digg and Del.icio.us things have moved on. Bloggers Twitter and Facebookers Dig. Many of us are multi-platform users and so our online ‘footprint’ is much more dispersed.

Brain suggests a multilateral approach that includes PageRank, inbound links, subscribers, content focus, update frequency, comment numbers, numbers of friends, number of Twitter followers, number of LinkedIn contacts, photos and videos uploaded.

And if so, life on the web just got a whole lot more complicated, hair is about to become whiter, or fall out, or be pulled out, especially if you’ve invested the last decade in traditional SEO.

But it hasn’t changed yet, and there’s no guarantee it will. But with all the industry experts talking about it, you can bet something’s about to happen.

(apologies to Rachel for using her page, but it was the first one listed in Google, which I guess is some sort of honor)

Search engine visitors get to see your profile pic, five of your friends (and a convenient link to see five more at a time), and whether you post a lot of pictures, notes, join a lot of groups, and have a lot of people posting on your wall. Clicking anything on the page (except to refresh friends) results in a registration prompt, so that’s all there is to it.

So, really, this is a message to everyone on Facebook that you need to understand how important it is that you know your profile might be in Google. If you don’t like it, you can go into your settings and change who can find you in search engines to something more limiting. If you don’t take yourself out of the search engines, then you might want to change that picture of you and the beer bong at that wild party from being your profile picture.

In the meantime, we can be happy to know that Steve Rubel’s got a public profile, as does Robert Scoble. If you’d like to add me as a friend on Facebook, click here (but you’ll need to be signed in).

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 I grabbed a pre-release copy from his publisher and read it on the plane to India a couple weeks back. It’s a great, easy read and I was quite impressed with his balance. It’s SO not a get-rich-quick book, in case you were worried. I do recommend it, if only as a challenge to your status quo.

Now, Tim is a writing some really tantalyzing posts on his blog at the moment… I’m sure they were prepared in advanced and queued up ready to go in time for the book launch, but that’s not the point. They’re juicy content.

But check this out… go look at all the submitted stories from his blog on Digg. Notice something?

Two stories have been promoted to the front page and one more is about to go there (this one). The other nine submitted stories have almost universally performed really poorly… all but one not even making it to double figures. Is this because their content sucked? Is this because they were submitted with bad titles and descriptions? “No” to all the above.

There is only one key reason those two promoted stories (almost three) were so much more successful on Digg: the submitter. The first story to get promoted was submitted by Karim Yergaliyev and the other two by Muhammad Saleem (of Pronet fame).

Both these guys are among the very top Diggers. When they submit a story hundreds (even thousands) of other Diggers see that story in one of a few highlighted ways and are then more likely to digg these stories than others. Never mind the details about how that works… the point is clear: your success on Digg starts with delectable content but the clincher is getting your post submitted by one of the top Diggers. Yes, there are exceptions to this rule, but I’m giving you the best scenario with the highest probability of success, ok!

Remember my story of a few weeks ago, about how all Kevin Rose’s submitted stories on Digg get promoted (ALL of them!)? Well, check out Muhammad’s success rate. I’ve not done the math on this precisely but it looks like about 25 to 30 per cent of all his submitted stories get promoted, on average.

Translated: if Muhammad Saleem submits your story it means a) you’ve written an impressive enough post to get the attention of a top Digger (well done!) and b) you have, say, a 25 per cent chance of a bucket-load of traffic from a promoted story on Digg!

(Karim’s stats are roughly the same: out of his last eight submitted stories, fully half of them were promoted to the front page!)

Now, you can leave it all to chance or you can think hard about how you can befriend some of the top Diggers. Muhammad Saleem, for example, is very approachable. Start by adding value in the comments of posts he writes on the Pronet blog, so he notices you. If you have good reason to do it, link back to a relevant post of your own in a comment you leave on his blog. Do what I did and send him a message or two via MyBlogLog. I didn’t send rubbish; for memory it was a suggestion to check out a post of mine that was on-topic with something he’d written somewhere.

The point is, get committed and creative and you’ll get noticed… in a good way! Just don’t hassle, for goodness sake

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Mashable’s Kristen Nicole broke the news, and noted that “[c]ertain keyword commands operate in a similar manner to syndicated Google gadgets, but will allow user preferences to be specified as a function of the query.  This makes it easier for users to remember, and will also capture their attention; this is something developers should remember when submitting their Google gadget to the directory.”

But the last half of that sentence leads into a small problems with Google’s gadgets – at the moment, there just aren’t that many of them.  Nicole thinks the new “embeddable” ability “offers a large potential for increased integration of Google’s front page and usefulness of its gadgets.”

Steve Rubel also noted the limited availability of gadgets, and, like Nicole, thinks the latest upgrade is “an important development.”  But as he continues, he writes, “[O]ne wonders if Google will eventually rolling [sic] this all up into their new universal search and ‘widgetsense.’  As you look down the road, you can see this as an avenue to deliver one heckuva an opt-in online ad.  The key is that the information delivered must be compelling enough.”

On one last, pretty much unrelated, note, both Nicole and Rubel drop the hyphen from the word “co-op.”  I’m not sure if this is some grammatical convention I missed out on, but, hey, at least it provided me with a pun for the title.

I haven’t seen the report itself, but Steve Rubel says "this is the first report I have seen that really delves into what drives and motivates people to engage with the web."  I’ll get a copy of it and see.

But I still contend that a more ideal community is scale free in structure.  What I wonder is if you could benchmark these levels of engagement against a power law — not just to test Forrester’s findings, but to help a given company realize — "we are under-weighted in critics!"

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Editor’s Note: Steve is a former blog partner of WebProNews. As such, we held off on this story for a couple of days to await comment. That comment hasn’t come, but we imagine it’s like asking a star running back how he feels about fumbling. Fair enough, right?

A week ago, at 5:44 a.m., Rubel posted on his Twitter page the following:

PC Mag is another. I have a free sub but it goes in the trash

It’s a short pair of sentences long on impact: short because Twitter is for stream-of-consciousness blogging with entries limited to 140 characters; impacting because Rubel is a big player at Edelman, a PR firm representing Microsoft, Palm, Mozilla, Adobe, among others that like PC Magazine’s 11 million subscribers.

That takes it well beyond an idle (public and permanent) statement to 1,600 Rubel Twitter-thought followers (isn’t interesting we live in a time where people can subscribe, basically, to your every thought as you type them? Is that narcissism, idol worship, boredom, or progress?).

CNet was the antecedent to "another," posted at 5:43 a.m., when Rubel asked if anybody still read them. CNet doesn’t appear to have been offended.

But PC Magazine Editor in Chief Jim Louderback was incensed at the remark, posting a long response on Strumpette.com (Strumpette boiled it down to "systemic Tourette’s.") Louderback, who promptly canceled Rubel’s free subscription, asked if an Edelman boycott would be overacting:

But then I started thinking about what this means for our relationship with Edelman. One of the company’s top execs had stated, in a public forum, that my magazine (and by extension, my audience) was useless to him. He wasn’t even interested in seeing whether we’d covered one of his clients. Did the rest of Edelman think like Steve? Were we no better than fishwrap to the entire company?

Rubel was quick to post an apology on his "Micro Persuasion" blog:

I learned a valuable lesson. Post too fast without providing context and it can elicit an unintended response. While the item is true, it does not reflect my full media consumption habits. I subscribe to PC Mag RSS feeds and have linked to several of your publication’s online articles over the three years I have been writing this blog. Further, I have linked to articles from eWeek, your sister site.

Rubel’s been light on the blog posting this week, and seems to have stopped Twittering altogether. His last post was dated and timed 8:40 p.m., April 18 (note to self: to solidify alibi, sign up for Twitter account), less than 24 hours after he posted his apology.

The length of time between Twitters is significant since Rubel has been a fairly constant Twitterer for some time.

Some other, now sadly ironic, Rubel Twitters in hours before the overreaction (yeah, overreaction, because everybody goofs up from time to time):

Someone told me they miss my feverish twittering. Damn work; damn you. kidding. I love my gig. 06:28 PM April 11, 2007

Quote of the day: "Be excellent to each other." 05:58 AM April 12, 2007

Not trying to be a downer today, but read this. Execs wary on 2.0. http://tinyurl.com/22aeb5 08:19 PM April 16, 2007

How come no one’s talking about "The Secret?" It’s becoming one of the biggest viral memes of all time. It started as a web movie. 06:47 PM April 10, 2007

Okay, so the last one’s not really ironic, just wanted to say, "because it was better the first time when it was called The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale." A lot’s changed in fifty years, but some things haven’t.

Keep your head up, Steve, and remember Mr. Peale’s advice, as paraphrased in Amazon’s book description: Faith in yourself makes good things happen to you.

After watching the story being told and thinking about the film afterwards, I was drawn to the idea of permanence. 

The film has been produced and released, and now offers a permanent testament to the story of Kiranjit Ahluwalia – a woman who was strong enough to overcome her situation of domestic abuse and offer inspiration to women around the world. 

Film and books certainly have this aura of permanence, but what about the Internet? 

If you asked anyone a few years ago, they would have pointed to the inherently changeable nature of the web as proof that it will never have this permanence.  In a world where what is arguably the best source of information on the Internet is a site with millions of definitions for terms that can be changed everyday by anyone (Wikipedia), how could anyone believe that the Internet has the same permanence as a film or book? 

Yet as we have seen with the recent scuffle around Steve Rubel’s remarks on Twitter, what some might have considered the least permanent type of site possible, comments made online can indeed stick around for quite some time. 

People who have created photos and webpages throughout their youth are contending with this permanence as they go out and start to seek jobs and manage their indiscretions that might be recorded and easily available to a potential employer through a web search. 

Politicians are dealing with a new age of transparency on every legislative choice they have ever made being available for any voter to see.  Yes, permanence is alive and well on the Internet despite it’s many flaws and inaccuracies. 

It may not yet offer the same feeling of permanence as a film or book today, but there is no denying it has a feeling of permanence far beyond what it used to.  Here’s an open question: do you think it will ever reach the same level at films and books?

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And secondly, yes I totally understand that it was probably unwise of Steve to say that about PC Mag, seeing as how Edelman pitches companies to PC Mag, and that we all have to watch what we say now, Twitter is not like instant messaging, etc. etc. Totally get that. But still — what the hell is Jim Louderback doing posting a long commentary on what Rubel did to some anonymous PR gossip rag like Strumpette? He has his own website, although it currently just hosts a bio and some links. Why not put it there?

Better yet, why not post a comment on Steve’s blog, or send him an email? Or talk to Edelman privately? Instead, he posts it on Strumpette, and muses aloud about penalizing Edelman in some way — not to mention that he takes what Rubel said completely out of context. What kind of person does that? It’s like overhearing someone say something offhand on the streetcar and then writing a letter to the editor of the local newspaper. Bizarre.

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I know that’s the name of it – or was, since it’s apparently been yanked now – but I meant it in the original blogosphere/instant messaging sense of “what the f**?” Among other things, why would Technorati bother trying to reproduce something like Digg this late in the game?

Unlike some people, I’m totally okay with the name (which apparently stands for “Where’s The Fire?”). It plays off the other meaning of WTF, which could add to the buzz, and I think it’s kind of funny. But why? And not just why launch something that appears to duplicate Digg – like dozens of other copycat sites, many of which use the Pligg open-source Digg platform – but why launch something that seems to have taken its servers down with it?

After all, it’s not as though Technorati has been sailing along as smooth as glass. There continue to be regular system issues, unexplained and sudden down-time, complaints about technorati’s blog-ranking numbers and so on. As someone commented at Darren Rowse’s Problogger: “How about they fix everything else that’s broken on their site before launching a new service?” A fair point.

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Mathew Ingram is a
technology writer and blogger for the Globe and Mail, a national
newspaper based in Toronto, and also writes about the Web and media at
www.mathewingram.com/work and www.mathewingram.com/media.