Wicked Google PageRank Rumours

At Google Rumours some possible far reaching changes in how Google ranks websitesare outlined, these include:

Google PageRank To Be Reset
PageRank to be reset to zero and replaced
Two clicks for AdSense
rel=”nofollow” replaced by rel=”dofollow”

True or not these are thought provoking ideas...

Google Changing How it Ranks Sites from Links to Relevance

Jim Hedger at ISDB theorises that "Google is radically reworking its primary ranking algorithms" mainly because "Internet users are beginning to use their social networks as web-portals, the same way they once used Google and Yahoo!. Social networks are all about linkage however many if not most links found within social networks are useless from a search ranking perspective."

He also looks at recent patent applications by Google and concludes that " Relevance and location are in, links are likely on their way out."

He does concede that links are still needed for the search engine spiders to find and spider web sites but that relevancy to users will be uppermost - as usual with Google - this releveancy measure will come from Google tracking the path of searchers from query to exit, so to optimise for Google Search Engine Optimisers will have to consider how Google perceives the paths taken by each site-visitor on pages and sites.

Google instant site indexing ..almost

It seems from Matt Cutts official Google blog that Google’s index is getting fresher and fresher. No more waiting trembling with fear for 3 months to find out what the next Google Dance will do to your search engine rankings.. Matt Cutts writes that "Now some documents can show up in minutes instead of hours or days"

The example he gives relates to blog postings and I have to wonder if this applies equally to all blogging formats or just blogger blogs?

This rapid indexing does open up an opportunity - if Google is indexing content almost immeduiatly, it means website owners have chance to rank prominently for important key words and phrases faster than ever before.

To deter spammers using this as another way to fool Google it seems thatthe bloggers being indexed instantly are longstanding bloggs which also tick the other boxes of the Google algorithms.