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.