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A WebmasterWorld thread has an interesting, fun and thought-provoking discussion going on. The topic is, what would you change in the Google search algorithm.
The main issue is, none of us know all the factors in the Google search algorithm. It is hard to know what to change, when you don't know what is there in the first place.
In the past, the folks at WebmasterWorld tried to come up with a list of 200 Google ranking factors. So using that list may be a nice way of coming up with things you would change. But it is all hypothetical anyway.
Some of the things people would change, as mentioned in the thread include:
- Don't penalize paid links, just don't let them pass link juice
- Make penalties permanent
- Kill the nofollow attribute
- Modify the PageRank "link juice" calculation so that it was based not on how much "link juice" flowed to a page, but rather on how much flowed through a page
- Drop PageRank from the toolbar
There are many more ideas here, so join the discussion.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.
Comments:
Jill Kocher
09/22/2010 01:00 pm
I'd like to see some sort of "You've been penalized/dampened/banned" notice in Google Webmaster Tools. And perhaps a 2-3 word reason (IE paid links discovered). I understand why the engines don't want to be very specific about reasons, because it helps those who would game the engines. But so many small site owners who don't have the luxury of keeping up on SEO's changing landscape can run afowl without knowing why or what they did wrong.
John Weaver
09/22/2010 01:52 pm
Probably would drop the nofollow tag. Links are so important so you may as well count them all. If not that, then I would more than likely make the change so the big sites like Wikipedia would not dominate the SERPs all the time.
Kris Roadruck
09/22/2010 03:28 pm
Probably less weight on exact match domains. This one thing really muddies up a lot of SERPs as you see a lot of spammers, MFAs and Affiliates abusing this to the detriment of more legitimate/useful sites. I think it would also help put an end to the ridiculous domainer crap with people camping on solid domains and asking for thousands or even millions of dollars for a 7 dollar item.
Kevin
09/22/2010 03:29 pm
The ridiculous advantage of having an exact match domain. That it takes less effort to create crazy thin sites for one particular item and dominate the serps than it is to create a site that's actually worth something to users really needs to be fixed. But until then, I'll keep pumping out a site every 20 minutes.
Rob abdul
09/22/2010 09:39 pm
@Kevin, my sentiments exactly!
M. Christoff Escher III
09/23/2010 01:16 am
First off, the dorks at Google are A+ at applying D- Stanford stupidity called technology, in a mediocre, uh, C fashion. So, that's why to improve Google algorithms, you might pick a high school in Japan to give it a shot as a December project. Right?
Mohan Arun L.
09/23/2010 06:56 am
I am not tht well-versed on the innards of the algorithms behind Google, but what I would add is the feature of searching with wildcards and returning lists of items in the results, culled from sources (such as the answer to the question "list all rivers in china")