The entire World is abuzz (these aren't all just scrapers) about the second version of the SEOmoz search engine optimization ranking factors. Rand introduced the article at this thread, where you can join in on the comments if you wish.
The study was conducted with the help of 34 SEO experts across the world, including the following:
Aaron Wall, Andy Hagans, Ani Kortikar, Barry Schwartz, Barry Welford, Ben Pfeiffer, Bill Slawsk,i Caveman, Chris Boggs, Christine Churchill, Danny Sullivan, DazzlinDonna, Debra Mastaler, EGOL, Elisabeth Osmeloski, Eric Enge, Eric Ward, Guillaume, Jeremy Schoemaker, Jill Whalen, Jonah Stein, Joost de Valk, Laura Lippay, Lucas Ng (aka shor), Marcus Tandler, Michael Gray, Mike McDonald, Natasha Robinson, Neil Princess Patel, Rand Fishkin, Russ Jones, Ruud Hein, Scottie Claiborne, Thomas Bindl, Todd Malicoat, Wil Reynolds, Will CritchlowThe study was focused specifically towards Google search results. SER is proud to have three of our editors on this honored list of people asked to participate by Rand. Additionally, Rand's team in Seattle did a great job in putting the report together. According to team members, Jeff Pollard (aka Fluxx) was most responsible for the final product. One of the favorites features this year seems to be the addition of the "disagreement weighting." This shows how close the votes were in some cases and how varied in others.
Having completed the study, I can tell you that this was done straight from the hip, likely by others as well. It was a long questionnaire, which covered about every factor imaginable. Since we did not see other answers, it was really cool to see how many times the comments so closely mirrored each other, like the highly disputed factor of "Duplicate Title/Meta Tags on Many Pages" which led three panelists to mention supplemental results.
Again, read the intro and the actual study results at SEOmoz.
