Google's Matt Cutts answered a question on video on how Google handles content with little or no links, in terms of figuring out how Google judges the quality of the page.
The question posed was "How does Google determine quality content if there aren't a lot of links to a post?"
Matt's answer was, go old school - go back to Alta Vista, where search engines didn't use linkage data for ranking. Yea, just look at the words on the page and how those words are written.
Clearly, by Matt's expressions throughout the video, he wasn't keen on the idea of ranking pages without any linkage data.
Here is the video, it is good to watch and see his facial expressions:
One senior member at WebmasterWorld wasn't happy with the disclosure in the video, he wrote:
I don't think MC is telling it all in that clip. Nowhere in that clip does he mention on page / website metrics - such things as how long a user spends on a page, how many pages per session the user views and what happens when they exit the website. The very absence of any mention at all (absolutely none at all) tells you one thing, MC is not telling the whole truth. On page /site metrics matter a massive amount, they tell G so much that they never, ever could ignore them but MC still prattles on about links as if (exceptional cases excluded) they were the Holy Grail.
Forum discussion at Google+ & WebmasterWorld.
