Mediaboss Marketing

In a recent Webmaster video,Matt Cutts confirmedthat Google has tried internal versions of its search engine that work entirely without links. The results are low-quality for now, he said. But this suggests that the value of the almighty link has come into question at Google, and they may be working on a version of the PageRank algorithm that doesnt depend so heavily on the link graph which means PageRank as we know it might be on the chopping block. But when?

In light of this, we asked some of our favorite SEO and inbound marketing experts to answer the following three questions:

We got great insights into the future of PageRank, links, and SEO from industry expertsAaron Wall,Rae Hoffman,Brett Tabke,Michelle Robbins,Julie Joyce,Rand Fishkin,Glenn Gabe,Barry Adams,Alan Bleiweiss,Larry Kim,Pete Meyers,Eric Enge, andDharmesh Shah(click their names to jump ahead). Prepare to have your mind blown!

Here are their answers, in no particular order:

Almost all individual signals lose value over time as more variables get added into the mix.

One could perhaps say that variables that are on the way up/gaining importance are an exception to this, but even in these cases as the search results become more ad-heavy it offsets some of those alleged gains.

Links have been losing weight for about a half-decade now due to the folding in of other metrics and increasing algorithmic and manual penalties. How far off x level of decline is really depends on loads of factors which are query and vertical dependent. Some queries are localized, some have paid vertical ads from Google, some have lots of usage data which can be folded in, some queries are mobile-centric, some queries have Google scraping-n-replacing the results with theirknowledge graph, etc. All these variations on search impact different areas to different degrees. In some areas SEO might still be profitable even for small businesses for another half-decade or decade to come. In other areas SEO will have close to a zero percent chance of being profitable unless it is done by one of the players which is already favored algorithmically before they consider investment into SEO.

And even in some of those cases which look great, Google can arbitrarily shift outcomes overnight on a vertical-wide basis. Look at the historical algorithmic performance on SEMRush for Ask.com and BizRate. One entity is an extension of the home team, while the other clearly is not.

As mentioned above, there are some vertical-based metrics Google can use for things like location or similar. And then there are a nearly limitless number of ways Google could count their passive tracking of users from logged in user accounts, Google Chrome, Google Android, Google Fiber, etc. Google can further use things like credit card registration, YouTube usage data, location, search history, Google+ activity, etc. to determine which user accounts to trust more than others.

The differential and deferentialpolicing of link-based activitiesis in effect a way of removing links, selectively.One way Google is uncounting links is through massive amounts of algorithmic and manual penalties. That in effect is a way of having links not count for some while allowing them to count for others. The broad distribution (and even amplification) of fear-based propaganda around links by various link analysis tool vendors only further removes some types of links from the link graph.

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The Future of PageRank: 13 Experts on the Dwindling Value of the Link by @egabbert