Silvery - 10:16 pm on Jun 10, 2010 (gmt 0)

I think it's expectable that there may be some diversity among those surveyed. Google cites that they have 200+ ranking signals, and local search ranking is arguably got more variables involved than regular websearch likely does.

Among so many variables, it's quite difficult to isolate one signal's effect over that of another, much less figure out which signal provides more benefit than the other.

What's really fun to see are the factors that have very high agreement among recipients -- those would be ones which everyone has consistently seen to be effective by some significant amount.

{Disclosure: I'm another of the contributors.}

What will be really fun will be a more thorough ranking of citation sources -- I sense that David might intend to do that at a future time.