ashear - 5:42 am on Feb 23, 2007 (gmt 0)

bwnbwn and StickyNote,

As someone who used to work at a search engine I see the patents as advancements. Yes this will make our lives as SEO's a little more difficult but adaptation is a key that has driven this business for years.

Most of the old SEO's who realized that they couldn’t cheat as easily have dropped out. The one thing I have learned is that if you have to use "Special Tactics" to drive rankings it will most likely back fire at some point or another.

As marketers in general we know that if you can build a solid offering that is compelling your business will thrive. SEO seems to be moving in this direction every year. This theme is actually exciting me rather than scaring me.

I think personal search will be a great function and will help move us forward.

I am sure people will try to game this system to take a short cut, but as we know Google and other engines are very good at detecting and eliminating this over time.

I am going to think about this more and blog about it, best of wishes.

First, "a" proxy server obviously won't make the IP addresses look random at all. Second, even if you got 100 proxy servers (how much money ya got to spend on this?), you then have to make the activity look "normal". How many deletes per week does a "normal" user perform? What are the statistical norms for other activities Google can detect (searches, Google account activities, Google toolbar activity, etc.). When there's no penalty for collateral damage, Google can afford to do auto-detection that's pretty good at eliminating the bad guys. Just ask anybody who got auto-banned from AdSense because one of their students went to the computer lab and clicked on their ads for an hour every day.

I think that this will be based upon login information as well. It is very interesting that Google was requiring a referral to join Gmail. Now they are asking for an active mobile number. I am sure that their central user id system will have a direct impact on votes. I would also imagine that it may take hundreds of extremely unique searches and votes to validate a site or not.