tedster - 4:01 am on Nov 10, 2007 (gmt 0)

I'd hate to see a stimulating thread be stifled because it gets personally confrontational. There's a good discussion in our Foo forum [webmasterworld.com] right now about this topic. So let's stay away from the "steel cage death match" approach and instead, let's welcome varying points of view. We've had previous myth-buster threads that were quite thought provoking, especially because they did not get into personal back-and-forth exchanges that tend to lock out new participants in a thread.

thanks to the mods for letting the OP use actual REAL terms

Yes, these examples are worth making an isolated policy exception for - they're excellent examples, as a matter of fact. Thanks, grant.

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When we ask a question like "myth or truth", it asks for a yes-or-no answer at a time when Google is more and more getting into AI, fuzzy logic and machine learning. My sense of things is that new factors, some of which are mentioned in recent patent applications, get a chance to play in the real results, learn for a bit, then dialed back in their influence. Since there are many factors at play at the same time, apparent one-off examples and counter-examples will not be conclusive, only suggestive.

For example:

Link acquisition rates shouldn't be too fast

Google has a wealth of data on what the norms are for link acquisition, even broken down into various website types. Especially in some website taxonomies, some degree of burstiness would be the norm for link acquisition. The algo can easily be looking for statistically exceptional rate growth - and it also can fold in other modulating factors, such as the type of site where the link burts occur. An unnaturally generated burst would have other attendant signals.

Bounce Rates affect my ranking

Matt Cutts recently talked about this. He said bounce rate is a "noisy signal" - and that tells us right way that Google has measured it, but taken on it's own bounce rate cannot be trusted as a usable sign of quality for a given search result. OK - but since it's only noisy and not irrelevant, how might it be made useful? My bet is that this is exactly what Google is hoping to learn.

"Watch this space" for further ingredients in the witches' brew. Google badly needs to evolve their algo beyond the current dependence on backlinks, and I'm certain they are working on many fronts to do that.