caribguy - 7:21 am on Jun 3, 2009 (gmt 0)

build an emulating engine

That takes quite a bit of commitment (and funding). I'd guess 95 out of 100 posters here do not have those kinds of resources.

You sound like you have, and I'd be thrilled to be able to look over your shoulder sometime. A friend of mine builds optimization software to solve logistics problems, you could convert those types of constraints to emulate G's rulesets.

Your mantra is mine too. But, I could ask 10 buddies at the bar to define social media and get 9 blank stares in return. Joe Sixpack doesn't know much about Digg (let alone being able to spell Technocrati or del.icio.us) and is more likely to click on his highschool hottie's pics on Facebook than any other link in his stream. He probably doesn't even know that he's living in the big money walled garden.

We can waste days discussing the consequences of a particular update, but maybe our time would be better spent trying to figure out what makes Joe feel satisfied...

You mentioned 4 factors:

brand - Yes, crap content from b&m brand sites in my niche is getting stronger for no good reason

domain strength - I'm competing for #1 position with a 7 page website that has been online since 1999 (my content is about 2,000 pages and a 2 year old site)

raw link equity - Underutilizing this and feeling the consequences. Older sites and brand names have an advantage there. It's just a lot harder now to get a nice link from quality sites with related content.

anchor usage - Knowing this is an advantage. One of the things that was designed well in my case.

I think the elephant in the room is the amount of time people spend browsing a site. Discarding my 50% bounce rate, I'm left with half of my visitors looking at 7+ pages for about 6-7 minutes. If there is any signal to G that a site is relevant to its audience, I believe this is it...

Didn't mean to get off on a tangent, but when it seems like the sky is falling every time G tweaks its algo, then maybe webmasters should consider whether their content matches what the user is looking for. It's not G's fault if it doesnt...