tedster - 4:54 pm on Jan 11, 2012 (gmt 0)

@philipjterry, outside of playing around with reading level options, mostly after the first Panda release, I haven't given it a lot of consideration to it as a search factor.

I feel pretty sure that Google is calculating reading level for some reason - it's not just some curiosity. At the very least, they are monitoring this as a metric to see how it might be useful. We know they monitor a lot that they do not directly use in the algo at the present moment.

As a content creator, I use reading level a lot - and as an editor I ask writers to aim for relatively low reading levels (8th grade is great, 10th grade is OK). Even in high academia, there's often no reason for convoluted sentences and overly erudite word choices.