Whitey - 4:18 am on Mar 24, 2012 (gmt 0)

wait and see if the engineer of layout team makes similar statement as follow

That's an oxymoron . What else is he/she employed to do - i don't expect anything to come out of that division. Mission is to own every listing supplied with a Google asset, where organic cannot do the job better.

@Tedster - does this de-bunk your theory that i read somewhere on Webmasterworld ( which i previously supported ) that not even Amit Singhal knew the ranking signals within Panda and other algo elements. The implication was, i think , it's way too complex to decipher how the results are put together.

I'm not sure now. Combine this with other Googler remarks recently - such as the subsequently rebuked remark about SEO being unable to scale the way it used to. Perhaps it's a little easier than some of us thought, to pinpoint the major elements and controls. Maybe it's a case of a bit of common community/Google team sense against which the algo is written.