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not saying it's not legitimate. in many cases it is a legitimate link relationship between two very big, very popular, very related (subject/category) web sites.
however, who is to say that my little incy site, that most larger more popular web sites (MS to be extreme) will not swap links with because there is no busines relationship to cross endorse(at least not for free. haha), that does the best it can to exchange links with related sites and many of them are pr4 or less (we are PR5), is not therefore as popular as some sites that are larger and have powerful backlink partners?
what if i happen to use alot of traditional advertising to bring many visitors to my web site, or get alot of free publicity constantly that makes my site a very popular site with 0 backlinks?
also, clearly the backlink method of establishing link popularity is subject to manipulation as well.
my proposal to google:
you already can watch my surfing habits: i have downloaded advanced toolbar and said "sure, load a cookie and watch me surf". fine. no problem. have at it and i hope it helps make google a better experience for me and everybody else in the future....
well, if i am willing to let google watch my surfing habits, i am also willing to let them measure certain basic visitor information at my web site for internal purposes on the other side of things. give me the code snippit google, and i'll load it for you on my home page... noooo problem.
i would much rather have google measure accurate/true traffic to any web site as a gauge of popularity, than let backlinking be the guide or only guide.......
i am sure many would object to this re: privacy issues. however some day i would imagine voluntary/automated information sharing on visitors with the likes of a google- one way or another, will come into being- to provide better information to all.
many will think this is crazy. so be it. i don't think it's too far fetched, and they might be working on this code snippit in the back room in google as i write this post.
>> i would much rather have google measure accurate/true traffic to any web site as a gauge of popularity, than let backlinking be the guide or only guide.......
The amount of backlinks towards a page - calculated in a weighted way to show Pagerank - was not meant as a means of showing popularity, but "importance".
With other factors blended in it is intended to help rank relevant (and not necessarily popular) webpages.
Popular does not necessarily mean high quality.
For example the top 50 results of a given a search query, (pre-)ranked according to Google's Pagerank algo, could be reranked according to popularity as you mention:
Check Google's patent: "Methods and apparatus for employing usage statistics in document retrieval" [appft1.uspto.gov]
"Methods and apparatus consistent with the invention provide improved organization of documents responsive to a search query. In one embodiment, a search query is received and a list of responsive documents is identified. The responsive documents are organized based in whole or in part on usage statistics."
also mentioned here: [webmasterworld.com...]
Google results are on target for the most part.
I really like the way they handle Adwords in that they reward advertisers that have higher click rates and dynamically increase that sites position.
You always find a few sites that don't really fit in the results, sometime they are completely off topic.
Since google puts so much stock in DMOZ, why not use a hybrid model between DMOZ and Adwords dynamic listings.
Track click rates on keyword results and drop sites that receive a lower than expected result compared to other sites that are returned. In turn reward those site that receive a higher number of clicks expected for its listing position.
I often skip many of the results and click only the most pertinent. Granted Basically using users as human editors.
