Thu Jan 24 06:03:31 PST 2019

22
The Social Elements of Relevancy
Since many of you who have bought will not read all of it, I need to make sure I
deliver great value in the first few pages to ensure you get your money?s worth.
Relevancy is never static. Due to commercial market forces, search is
CONSTANTLY broken. Thus, if you think of this e-book as a literal guide, it too
will always be broken. Instead of thinking of the web and search in terms of
algorithms it helps to think of the web as a large social network. Ask yourself
questions like
? What are people talking about?
? What stories are spreading?
? Why are they spreading?
? Who is spreading them?
? How are they spreading them?
The reason search relies so heavily on the social elements is that page content and
site structure are so easy to manipulate. It takes a mind well-tuned into marketing
to be able to influence or manipulate people directly.
There are ways to fake authority, and when you are new it may make sense to push
the envelope on some fronts. But invariably, anything that is widely manipulated is
not a strong signal of authority.
Here is an advertisement I found in Gmail (Google?s email service):

Notice that their ads said they were selling Google PageRank. Then if you went to
their site, the ads looked like this:

Google wants to count real editorial votes. Consider the following:
? It is not common for news sites to link section-wide to an online bingo site.
? Most of the ads are irrelevant to the content of the pages.
? There are a large number of paid links right next to each other.
? The site has amazing authority.
Given all the above, it makes sense that Google would not want to count those
links. When I posted about how overt that PageRank selling was, Matt Cutts, a
leading Google engineer, hinted that Google had already taken care of not counting
those links.