SOPA is basically a legislation designed very simply to stop online piracy. Essentially it allows police, authorities, and copyright holders to be able to get court orders that will essentially force service providers (Comcast, AOL, etc.), hosting providers (GoDaddy, BlueGator, etc.), payment services (Paypal, 2Checkout, etc.) and search engines (really?) to literally shut off or stop doing business with websites that they allege are stealing or even enabling potential copyright infringement.

Just in case SOPA gets passed, we got this image from http://endoftheamericandream.com

While it seems good in theory in order to curb online pirating of music, movies, files, and the like, there’s something much more sinister in the background.  The biggest target would be torrent sites that facilitate illegal distribution of files such as PirateBay, ISOHunt, and similar sites.  But other sites that have user generated content like Wikipedia, YouTube, and Facebook could be shut down if SOPA gets enacted.

A site could be removed from the search engines, have their advertising revenue yanked, payment processing blocked, website shut off and even up to 5 years of prison time if someone alleges that a site is in violation and gets a court order against them. It also gives the government a LOT of power over what can and can’t be posted online. An example that may hit closer to home would be if you posted a photo on your blog that you acquired somewhere online and that you believed to be “free to use”.  If the person that owns the rights to that photo (even indirectly) decides that you’ve violated their copyright, they can get a court order to put all of those aforementioned detrimental factors into play on your very own website.  If you’re in a competitive industry, one of your competitors could reasonably shut you down over a photo buried on your site thousands of pages deep.

While it may seem far fetched, SOPA makes that completely possible. SOPA has a laundry list of big name opponents including Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, Youtube, Mozilla and many others. Google is exceptionally concerned because of the fact that there are many anti-Google folks just itching to tie them to something potentially copyrighted that could cause a lot of problems for the search giant. Hosting and domain megamart GoDaddy initially supported the SOPA project, but customers pulled over 72,000 domains from the registrar and moved them elsewhere as a result. GoDaddy got the point quickly and immediately pulled support once it truly understood the ramifications of the SOPA bill.

So tomorrow, Google will officially weigh in on SOPA, Wikipedia will go black (among others as well) and we’ll potentially get more details on where they stand. Actually, we know where they stand. It’s where you should stand. Even if you think SOPA won’t affect you, you’d be shocked how much it would impact your online experience. It’s a bad, bad idea.

As of today, however, Google Plus has taken it even further by now including your personal photos, friends photos, etc into the SERP’s. It initially shows personal image results that are relevant to your search, but when you click on “Show Personal Results”, whoa Nelly.  It shows you the image results you had seen previously, along with all relevant content posted from friends and family that contain that keyword term that you searched for.

Now while this is all neat ans fancy, what implications does this have for SEO? Let’s ask some questions and assume answers.

Will sites that relied on image results take a hit on that first SERP?

If you look at what’s happening now, the end result is Yes.  Stock photo communities stand to lose quite a bit when that first page real estate they once had is now replaced by a person’s personal images. While it’s understood that there would have to be a relevant term that matched a personal photo for their images to be pushed out, the possibility still exists and will be worth watching.

Even in our example below, you can see that the image results show three rows of our personal images before displaying images on other sites even without clicking for personal results. A cause for alarm for photographers and stock photo companies.

How will it affect the first page results?

A lot. A Google search for the term “SEO Experts” gave us two results on the first page because we were logged into our Google account.  The other notable thing is that the SERP’s were then increased from 10 spots to 11 when you’re logged in, which doesn’t count shopping or image results.  Log out and perform the same search and not only is it less real estate, but the results are back down to 10. The increase to 11 slots was most definitely to account for the personalized entries, but if you notice, THREE of the entries on the “logged in” page are not present on the “logged out” version.  Which begs to question, was adding 1 slot enough?

It’s designed to make it personal right out of the gate without even clicking on personal results, but people not involved with SEO or how Google makes those decisions may make incorrect assumptions based on those results. And we can’t think of many people that don’t have a Google account in some form or fashion for Gmail, Google+, Reader or something else.  And if they are, they’ll get a whole new SERP and not even know why. We’re waiting for the uninitiated to start bragging about how they’re on the first page of Google. While it’s an anomaly that’s nothing new, it’s even more prevalent now.

Will it be harder to get on the first page of Google now?

The short answer is No, but as time progresses and more people sign on to Google’s various services, the answer inevitably becomes Yes.  Especially since in our random tests, 30% to as much as 50% of the results on the “logged in” version aren’t present when compared to the “logged out” version.

That means at minimum, there’s a 30% less chance that your business won’t be on that first page if a person is logged into their Google account.  Or if you’re a “glass half full” type of person, a 30% chance that you will be on that page when the person logs out. But just how many folks do you think that will be at the rate Google is pushing their services?

And we’re sure there are tons more questions that need to be answered, but for now, this opens the doors for all types of questions for SEO professionals. While the changes are positive for the user, it makes the front page real estate even more difficult to master and as more people begin to utilize the Google+ service, the less probability that a new site will be able to crack that top 11.

Needless to say there’s a lot of positive things that will come of it, not to mention that Google will most certainly utilize your personal information even more to push relevant ads to you, steer you first to content residing on Google, or very simply making mad money off of you and all under the guise of “a personal experience”. You read that fine print when you signed up for Google services, right?

But the real question is figuring out how you, as a small business owner, can capitalize on these changes. That’s not an electrical fire you’re smelling. That’s your brain on Google+.

If you’re not that daring, you can watch videos of other businesses and uncover a vast array of SEO knowledge and it’s all free.  if you do decide to send in your site info, you’ll get the benefit of extra advertising, a free link, and a rapt audience! This is a perfect place for us to house our SEO blog post content, videos, tools and much more. We are very excited about it and hope that you’ll tell your friends and colleagues, but more than anything, use it!

Check it out. It looks WAY better than our site, so now we’re going to have to change things around. That’s just ridiculous.

Let’s say that you’ve got a nice wedding cake bakery that makes wedding cakes. The site has never really ranked well, but you don’t know why.  So you start doing keyword research to find out what people are searching for related to weddings. You find wedding favors, wedding songs, wedding planning tips, wedding consultants, and the list goes on.  You decide to make a page that contains a list of the the most popular wedding songs on your site. Your thought process is that a bride will click through to see what the most popular wedding songs are and then see your services and buy a cake.

The trend continues as you then open a little side store attached to your website to start selling wedding favors. Again with the same thought process in mind that you’ll get that residual business or worse case scenario get affiliate sales from selling wedding favors.  The next thing you know, you’re ranking worse than you were before.  ”How can this be?! I added more relevant content!” Unfortunately, you just muddied up your website and made things worse for yourself.

And if you have a website that has already done something similar, you now have to figure out how to dig your way out and get back in Google’s good graces. Whenever you consider adding more content to your website, you should always first consider what type of impact this will have on your site’s relevance. Weddings are a very broad topic in general and in a saturated market, you end up being your own worst enemy.

In the above example, adding wedding favors to a wedding cake website makes your website becomes less relevant for wedding cakes. To make the matter worse, you not only will continue to fail to rank for wedding cakes, but now you’ll fail for wedding favors as well.  And while you might think that adding more wedding related items will make you more relevant for weddings such as wedding invitations or wedding dresses, you thin out your site’s focus instead of excelling at wedding cakes.  It’s the only thing you do and you should focus on your expertise on that.

If you want to add more content, make sure that it’s directly relevant to wedding cakes.  For instance, maybe you consider a section of available wedding cake toppers, so that even if they don’t buy a cake from you because they’re across the country, you may still sell them a wedding cake topper and still be able to maintain your wedding cake relevance. Everything you add to the site should be directly related to cakes.

If you’re already stuck in the mud with a website that has thousands of pages that are all thinly related in the same type of scenario, there are ways out.  You either have to restructure your website and properly silo it or totally kill it and reuse the information in a logical relevant manner.  If it’s not relevant with cakes, it has to go.  The only way that a convolution of thinly-related topics works is if you’re in a non-competitive industry that isn’t represented on the web.

So it may be time to pull a sitemap (you can get those free you know) and take inventory of what you have out there. Keyword research plays an integral part of deciding what direction may be best for your site based on keyword intent and what terms people are using to find you.

If you’ve used Google, you’ve already seen Google Instant at work. You start typing and Google is already displaying results based on what you’ve typed so far even if you pause for a split second (hence the “Instant” moniker). Not only is it presenting you with options that are the most popularly searched for the moment based on other searches, but it’s also changing the results page for each variation that you complete. In this example below, we started typing the word “printer” and it gave us keyword options that are the most popular at the moment, all the while showing us SERP results for “printer“, just in case we’re already done typing.

There is a lot of significance here for you as a website owner and one that’s not lost on any serious SEO professional worth their salt.  The first being that Google is offering up the most popular keywords based on the root keyword of “printer”.  Not since the now defunct Google Wonder Wheel has Google laid it out so nicely for you. If your website carries a wide variety of printers, maybe you would consider creating a page dedicated to reviewing those printers since it’s a heavily searched keyword. While you would never expect to rank for “printer reviews” because of the competitive landscape like CNET, Amazon and the like), it may help to round out your site’s relevance to Google and also make your site more useful and comprehensive to your visitors in search of printer information.

However, if you’re a business card printer, you’re already going down the wrong path since these variations don’t lend any relevance to what you do.  Just think about the variations of the “printer” keyword;

printer – could mean an inkjet printer, magazine printer, or business card printer.
printers – same as above, but now plural.
printer reviews – a review of inkjet printers? Or maybe customer reviews of local business card printers?

If you’re a business card printer, you should focus on that branch of keywords such as “card printer”, “business card printer” and don’t forget that adjectives are your friends. Words such as “free“, “best“, and “cheap” often rule the roost in search volume.  The same goes for localities such as “Dallas business card printer”. While “business cards” may sit on top of the most searched keyword related to your industry, you can almost guarantee that the person’s search didn’t end there simply because the results presented to them were probably way too broad to make any good decisions.  And once that happens, the searcher then begins to add those adjectives and begins refining the search term to narrow in on what they’re looking for.

This is exactly why Google implemented Google Instant. To not only guide a potential customer down the right path to find the most relevant information, but to also show you how to properly focus your site content to be useful to that person. We’ll talk more about that next.

Here is the list of questions that Google presented on their site that you should print out and ask yourself whenever you decide to do a post, article or page on your own website.  We take a look at each one.

• Would you trust the information presented in this article?
  This is a biggie. What about your site can be trusted? Are you posting this content only for SEO sake or does your website actually contain other similar information that would collectively make this content trustworthy?  For instance, if you only sell bikes, but you make a page focusing on cars just to try and get ranked for some car related term, it won’t work.  You’re not a trusted source for info on “cars”.
• Is this article written by an expert or enthusiast who knows the topic well, or is it more shallow in nature?
  This is pretty self explanatory. Don’t write about something that you haven’t discussed in detail before.  Again, if you’re a bike shop, don’t write about cars because you haven’t done or written anything to establish yourself as an authority on cars.
• Does the site have duplicate, overlapping, or redundant articles on the same or similar topics with slightly different keyword variations?
  Even if you are an expert on the article you’re writing about, do not then take that article and repost it in several areas of your website altering the content slightly to make it look like there are more articles on the subject than there actually is.  Google has very sophisticated algorithms to spot this kind of activity and will devalue all of them which would be a waste of your efforts.
• Would you be comfortable giving your credit card information to this site?
  This would relate more to a retail site, but there again is the confidence factor Google is looking for.
• Does this article have spelling, stylistic, or factual errors?
  Use spell check or, even better, create your content in Word or a similar program before posting so that you can check for both spelling and grammatical errors.
• Are the topics driven by genuine interests of readers of the site, or does the site generate content by attempting to guess what might rank well in search engines?
  When we write content on our blog here, we’re writing out of interest for any given topic. You should never write content based on a hot keyword. However, there are plenty of benefits to looking to see what topics are currently hot for your given industry and to provide information on what people are searching for.That seems like opposing statements, but it really isn’t. If you have an entertainment blog that discusses music, you would be wise to see what’s trending in the music world and make sure that you provide content for that topic. Not just because you want to rank, but you’re giving people what they find genuinely interesting within your genre.
• Does the article provide original content or information, original reporting, original research, or original analysis?
  Did you write the article yourself or did you just copy and paste it from somewhere else? This post is a prime example of that. We took a list of questions that Google has indicated it pays attention to and provided more details and insight into the reasoning behind it.
  
  
• Does the page provide substantial value when compared to other pages in search results?
  Simple enough to understand. If a person searches for “funk music”, the sites that have a lot of information on funk music or totally dedicated to funk music will get those top slots as opposed to sites that aren’t completely relevant to the search.
  
• How much quality control is done on content?
  Do you have multiple misspellings and grammatical errors in your content? Not only that, but believe it or not, Google also does “fact checking” as well, although we’re sure that part of the algorithm probably has its limitations. 
  
• Does the article describe both sides of a story?
  If an article or piece seems very one sided compared to other offerings, Google may sway towards the site that maybe offers more variety of angles on a topic.
• Is the site a recognized authority on its topic?
  This is where linking sometimes comes into play. Do any authoritative sites link to you as another authority on a topic? But yet again, that won’t matter much if your site is one of very few that specializes on a given topic. Links always accent your efforts, but getting them naturally is much better and won’t get you busted by Google.
  
• Is the content mass-produced by or outsourced to a large number of creators, or spread across a large network of sites, so that individual pages or sites don’t get as much attention or care?
  Don’t need to explain this too much. If you know the content was already posted on many websites, then don’t bother posting it on yours unless you plan to heavily modify it.
• Was the article edited well, or does it appear sloppy or hastily produced?
  Another question from Google that supports the frowning of Google on misspellings and grammatical errors.
  
• For a health related query, would you trust information from this site?
  Google takes sites that make health claims very seriously. This may have some underlying legal implications for them, but with health sites in particular, they undergo very intense scrutiny.
• Would you recognize this site as an authoritative source when mentioned by name?
  This would be up for interpretation, but when you think “travel” you think Travelocity or “health”? WebMD. This level of authority matching would apply to larger, broader topics. More specific topics won’t necessarily undergo this level of scrutiny unless the topic if highly competitive.
• Does this article provide a complete or comprehensive description of the topic?
  The more you can give, the better. More content will always win.
• Does this article contain insightful analysis or interesting information that is beyond obvious?
  If you go with the details of a story that every other website also covers, you put yourself at the mercy of who posted first. But if you provide more details than other sites, you can get the edge.  More details doesn’t mean you get the scoop on a story which is typically improbable. However, providing more background information on people, places or things within the story will beef up your content and hand you the advantage.
• Is this the sort of page you’d want to bookmark, share with a friend, or recommend?
  If you can’t see someone bookmarking or sharing your post or story, it’s probably a waste of time.
• Does this article have an excessive amount of ads that distract from or interfere with the main content?
  It’s good to make money with affiliate ads, but when the site or page is overwhelmed with them, you’ll lose. The customer may not know it’s an affiliate link, but Google does.
• Would you expect to see this article in a printed magazine, encyclopedia or book?
  We think this question was thrown in to  make you think more about the importance of quality content, but good solid content always wins anyway, so it’s a good rule to follow.
• Are the articles short, unsubstantial, or otherwise lacking in helpful specifics?
  Yet more bulletpoints to support the “beef up your content” campaign.
• Are the pages produced with great care and attention to detail vs. less attention to detail?
  And even more…
  
• Would users complain when they see pages from this site?
  This is an obvious one. If people hate your site or content, they leave quickly which results in a “bounce”. More bounces means your rankings will drop. More negative reviews and the same can be expected.

This conversation is a good example of how humans might process information.

A friend comes to you and says, “I saw a bear.”
“Wow.”, you say. “Where?”
“Across the street!”
“Across the street from here?”
“No. Up in the mountains.”
“What mountains?”
“In Helen, Georgia.”
“Was it a big bear?”
“Huge!”
“What kind of bear was it?”
“No idea.”
“Well, what color was it?”
“It was a black bear.”

While this conversation may seem silly, it could have been avoided if the person simply started the conversation by saying, “I saw a huge black bear across the street when I was up in the mountains of Helen, Georgia.”  At that point, you have all of the information that you need.  However, this is the exact same thing that happens when a person puts broad keywords into a search engine.  They may have a vision of the results they expect to see, but they simply put “bear” in the search window without giving the search engine the data it needs to know the whole story.  Depending on the broadness of the keyword will determine how much interpretation the search engine has to do.

This is why website siloing is so important is because it allows you to start broad, but still lead the visitor down certain paths depending on more specific data. It’s also why keyword research is so very important. You may think you want to rank for “bear”, but if your website focuses only on Georgia black bears, you’ll kill yourself trying to rank for “bear”.  Then you’ll drive yourself crazy trying to figure out why “Build a Bear”, the “Chicago Bears”, “Bear Bryant” and tons of other sites outrank you. And unless you expand your content to include all things “bear”, they always will. This also goes back to building out the respective areas for specific terms and then optimizing those areas for those longer tail keywords such as “Helen Georgia black bears”.

Customer Intent (But what did you really mean?)

This brings us to customer intent. What did the searcher really want to find? But more importantly, does your website capitalize on that intent? And if it does, can it capitalize on it even more than it already does?

For instance, if a person searches for “windows”, are they trying to find a glass window or are they looking for something to do with the Windows software? You would definitely know if the person used the keyword in “plate glass windows”, but now you don’t know what they want with plate glass windows. Do they want to find more info on types of plate glass windows? Do they want someone to install them? Are they looking for pricing? How can you know for sure? The answer is in your Analytics.

Your best bet is to look at the keyword area under “Traffic Sources” in Google Analytics (assuming that you’ve installed it). You’ll see that people arrived to your site using a variety of keywords and your telltale sign is in the column called “bounce rate”. When a person “bounces”, they are leaving your site within a pre-defined time frame (typically under 5 seconds).  The higher the bounce rate, the less relevant that page probably is to the term they searched for.

However, it doesn’t always mean that it’s not relevant. If the person has searched specifically for “toddler girl dresses” and your page is all about “toddler girl dresses”, then maybe there could be something else on that page is turning them off.   The page could be taking too long to load (check Google Webmaster Tools). Maybe your pricing is too high (try doing some A/B split testing using Google Website Optimizer). Maybe your designs or selection sucks (more A/B split testing). Either way, you should always pay attention to how the person arrived at your page in the first place and pay close attention to keywords that have high bounce rates.

Alternately, if you see a high bounce rate for “blue toddler girl dresses“, and you have 4 blue toddler girl dresses, it’s once again time to analyze why.  Are those blue dresses mixed in with dozens of dresses of another color? If there’s a substantial amount of traffic bouncing for blue toddler girl dresses, maybe it’s time to move your blue dresses onto their own page. That way you can optimize that specific page for various blue dresses keyword terms and start landing those sales.

“Well, I did that and now they’re not bouncing, but they’re still not buying.”  If that’s the case, then you should start looking at your sales funnel. You have that set up, right?  If not, you should head to the Goals area of Google Analytics and get cracking.  Once you have that set up, you can see where they’re leaving the sales process. If they leave before anything even goes in the cart, then maybe it’s your pricing. If they leave on the shipping page, then maybe your shipping cost is too high.  If you end up in that conundrum, than it’s time to fire up Google Website Optimizer and do some A/B split testing and start analyzing different shipping or pricing.

The beauty of all of this is that it’s readily available to you for free via Google Webmaster Tools, Google Analytics and Google Website Optimizer.  So if your sales have slowed down, or you simply can’t even get found on the web, it’s time to research your site structure first, then your page structure, and then the content of those pages. In that order. If you don’t analyze and test, you’re leaving major money on the table.

To oversimplify it, a page with a PageRank of zero essentially means that the page doesn’t have any authority on the given topic and little to no community support via inbound links.  Alternately, a page with a PageRank of 10 means that there is no higher authoritative page on the subject according to Google.  Of the top 100 visited websites in the WORLD according to Alexa, only 4 received a perfect 10 rating.  This is where the poo starts.  There is so much wrong with this ranking consideration that it’s almost insulting.    So without further ado, I’m going to cover the top 5 reasons why Google PageRank is nothing to lose sleep over without getting too technical and keeping it as non-geekspeak as possible.  It’s why you love us.

• A Perfect 10

  As of today, there are less than 150 web pages that carry the perfect PageRank score of 10.  You heard right. Out of the billions of web pages on the web, only 148 are blessed.  Ready to be ticked? Here’s the rundown of who they are: Google – 44 pages with a pagerank of 10
  Adobe - 55 pages with a pagerank of 10
  Apple – 22 pages with a pagerank of 10
  Government sites – 9 pages with a pagerank of 10
  WWW Consortium – 3 pages with a pagerank of 10
  Macromedia – 3 pages with a pagerank of 10
  RealPlayer – 2 pages with a pagerank of 10
  Microsoft – 2 pages with a pagerank of 10 (Microsoft only has 2? Really?)

  And who are the rest of the “blessed ones”?
  
  GlamourGals.net - Really?
  Keio University in Japan – No other universities in the WORLD made the list. Sorry Princeton, Yale, Harvard.  Keio wins this round.
  LiveSoftware - guh?
  Sprinks.com – A site that I have yet to be able to get pulled up.

• Authoritative to Who?

  If there was legitimacy to the PageRank ranking in regards to authority and relevancy, it would change dependent on what the person searched for.  On our site here, Google recently demoted our site from a PageRank of 4 down to a PageRank of 1 on our main home page.  A site that has been online for over 8 years and has offered a high level of service and knowledge to our clients.  We are not the authoritative site for “SEO” or “web design” by any stretch, so that may seem warranted, but if someone searched for “Horton Web Design”, there is no higher authority than us. It is who we are. The same if someone searched for NASA or HP.  When someone searches for HP, the HP website IS Hewlett Packard.  Granted it’s a vague search term, but there is no other and there are millions of links pointing to HP domain.  Their PageRank? 7.

• Competition Breeds….a bad PageRank

  The fact that, according to Google, Microsoft only has 2 pages that are authoritative is VERY suspect. And all of the sites that operate in a competitive position to Google (no matter how big) are mysteriously absent from the perfect 10 list. Google dabbled in voice over IP communications. Funny that big players like Vonage and Skype are nowhere to be found. Google has long been eyeballing auctions and surprise, Ebay is absent. Google Knol was Google’s failed attempt at stealing away Wikipedia’s thunder. Yep, they’re not there either.  So why is Apple so prevalent on the top 10 list?  I’ll let you conspiracy theorists have at that one, but Apple doesn’t do search. …Bing, cough, sniff.

• No affect on ranking

  There are millions of websites online with a PageRank of zero that rank at the top of the Google SERP’s for many competitive keywords. Yet another reason to not care.

• The ability to pass the love

  The fact that a website with a PageRank of 10 could pass on Pagerank to another website by simply putting a link and almost immediately pass PageRank juice only further proves the lack of worth in PageRank. Just because a webmaster says that another website is important doesn’t mean that it is. That’s handing off a lot of power to someone that Google probably hasn’t ever even met.  And if 100 websites with a PageRank of 7 link to some new site, would that site only be able to attain the highest PageRank of 7?  Nope.  Not according to the algorithm. That website can surpass the PageRank of it’s supporters.

Long story short, what a strange, twisted, complicated (and very fishy) mess.

The point of it all is simply to say that PageRank has no bearing on your websites online success. Don’t get stressed out by it because even if your site ends up with a very bad ranking, there’s nothing you can do until months later when they eventually do updates.  And at that point, you’re simply praying that you’ve managed to fix whatever messed you up in the first place.  Just focus on being relevant because authority is in the glass eye of the beholder. The deformed, scarred, scratched up, chipped glass eye of the beholder.

1. DON’T sell advertising on your website. Google frowns on websites that sell ad space on their sites because they think that you’re trying to manipulate the rankings by allowing other websites to benefit from the popularity on your site.   Google will devalue your site if it sees that you’re selling banners or links by searching your site for terms like “Advertise here” or “Advertise with us”.  However, Google is allowed to sell ad space on their website though, because of supply and demand. Google is the most popular search engine online today and that’s one of the primary ways they generate revenue.  Yes, I know that’s what you’re trying to do now that your site is generating good traffic and people actually want to buy advertising on your site which is exactly what Google is doing, but Google is the Tony Soprano of the web and it’s just wise not to do what they do.

   
   Don’t offer products or services in exchange for a link. Google does not like it when you make offers such as “Get a free listing on our site if you link to us from yours!”.  Forget that something like this is referred to as reciprocal linking and really doesn’t have much value in the first place, but it will be even worse if Google sees it (which they will….maybe).  If the practice runs rampant on your site, you run the risk of getting your site penalized.  Google looks at this practice as a means of you swaying a person into linking to your website which will cause their algorithms to award you improperly.  Forget the fact that each and every year, Google gives away thousands of free phones, tablets, etc. so that people can help to expand their hold on the industry.

2. Do not buy paid links. Google does not want you to purchase links on website because that may possibly give you an unfair advantage. Getting a link on a site with high PageRank (even if you have to purchase it) could possibly give you a boost (but most likely not).  Google would prefer that you only buy links from them.  Yes, that is okay.

Exactly how this new +1 feature will possibly skew results, if any, is unknown.  One would assume that if a site is neck and neck with a competitor, but one has more +1 votes, it just may be an algorithm attribute taken into consideration to push a site into the higher slot.  If it’s not going to be used that way, then what’s the point?  This was Google’s answer to the Facebook Like button, but there is also an upcoming feature that will allow webmasters to incorporate the +1 button onto their website as well.  Will that functionality pull the +1 data from the SERP’s and input them there and vice versa? Will a click on the website +1 button add a “vote” to the SERP listing?

The ad part is the most disconcerting and especially for new advertisers that don’t have any established votes.  You can see what a site that has received multiple votes looks like on this new report from Search Engine Land that covers this new feature in somewhat good detail, but it raises more questions than it answers. While it’s understood what it’s supposed to do and why it’s there when looked at in comparison to the Facebook Like button, what it doesn’t explain is exactly how Google plans to use the +1 feature. Will it be used as part of their algorithm, even if very minutely?  Will it have an effect on Adwords or factored in as part of the Google Quality Score?  How much of a frenzy will it create when CTR’s start taking a dramatic upward spike due to “accidental” click-throughs?

Regardless of how you feel, it’s coming and is being pushed out in waves.  If you don’t see it in your results, but want to take part of this experiment, head over to http://www.google.com/experimental/index.html and opt in.  SEO experts should probably consider clicking on their client websites sooner rather than later to get the jump on competition.  How skewed can this data get and how will they monitor these “votes” for legitimacy?  Or will it be yet one more back alley tactic that black hats will start using somehow to their advantage.  Since we don’t yet know the full implication, all we can do is start clicking as much as possible because it will be used.  We just don’t know for what or even why.