SEO Skeptic

For my sins, I'm a chocoholic, so I'm often cruisin' the candy aisles.  And when I'm there I almost always see a new, derivative candy bar that I know is doomed to failure in a few months.  Did the world really need or want a Smarties Bar, or a Terry's Raspberry Orange (though I kind of admire the perverse logic that wants to turn something round into a bar, and an orange into a raspberry)?  Their future relegation to the bargain bin is as clear an indication as any that the answer is no.

I can see the logic at work here.  You have to keep creating new products to be a leader in the marketplace, and to capture a larger proportion of market share - at least that's the pitch doubtlessly made at product development meetings that result in some bizarre, unwanted and unloved chocolate bar.

I'm beginning to get the sense that the search engines are experiencing a similar devolution in product innovation.  That is, they're producing new products or features for the sake of producing new products or features, rather than introducing innovations that really improve usability or provide more relevance to searchers.  Here are two recent examples.
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Ben Parr's Mashable Post that Google may launch a microblogging (Twitter) search service has ignited a storm of speculation in the SEO and SMO communities.  Perhaps most interesting object of speculation is how Google will calculate authority in order to rank tweets in search results.

Jordan Kasteler has written a thoughtful post on this issue in which he introduces the notion of "InfluenceRank" for social media ranking (at least I haven't seen the term coined before), following a couple of patent applications relevant to social media chronicled by Bill Slawski.

As Parr points out, Google is probably seeking to extend the hub/authority model (à la Hilltop) to social networks.  There, are, however, unique challenges posed by Twitter.  Twitter is somewhat of an untamed frontier from an optimization perspective these days, with very few spam controls and filtering options - almost analogous to the ease of gaming the <meta> keywords tag back in the good old Alta Vista days.

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An SEO Skeptic gold star to Aaron Wall for his post today regarding PageRank scultping, Expert SEO Testing: Usually Worthless.  Since the recent "announcements" that Google is now basically disregarding efforts at controlling internal linking using the nofollow attribute - "PR sculpting" - there's been a whole lot of hand-wringing in the SEO community about Google getting their messaging straight.  These usually public protestations don't actually address the point Wall makes so well in his post:  was there genuine value in using nofollow for PR sculpting anyway?
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When Google introduced paid link reporting via Webmaster Tools in 2007, in marked the second time human informants were solicited to help the search engine.  The first - less contentious - invitation a year earlier was the spam report, by which conscientious website owners (or their minions) could report such things as sneaky JavaScript redirects, doorway pages and even "misleading or repeated words."  These share with paid links the characteristic that they are potentially hard to detect, and indicate that the machines crunching through all those web pages are still occasionally outsmarted by some upstart human.
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