A world beyond links

This post is from from my other blog here

Understanding Ranking Signals in a Modern Search WorldI was reading a post from Dave Naylor the other day in which he was musing over what he’s seen as a shift in ranking signals and weights (http://www.davidnaylor.co.uk/maybe-links-arent-important-anymore.html) over at Google. In short, he seems to be noticing movement in the dominance of links as a ranking factor. Why do they do it?One of the more important things to consider is that for a (nodal) link centric search engine aspects such as spam detection are often easier. What I mean is that if we valuate links heavily, it effectively funnels spammers down the path of link spam to ultimately rank. This means that it is exponentially easier than if we used a more balanced set of factors which could be manipulated.The balance that one would need to weigh is between search quality and web spam control. Certainly not a task I envy....