• ClickZ, Monday, November 3, 2008 1:03 PM

Search engines are looking for a new type of signal. Keywords in prominent places, tags on pages, good linking data, and anchor text were the search workhorses of yesteryear, according to Mike Grehan. "But now there are so many different signals," he writes. "Social media bookmarking, tagging, and ratings send out half-decent signals. Number of plays and distribution of a video send out sharp signals. But the biggest signals come from the toolbar and end-user data."

Grehan believes the toolbar can help build the tools that you need to track end users "from the click on the search result to their final destination page" and then aggregate that data. It's all about discovering resource locations. But the old idea of "throwing up zillions of pages to see if you can get the odd click here and there is the wrong way to go now." Creating quality content that's visited frequently works, but having a "Web [site] with millions of redundant pages that rarely get any visits may send a signal that a particular domain hosts lower-quality content," he writes.

Read the whole story at ClickZ »