There are two answers.
The first one is: I never want to take the ranking signal off the table. I’ve joked that if the phase of the moon can help us rank search results better, I’m willing to use the phase of the moon.
At the same time, think about how people would attack the user references. Right now, a lot of people rely on getting links. If all they have to do is have a example.com in text, then you can leave comments all over the blogs, the web, all over forums…
It would almost be anywhere you could stamp any user generated content, people would be leaving those references.
That’s the sort of reason why we might be skeptical about why we’d use this sort of signal. People could abuse that sort of thing. They could just leave mentions of the URLs even if they can’t generate links.
But I’ll say that we’re willing to look at it, we would run the analysis. We would say ‘Is there a way to pull out a signal from that noisy data where we could find a way to improve it’.
But it would definitely be a sort of thing where people would try to abuse it.
Related posts:
- Do you feel that the widespread and blanket use of nofollow tags is devaluing Google’s search algorithms? Examples such as Wikipedia, where ALL external links are nofollow. Does Wikipedia mean nothing to Google’s algorithms? Do Google take into account quality factors from nofollowed links when the links come from the well established authority websites, such as Wikipedia?
- If you have inbound links from reputable sites, but those sites do not show up in a link:webname.com search, does this mean you are not getting any “credit” in Google’s eyes for having inbound links?
- Are titles and description tags helpful to increase the organic CTR – clicks generated from organic (unpaid) search – which in turn will help in better ranking with a personalized search perspective?
- Does Google value its own links for PR/Linkjuice? Google Bookmarks, Google Profiles, etc. Reason – Google links never appear in Webmaster Tools
- Recently, Google has been more proactive in providing results that featured “corrected” spellings. In what way will smart guesses be employed in search results in the future? Can we expect more synonyms in search results, for example?
