Google, TrustRank, PageRank, Conspiracy Theories and More. The Future Of Ranking?
So yet again a big brand gets caught trying to game Google, what JCPenny did (or rather their SEO agency did – allegedly) is, in Google’s eyes wrong but is it uncommon practise? On this occasion they got caught out but in the modern world of ranking; I would hazard a guess that most big sites (by that I mean sites with over 5m UU per month) have, at some stage engaged in a little link purchasing. I am lucky to have got to know a number of people who have successfully grown some big sites and only a couple of them can honestly say they have never had link purchasing as a major part of their SEO strategy at one point or another.
So, on to the subject of this post. Clearly and proven beyond all doubt, Google (by their own admission) cannot keep on top of “illegal” link activity. It must sap a huge amount of resources and effort to try to keep up to date with known illegal activity and also dealing with spam reports. Sometimes it pays to think the unthinkable when trying to work out how the whole business of linking may change in the future to combat issues and find a genuine way to rank sites importance. Below are some random thoughts: (and boy do I mean RANDOM!)
Conspiracy One – “nofollow” links carry more weight than “dofollow”: like all the suggestions below, this sounds crazy but let’s think about this a second. Anyone who sets a link as a nofollow is likely to be either engaged in PageRank sculpting, a tight-arse who does not want to pass link love or more likely a site that is simply referencing another site for genuine reasons.
Now herein lies the clue. The fact of the matter is that very few SEO’ers are going to spend cash on “nofollow” links. So therefore it stands to reason that more of the nofollow links are likely to be much more relevant and created for the true intention of why we are supposed to create a link: to reference a useful page, not pass PageRank. A crazy idea? woud it really surprise you to find out that TrustRank has a major component that upweights nofollow links. One to test at some point soon – comment if you know 
Conspiracy Two - Outbound links are as valuable as Inbound links: Many of us have suspected and even proved that outbound links can be critical, it is why you see so any pages linking to authority sites like wikipedia. What intrigues me and makes me think that we are all underestimating the true value of outbound links is a little line hidden somewhere in the Google Webmaster Guidelines (I can’t locate the actual line so I think I may have seen in the the Q&A section on the link provided) but it states to the effect that “you are responsible for sites that you link to so if you link to poor quality or irrelevant sites, your ranking could be
