The SEO popularity contest

Search engine optimisation (SEO) punditry has become a "cult of personality", while Google rankings are continuing to favour "quality" news providers and authoritive spokespeople, according to one commentator.

SEO Book's Peter D was commenting on recent remarks made by Google chairman and chief executive Eric Schmidt at the Newspaper Association of America conference, where he admitted that the search engine did not have an algorithm to promote trustworthy sources to higher rankings than those that are better known.

Mr D said that the Google algorithm was "essentially a popularity contest".

He added that the search engine did not know what content was worthwhile and what was not.

"Ranking signals have traditionally been about links, however code tweaking and link begging is fast becoming about marginal activity," he added.

He predicted that in the future ranking signals would be focused on attention.

In order to boost popularity, the expert recommended that commentators offer to write for an authoritive source in order to build up an established audience.

Google has now made some new additions to its news search offering, by adding a News Timeline as a Google Labs experimental service.

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