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I make my living as an SEO and yes Google searches can be manipulated by

  • Internal linking
  • Contextual keyword references
  • External linking
  • Social linking
  • Social engagement

But yes external link building is by far the heaviest weight because of the barrier to entry, to get someone to link to your site is based on the assumption you created something so high value it was the ideal reference, but as we know every website on the planet is for sale and for the right price you can buy the right links from domains, or run link building campaigns that help you secure a competitive domain valuation in google's eyes that gives you ranking ability

Let's say we do have a LN-ranking factor that could be stored in an LSAT or something like and had a weighting for everyones own biases

So a piece of content could have a weighting on

  • Internal linking
  • Contextual keyword references
  • External linking
  • Social linking
  • Social engagement

as a baseline, I don't think throwing it out completely is a good idea, there is some merit to the system, it should just be re-weighted with secondary data

Lets say we had economic factors like:

  • Unique wallets that engaged with domain
  • Unique wallets that engaged with page
  • Number of wallets that tipped
  • Amount tipped
  • Number of recurring payments to domain
  • Number of paywall interactions
  • A conversion rate of paywall to wallets
  • Scroll depth payment %
  • Return rate of unique wallets to content or domain
  • Average spend on content/domain

Overlaying this information with the standard google metrics can give you a much deeper understanding of the value of a piece of content.

How it could work in practice

Lets say there are 2 pages, both 2000 words each both have the same amount of links and shares, but one is an indepth researched article, the other is listicle, they might have the same time on site, bounce rate and to google they are both simliar, but when you overlay the economic data you can see that the rich piece gets far more real engagement and therefore should be ranked higher.

How we break the network effect

I agree it's been bastardised through the years, as fiat dilutes all products and is due for an upgrade, I just don't see how a site with superior ranking eats market share because normies don't know they're getting bad results, they take it on face value this is what results should be and yes you do get brand biased searches as mentioned in the post but this is not the norm.

As an SEO I use multiple search engines all the time to compare resutls, but a normie is not going to do that, if lets say the wallet is now a chrome extension like alby and can prompt users to adopt the additional metrics to update search results that could be a jumping off point since you're not moving them off google.

I use tools like ahrefs that do that, so I can view location biased searches when i work for clients in different regions, and think this could be a cool solution that could even be useed to feed data into having a stand alone search engine too like Ahrefs has with Yep.com