Google Team Considering Replacing Backlinks

Here is an interesting story I saw about a Google research team currently modeling a ranking system intended to weed out garbage sites and reduce rankings based on backlinks:

Google wants to rank websites based on facts not links - 28 February 2015 - New Scientist

The PDF report of the Google's team's findings is here: (warning: highly technical research analysis)

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1502.03519v1.pdf

While this is still in the research phase with an evaluation of more than 100 million web pages, the ultimate goal is increasing the trustworthiness of web pages being delivered. Implicit - backlinks have become untrustworthy.

Whether or not you believe this "KBT" analysis will be used or incorporated into the ranking algorithms, take a look at the PDF. Google reports and patents are always fascinating for what you can pull out of them. This one references numerous algorithms which can also be used to influence the ranking of pages:

PageRank
Authority hub analysis
EigenTrust
TrustMe
Web topology
TrustRank
AntiTrust

The next to the last page references duplicate content.

Within the research is a finding that information in forums is of low factual quality.

Ironic, I know, posting this is in a forum. But it's a heads up if you have or rely on a forum, or a site like Yahoo Answers which is also referenced as being poor, as rankings of such sites may be going down in the near future.

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