When Google recently came out with their SEO Starter Guide PDF, I read it quickly (ok, maybe even skimmed it), found nothing all that new and interesting and kept on looking for a new house to rent, since I’m in the process of moving.

Then I started thinking, so I reread it, as well as going through both the current and original Google Webmaster Guidelines.

I’d be lying if I said this is a revelation, but the most striking element of Google’s PDF is the major difference between this new document and the Webmaster Guidelines regarding the increased emphasis on user experience. It’s not a new tune by any standard, but it is official now – usability took center stage away from crawlability – Google has spoken.

Ever since Big Daddy, things have felt increasingly different, sometimes even scary, especially in the more competitive markets. I believe that’s about when TrustRank (flipside of the oh-so-dreaded Sandbox) was coined. Not long after, user behavior seemed to have an impact on ranking and traffic, with crawlability becoming more of neutral factor. One that can still damn a site when issues are present, but not a factor that can boost rankings when all is technically well.

So ranking highly appears to be all about trust. It’s apparently gained from user behavior, trusted backlinks, whois data, and other on and offline signals (possibly real world company registration info,etc... to separate brick & mortar from cans of spam?). Without trust, relevance means nothing and acquired backlinks seem to have a diminished influence, they can even hurt the page pointed to. It seems that some things that can help a trusted site rank well will hurt an un-trusted site.

So is it goodbye to the days of stuffing, cloaking, creating glorious web-spam pages and all the like? Hardly. Things are just changing. First we must appropriately discount Google’s claims, keeping in mind countless statements on how they can spot bought links, and this may be less false today than it was 2 years ago, but not by much. Link buyers have just had to adapt a bit. Secondly, assuming that usability is the major ranking factor du jour, it just means that instead of stuffing keywords or buying footer links on university newspaper sites, webmasters now have a new backdoor into Google.

For black and whitehat geeks alike, all you need to do now is build sites that are either great for users, or just appear that way. Can an algorithm differentiate between a sticky site and one with a badly made or misleading navigation? With a 15%-20% clickfraud rate, you’d think Google would be better at identifying clickbots, so what kind of chance can they have against well-made bots that pose as satisfied users to target the organic SERPS?

If you’re whitehat, things are even better. Build a site, get some trust, let the site stew a bit and focus on sticky content & structure. It doesn’t take as many backlinks as it used to start getting traffic once you’re trusted, even in Porn or online Poker.

Less nice to read was the general tone when Google covered the nofollow attribute. Even the header, “Be aware of rel="nofollow" for links”, sounds too much like “Beware of rel="nofollow links". All the examples used in the following paragraphs were about spam. The motif seems to be that nofollow is used as an indication of spam.

This is different from comments by Matt Cutts that it can be useful for PR sculpting (ok, he called it a ‘second-order effect’, but it can still open up new options). So which way is the wind blowing? I’ve started to like the idea of shepherding my wooly flock of PageRank goats. It would hurt to lose this the same way we first lost the tilde and then the Supplemental Results designator in the SERPS (I know the Time Warner workaround, but it’s not the same, there’s less certainty, since it’s not stated, but implied).