Marissa Mayer from Google commented that Google in future could use SearchWiki data to change Search Engine Ranking. This may thrown open an avenue for exploitation and in the long term maybe kill SEO. What is your take on it?
Need to say more? This is going to open pandora's box. I'll get 5k "removes" to your site and you're gone. (Using a script, that i bet is already in testings...) Maybe not so easy to do, cause G will have defences but in time i will get you down. I don0't know really, i love new stuff and progress, but sometimes i wonder if G is not going too fast here.
All I can say now is that we will all be banking on Google to have an effective counter measure, if they ever decide to go ahead with it. I am sure (as you said) many of the shady guys have already begun there testing, ways to game the system. It will be a killer for SEO rankings. Do you see the future. I wish I had the magic crystal ball more than ever.
I don't see searchwiki going mainstream very soon. It will be easy to 'game' the system. People manage to game digg many times which uses user digg/bury to 'rank' websites (not the exact analogy but close).
Yes, but not directly. Searchwiki should be used (and probably is) as a way of "flagging" content for manual checking. If a lot of people delete a site from their search, a person should go in and manually check the site. If a lot of people boost one up, then it should be checked to see if its worthy for a boost.
This is exactly the problem: i have a great website that doesn't rank very well. I use a script or buy those boost's to my site and a manual revision puts it higher. Same sheet, different approach
I don't think regular users are going to use Search Wiki much. If they do a search and one of the results is not what they're looking for, they'll just go to the next one. Why take the time to remove it from their future searches? Once they've found what they want, they're not likely to repeat that same search. And if they already know of a website that satisfies their needs, why search in the first place? The only people who are going to use it are SEOs. I think they would be better off to track what users actually clicked on. So there are x number of searches on "keyword", and 50% of searchers click on a particular result. It stands to reason that this website seems to satisfy what the searcher was looking for. I suppose you could take it a step further and take bounce rate into consideration too. I'm sure there are ways to manipulate this too, but at least a lot of real users would be participating.