I do a lot of niche research these days. One of my criteria has been a competitive and reachable first page of SERPs on Google. Those that look unattainable end up getting ruled out. While doing this research I noticed something very interesting…

We’ve all been taught to believe in the power of incoming links. Links pass PR which boosts our ranking, right? But on a recent search across the web I noticed a lot of content getting ranked in the top 10 on highly competitive terms, but yet the page has no pagerank value associated to it. On closer inspection a lot of the text seems to come directly from a lexicological search, like the one you’d get if you looked for related search terms with Google’s Adwords tool. In one case someone mirrored a wikipedia page and ended up only 2 notches below the original page, yet had no links on a link: search and no pagerank at all.

This is leading me to believe some things are changing. When I searched for the URL in question I found numerous web bookmarking services like digg and technorati had the site listed, but all using rel=nofollow links. Could we be seeing some sort of alternate trustrank in the works? Maybe these nofollow tags are being followed afterall.

Or maybe it’s purely on-page optimization. I was always told that on-page text is too easily manipulated, but maybe Google’s algo has gotten a lot better at detecting abnormal text patterns and they’re beginning to shift from the old link vote strategy to a more on-page LSI-based.

This makes me wonder how long it’ll be before SEO folk will be to beat the new system and get high ranks without a single drop of PR or link building. I wonder what that’ll do to all of the link directories out there… or whether they’ll continue to serve a purpose in the new regime. It’s hard to tell, as these things have just begun, but one thing’s for certain… times are changing.