Posted by randfish

Years ago, the world of SEO was filled with mystery and intrigue - vague half-answers from the engines combined with private forum and backroom conspiracies to make for an industry rife with misinformation. Today, those problems still exist in some forms, but the engines are far more forthright and the mysteries of the ranking algorithms are no longer shrouded in dubious half-truths. Sure, we may not know everything in them, and we may not have the right balance, but by and large, search marketers can read through a document like the search ranking factors and feel fairly confident in their wisdom (if not, neccessarily, their abilities). As the old joke goes - "I stole the Google algo!" "What does it say?" "We need links!"

However, all that aside, there are still plenty of straightforward, honest answers to questions, both simple and complex, we'd all love to get from the engines. I'll share a few of mine, and hopefully you can fill in lots of your own in the comments. If we're lucky, one day in the future, these may all have answers.

A few of my questions (in no particular order):

1. Does a link from a page with meta robots="noindex, follow" carry less weight? no weight? 
   
2. What role do search quality raters play in determining rankings?
   
3. Does your engine ever use the predictive abilities of search keyword demands to profit outside the world of search?
   
4. Some domains move effortlessly to new domain names without a loss in rankings, while the vast majority go into the "sandbox" to languish for many weeks or months - what are the factors affecting the decisions to "trust" some domain moves while "distrusting" others?
   
5. How much impact do the other domains owned by / registered by a site owner have on the way a site is viewed/treated algorithmically?
   
6. What is the purpose/motivation behind obsfucating accurate, precise keyword usage data? (why not simply charge for it?)
   
7. What is the purpose/motivation behind obsfucating accurate, precise link data? (why not simply charge for it?)
   
8. Do better webmaster relations have a direct, positive impact on earnings?
   
9. Why don't you (mostly Google, Ask and, to a lesser degree MSN) refrain from building/owning content portals that could deliver traffic and revenue?
   
10. Google - is your share price overvalued?
    
11. Do companies/sites that spend a lot with your engine receive any SEO benefits (free consulting time, a few tricks from an engineer, etc)?
    
12. Do you use any of the following - latent semantic indexing, keyword density, term vectors, term weighting?
    
13. How do you detect cloaking? No, really?
    
14. In less than 100 words, describe why you choose to rank Wikipedia above accurate sources?

If I were Matt Cutts or Tim Mayer or Eytan Seidman or Kaushal Kurapati... I would probably answer - 1, 5, 7, 8 and 9. Seriously, though, I'd really love to get your questions below. Next time I sit down with these guys, I'll put their feet to the fire (or, in my case, a slightly warm pebble).

p.s. I promise - lots of fantastic stuff on China to come ASAP. And if anyone from Google China in Beijing is reading, please drop me a line (rand_at_seomoz.org) - we'd love to see you while we're here