This one has us pretty amazed, when Google did the latest round of page rank adjustments, Google itself slipped to a PR of 9, while Google’s biggest competitor, Facebook went to 10.

Aside from demonstrating that Google is completely unbiased with the page ranking system, it is also the strongest indication yet of the importance of visitor time on the website being an important factor in calculating page rank.

Think about it, the more effective Google is as a search engine, the more quickly people will find what they are looking for and the less time they will spend on Google. Conversely, a social networking website like facebook should hold vsitors for a long time.

So what is the SEO Tip for the average website owner wanting to rank highly in Google? Keep tweaking your website to make it an engaging experience for visitors. Sure it’s important to have people linking to your site and to be indexed in directories and good PR across the web, but if your website is not holding the visitors when they get there, you will probably struggle more and more to maintain a good rank in search engine results. And anyway, the whole purpose of having a website is to attract visitors, engage in some way and get them to take some kind of action before they leave.

Back in 2009, Link Building was responsible for about 42% of a website's SEO rank

This is one thing the experts appear to agree on as Google becomes better and better at catching cheats. A comprehensive survey published on  SEOMoz, concludes that the perceived value of a website to others will be the most important factor in determining the search engine results.

This is good news for all those who maintain credible websites and have struggled to maintain high search engine ranks against the sheer mass  of  crappy Adsense  pollution that ruled that space for so long.  Slowly, one by one we have seen them get slapped into oblivion as Google becomes more and more sophisticated at defining crap and catching these morons.

But it does make you wonder – this patented system of ranking a website by the number of inbound links is what has kept Google the undisputed king of search engines for so long is now almost redundant. Doesn’t that mean Google will lose it’s advantage over the rest of the field?

It will be an interesting couple of years as the peer endorsement through website links all but fades away and is replaced more and more with the perceived value of a website to visitors. I expect to see software applications that mimic the patterns of visitors on a website, increasing the average time people spend on sites or perhaps that is what all the unemployed Indian link builders will be doing in the future.

But the one thing that will always be hard to cheat is good original content. I doubt there will ever be a substitute for it.

For those who love the science of SEO, the SEOmoz report is comprehensive and a good read, though very academic, as you would expect from such an organization.  Read it here: http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors

A famous quote by copywriter  Paul Butterworth, aimed at copywriting critics.  ”What the heck has this got to do with SEO Tips?” you ask. Everything.  Because good effective SEO is increasingly about creating a valuable, useful resource for people online and that is largely copywriting. Original copywriting, not spun articles from other writers.

Google's Matt Cutts, Principal Engineer & Head Of Spam Prevention wants Original content in Google Rankings

Recent Google Algorithm updates were aimed at reducing spammy, copied content – which is exactly what people searching for information on the web don’t want. This change affected approximately 12% of Google searches.

According to Matt Cutts: “we recently launched a redesigned document-level classifier that makes it harder for spammy on-page content to rank highly. The new classifier is better at detecting spam on individual web pages, e.g., repeated spammy words—the sort of phrases you tend to see in junky, automated, self-promoting blog comments.”

Matt went on to say: ”We’re evaluating multiple changes that should help drive spam levels even lower, including one change that primarily affects sites that copy others’ content and sites with low levels of original content. We’ll continue to explore ways to reduce spam, including new ways for users to give more explicit feedback about spammy and low-quality sites.”

For search engine optimization it means that original, useful content is becoming more and more valuable, so if you can’t write, go get yourself somebody who can.

And to those who just take other’s content and “spin” it, “Where the heck were you when the page was blank anyway?“