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I doubt it Though, let's wait and see....

Yes that's my thoughts too. What's interesting is that they made a switch after a while.

Try the keyword research tool for google adwords.

I like that! Thanks Rand.

I have an article uploaded on May 8th showing greenbar.

"quality content = ranks well." Well that's what Goog keeps telling us. ... so are we talking real world or pixie land? Honestly, I knew I was stepping into a pile of crap when I put the "Ranks Well" criteria in there. But, it sure makes for a good litmus test. So yes... quality content = ranks well. ...and the vicious circle continues.

Yes though it's going against me right now as I cannot Tweet. We've been sitting at AU $217.50 and no movement I will end the auction early and give the Tweet to the highest bidder. If anything we made two hundred bucks to our charity!

Thank you for your great answer.

Any idea as to why the cache redirects?

From my testing (and I do a fair bit of that) I conclude that links still outweigh every other signal. Though it would make perfect sense that newly introduced hints steal a bit of link graph's glory until it's put in a fair place with everything else. I notice Matt Cutts still talks about links a great deal in his videos which confirms my view that links are still going strong. What puzzles me is how strongly they treat exact anchor text, when in natural world we rarely see it happen, it's usually click here, or read more or just plain website address. This is the area I believe needs fixing sooner than others. Back to the original topic... once links stop being a super-signal content and function will rule.

You probably already know this but there's a FF plugin called Google Global which you can use to search from other places if you wanted to check the differences easily

Very good point.

Nofollow should not be an issue if Twitter feeds raw data to Google directly via firehose. I do of course appreciate the fact that there are secondary benefits to nofollowed links.

What about using another TLD but exact match and the 'Use Facebook as my website' feature? Depends what you're testing for really. I'm pretty sure that when I registered a new domain and set up a FB page on the same day the FB page outranked it, but after a few days the site was on top so if there's any links between the site and the social pages (and back again) I presume Google can actually figure it out.

The top three gainers from the farmer update was Amazon.com, eHow.com and NexTag.com. There is a pretty complete article on the visibility changes here from SELand. http://searchengineland.com/who-lost-in-googles-farmer-algorithm-change-66173 NexTag specifically is a very old property, going back to 1999.  The authority built up from being one of those older properties has to carry a lot of weight.  The majority of the losers from the farmer update are content farms, but where we see eHow survive I'd wager comes from eHow being the origin of many pieces of the content that is being farmed out. This, to me, relates to Local Search.  Sites like Localeze are the source of much scraped data that other directories use to show addresses, business categories, etc.  So Localeze as the source for this data has authority, where the individual pages that it enters data into does not have that same authority, and protection. Duplicate content can be tracked to an origin, the time the post was made, the time Google first crawled it, etc.  So in NexTag's case, being the origin for so many things, I'd say it was safe.  NexTag is also very trusted by Google, they have had a Google Shopping relationship for years because Google, and this is just my observation, but Google feels they can trust NexTag's system to deliver a viable product when their links are clicked. I'd wager also that NexTag had a much better link portfolio than the losers, so those trying to copy the NexTag model were shot down in favor of the original provider. Again, these are my best guesses based on the data.  Hope it helps. Cheers,

There were no detectable inbound links to any of those pages before the pagerank update. What other signals could have affected it... content quality alone? By the way content was written using the same writer and same quality level.

He also said: "We invite and strongly encourage readers to test these themselves." This is what I am after, personal opinion from people who have either tested or experienced the effect first hand.