A few years ago, I wrote about what I called "Soft SEO". I feel that there are squishier things that the all-knowing Google uses for ranking websites.

In addition to the all-important onsite (meta data, keyword-rich content, header tags) and offsite (inbound links, authoritative mentions) there is likely more to what matters in getting your site to be amongst the top ten of all websites in the world for any given search result.

I guess that google is also paying close attention to bounce rates and time on site. If people click on a search result and quickly return for another, then it must not have been a good experience.

And down it goes.

I haven't read anything specific to validate these thoughts, though I have seen anecdotal evidence to support these theories (though that's all they are).

Anthropomorphizing Google

When we work on the SEO for our websites, we often give Google human characteristics. We treat it like a intelligent being. But not too intelligent. We frequently have discussions about our websites and their structure that contain terms like, "We're confusing Google with this," and "Let's be patient. It's digesting all the changes, it needs to sort it all out."

Anthropomorphizing Google (or thinking of Google's systems as "human") helps us get above the simple algorithmic thinking about how many keywords and links are required and more toward the advanced multi-variate factors that all contribute to good search engine rankings. Since Google won't tell us what the factors actually are, if we treat the search engine like a thinking being, what's important to Google and what's important to users converge.

And that's a good thing.

What is Google Actually Telling us?

If you pay attention to what the folks at Google ARE saying, you can start to get the idea that they are looking at many different ways to determine the value of a website.

Today, Google announced that site hierarchies display in search results. Clearly they're looking at how navigation works in a website, and now they're displaying navigation in search results in some cases instead of URLs.

What if they can't make sense of your site structure? It's not the end of the world, but it certainly isn't helping your case.

And recently, there's been lots of discussion over something that Matt Cutts said about site speed and performance in an interview.

How long before Google's telling us how long it takes for our pages to load in their Webmaster tools? Slow sites cause unhappy users and bounces. And Google's paying attention.