There is probably a thread on here about this and I expect it isn't that new. If there is a thread could someone send me the link. If not can anyone shed any light on this?

One of my friend said - just keep link building and doing the right thing with the content and you will be fine but this major change is likely to disrupt already established business processes we've got in place.

In my opinion it might be a huge change in SEO. Show me a person which doesn't have a google account ...
Now we can mix up organic results, great, huh?

I was under the impression that it was just the results you are viewing that you could sort? I don't think using the icons will affect the actual Serps... Could be wrong though.

Originally Posted by Vizcom

I was under the impression that it was just the results you are viewing that you could sort?

ye, you can only mix results you're viewing, but it's enough to make impact on actual serps imho, think about people who got account on Google.. It's like ... almost everybody? If it's going to be popular tweak, actual results will suffer a lot. Hm?

Yeah, I think it's going to change the entire SEO industry (on Google) and I'm not liking it very much...

I believe they call it the "Search Wiki", right?

Looks like they're "crowdsourcing" spam detection? Obviously Google will be wary of SEO "gurus" with proxy servers, but if they do start reporting on very common changes and feeding that data into their search ranking algorithm (an open question), that could lead to better quality for their search. Which would be good for everyone who uses Google.

Yes, but then the top 10's will be flooded with the sites that the majority of people like. Then the little guys that are working hard to get their site out there and recognized will have a much bigger struggle on their hands as nobody is going to 'promote' them. I for one am hugely against this.

The purpose of a search engine is to allow searchers to find information they're looking for, not to give every web site an equal chance to be seen.

It might be great to force people to look at every web site, and I'll agree that many of the small ones are small because of a lack of marketing, while many others are "small" because of a lack of value or quality. Small traffic isn't a diagnostic indicator.

But look at this from the perspective of a person who's looking to find something out. If I need to learn about the System.Activator class, I don't frankly care whether that comes from Joe's Unseen Blog, or MSDN's front page, so long as I find the info I need, and it's reliable. Now think from Google's perspective. If you built a search engine (and, given your web site, it seems like you'd have an easy time doing so!) how would you organize the results? Wanting people to use your new search engine, would you doll out the top spot in a round robin fashion, or would you put the pages you think to be most valuable at the top?

If you were a small grocery store, would you sell chocolate, or marmite and haggis?

These buttons only appear when you are logged in and only affect the results that YOU see.

try it. Log in to your account, promote a page and up it comes, then logout and you will see it drop back. Login again and there it is back at the top.

At first I thought Google was going to let people decide who gets to be on the top for each term but it certainly isn't the case. Like chrishirst said, it's only for your own google account and to improve your viewing pleasures.

Yeah, that's pretty obvious - Google has done a good job of preventing spam, and isn't going to make such an obvious mistake. I'm sure they'll have analysts looking at the data for interesting patterns, though.

Originally Posted by Learning Newbie

The purpose of a search engine is to allow searchers to find information they're looking for, not to give every web site an equal chance to be seen.

It might be great to force people to look at every web site, and I'll agree that many of the small ones are small because of a lack of marketing, while many others are "small" because of a lack of value or quality. Small traffic isn't a diagnostic indicator.

But look at this from the perspective of a person who's looking to find something out. If I need to learn about the System.Activator class, I don't frankly care whether that comes from Joe's Unseen Blog, or MSDN's front page, so long as I find the info I need, and it's reliable. Now think from Google's perspective. If you built a search engine (and, given your web site, it seems like you'd have an easy time doing so!) how would you organize the results? Wanting people to use your new search engine, would you doll out the top spot in a round robin fashion, or would you put the pages you think to be most valuable at the top?

If you were a small grocery store, would you sell chocolate, or marmite and haggis?

You "hit the nail on the head"...I couldn't have said it better myself...well maybe a little better.

I think its a good idea - only just realised that it links with the Google account but I think if you could somehow ease it in to the general results it would be a great way of promoting actually useful sites!

Granted there will be alot of room for abuse but Im sure Google can curb that!

Personally I think a similar tool would be a great addition to the Google toolbar - so you can make the decision AFTER you have visited the site and base it on whether you found what you were looking for...??

If I click any Promote/Remove button, can I reset it then?