Could Microsoft’s BrowseRank Have an Effect on SEO?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis ShareThis

The major aim of a websites search engine optimization strategy is to balance on page and off page activities. The off page activities lean heavily towards building inbound links. Microsoft’s BrowseRank will base ranking on an entirely different set of data. How will that affect SEO?

It appears that BrowseRank is intended to be based on the activities of the user. In other words, traffic will be the major component of any algorithm. The aim of a search engine optimization program is get a page ranked high enough to attract organic search traffic. The traffic you can attract, the higher your BrowseRank.

What isn’t clear is how this traffic will be measures. I have yet to see an analytics package that can accurately measure traffic. If traffic cannot be measured accurately, how reliable can a ranking system be that is based on those measurements.

Other aspects that could cause concern include artificial traffic spikes. A heavy flow of traffic from any of the social bookmarking sites can produce abnormal results. BrowseRank’s algorithm may provide for some smoothing to take out traffic spikes, however web sites that ‘buy’ traffic could inflate their visitor numbers and sustain it over a period of time.

Google’s own PageRank is no longer relevant to most serious web users, despite Google’s claims. Once the novelty effects wear off BrowseRank will probably suffer the same fate.

It interesting to note that there are already several different ranking systems floating around. Google PageRank is one, Compete another and Alexis a third. What makes these systems noteworthy is there lack of impact on rankings in the search engines. No one pays much attention to them these days and they certainly have little bearing on our SEO activities. BrowseRank will be no different.