My good friend Bill Slawski, a man who will go where few other SEOs dare (deep into the world of patents and research papers), has been interviewed over at SEOBuzzbox.

Bill raises a good point, one I’ve often banged on about, and that is that a link is not a vote. Google have chosen to characterise links as votes, presumably because that’s the way their algo works.

I detest the values expressed by the KKK (heh – imagine a link on KKK, damned if I’m going to help them along in vote-countin’ search engines). Is that a vote for the KKK? Only if you count links as votes of confidence without regard to context. The link is more subtle than that – it’s a marker of attention, which is what I think Google really mean when they say vote. Presumably, Google are making advances in terms of context analysis, so the point will be moot.

Well done Aaron & Bill.