Coding it is not really the hard part. A competent programmer or two could make a working PHP prototype of such a thing in a relatively short amount of the time.

The issue is: What algorithms and weights etc should be used? This is really a question that a group of SEO pros need to get together about, hash around a bit, and write a few pages of simple English with scatterings of algebra, etc to describe.

Once that’s settled, you can pretty much just hand it off to some good programmers to have the thing built. (Not to say that a few geeky-types shouldn’t be consulted about the new alg while writing it up to avoid some technical pitfalls.)

Another problem is who’s going to accept the new ranking system. It likely has to come from a trusted source. Yahoo? MSN? And then we may run into the same problems we currently have with Google. The advantage is then that Google has a competitor. Competition may breed different policies.

umm.. stumbled.

Interesting this could make for a cool blog plugin project.

I’d like to see something proportionate,something that didnt rank a site or a blog based on link numbers or visitor numbers.Perhaps a thing that counted visitor interactions, bounce rates, form submissions, session lengths, repeat visitors,comment to post ratios,comment length,post length,post frequencies.

Then you’d need a server and a trusted source to house the data and send back the signals and as you point out the trust of the community too.We all know too well how easily the trust in a thing can be lost. Googles altavistic suicide tendencies are a testament to that.

Building web applications is indeed a simple job, provided we know what kind of algorithm and techniques that can really judge a website fairly…