Random start:

We’ve spent a lot of this year talking about Pandas.

What will we be talking about this time next year? I’d like to think it will be Racoons or tricycles or sink plungers

If you have any thoughts send them by postcard please to stefan@propellernet.co.uk

Veering off in another direction I wanted to pick up on Google Silverback Matt Cutts commenting on something Pot Pie Girl has been talking about for a while now – the impact the raters have on sites’ rankings.

According to Cutts: “Even if multiple search quality raters mark something as spam or non-relevant, that doesn’t affect a site’s rankings or throw up a flag in the url that would affect that url.”

It seems to have caused a bit of a debate. I’m bored of it so let me put it to rest.

What the raters do affect is how the algorithm sees the world of search. And that can impact a site’s rankings. That’s my take on it anyway. Cause. And. Indirect. Effect.

And, of course, some sites can be red flagged ( a la JC Penney) – just not by the raters.

There you go. I’m 99.9% positive.  That’s enough. Just do things properly and you won’t need to worry as much about raters and the like.

Then you’ll have more time to note down people’s predictions for 2012, if only so that you laugh out loud when you reread them at the end of next year.

We’ve reached that time of year when the media moves from reflective pieces to predictions for the year ahead, most of them fairly generic and useless.

But I really liked this piece on link building predictions by Eric Ward. I don’t agree with everything he writes but I’m sure he’s going to be more right than wrong.

More right than my Google update naming suggestions…

Merry Christmas!