Comstock was so bewildered by the post that he and several colleagues conducted their own research on the issue and found it to be accurate. One of his colleagues even questioned Matt Cutts about it. Comstock reports that Cutts has since “insinuated” that Fishkin’s finding and their research are, in fact, true.

As a result, Comstock’s team developed a tool called First Link Checker. The tool spiders all outlinks on any page and then groups the outlinks that go with the same url to show the first one that Google sees in the source. Users can check their SEO efforts and determine if the link Google is counting is truly the one they intended.

To learn more about this tool, check out First Link Checker.

Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz also talked with us about ranking factors, but took a different angle. Experts are quick to offer advice on how to get your site to rank well, but does their advice match the data? What the data shows is what really matters. For example, Rand says the experts say H1 tags are very important, but actual data shows that they have a very low correlation with rankings.

So what advice does Rand offer for ranking well? He says titles tags, anchor text, on page keyword usage, and social aspects are all important factors. Social aspects are hard to measure, but Rand points out that they influence ranking with the search engines in an indirect way. He also agrees with Laura that there has to be a distinguishing factor involved in order to outrank competitors. Taking it one step further, Rand says the product not only has to be compelling, but it also has to give people an incentive to want to link.

Because SEO is constantly changing, you need to look at the data to make sure that your efforts match your goals.

Are the traditional ranking factors changing? What new factors are now included in the game?