A programmer here just told me that Google has been experimenting with Digg style search results. After looking into it I saw that there is Google Experiment about this project. The functionality of the experiment means that after you run a search on Google, you have the option of rating each individual result by the following options:

Like It - Will move your result to the top of the page with a small marker. Your results stays at the top of the page whenever you search for the same keyword(s) in the future.

Dont Like It - The result will remain hidden when you search for the same keyword(s) in future searches.

Know of a better Webpage? - You can submit a url that is relevant to your search. Then it will show at the top of your searches just as the “like it” option does for further searches.

Each time you run a search for a previously modified result, your rules will stay in tact. You will have the option to see the results in their default order though by clicking a link at the bottom of the results page. You must also be logged in, to do this.

So what does this mean for those of us involved with SEO? I think a lot of this has to do with how Google uses this information. Do they plan to take the results from the people who are adding, removing, and modifying their results into account when doing actual rankings or will their actions affect them only. We all come across search results that don’t belong, and a feature that allows us to say we don’t like it, would be nice. I am concerned though (and this goes back to how Google plans on using this relevancy feature), that your competitors could go and purposely say that they don’t like your rankings and this hurt your overall rankings. I think of that as being like a competitor coming in and attempting to perform click fraud on your PPC ads with ill intent.

Of course this is still very early on and its only a test so I won’t overreact but I would be curious to see that if this implemented in the future, how it will affect the life of SEO’s out there like me. Think about it; They didn’t build a giant algorithm that works pretty amazingly just to replace it by some digg style voting method. I think they’ll just use this in tandem honestly.