A system of rules which are only partially known, leaves the the advantage in the hands of those with access at the top of the barrel. You really think your ranks are so tight that information doesn't leak? And there for create more harm than good?
If the article is untrue, put it in writing. "Matt Cutts says Google doesn't use email as an indicator in search rankings" would kill the story.
You haven't said that, so it leaves me to believe that the article is true. And it is only the method of discovery you dislike.
This patent for "Ranking blog documents" seems to disagree:
http://bit.ly/msgrsv
"[0044] References to the blog document by other sources may be a positive indication of the quality of the blog document. For example, content of emails or chat transcripts can contain URLs of blog documents. Email or chat discussions that include references to the blog document is a positive indicator of the quality of the blog document."
Andriy Bihun, the first name on the patent, is still a Google software engineer according to LinkedIn.
That's a good find, but the fact that a Google employee has a patent on using email links to rank blogs doesn't necessarily mean that Google's using it.
actually, he has put in writing that the title of the story isn't true. I still think there are reasonable questions that haven't been answered but I'm not sure we'll actually get answers to those.
To be honest, I'm surprised we got this kind of response from Google at all. They generally don't weigh in on SEO theory.
Matt once told me that if I did a bad thing on my site there wasn't a penalty, I just didn't get as many points as I could. Semantics. When he says "there is no correlation between Email and search" I will maybe believe him. Maybe.
Maybe you are too young to remember the Matt Cutts "use no follow on internal links" debacle where he said that was a good idea.
I read the response from Google as Matt's annoyed a minion said something they shouldn't have, and Google's caught with their pants down on what is a pretty scary thought. "Google Reads Your Email And Does Scary S___ With It"
If the article is untrue, put it in writing. "Matt Cutts says Google doesn't use email as an indicator in search rankings" would kill the story.
You haven't said that, so it leaves me to believe that the article is true. And it is only the method of discovery you dislike.