The whole 'algorithms do the ranking' thing is a misdirection. Algorithms do of course rank pages, but they do so according to criteria chosen by humans employed by Google. Google absolutely chooses which pages rank highly and which do not according to their own subjective human judgement, applied by machine. It is disingenuous of them to pretend otherwise.
While I wont speak for gibwell, I'm interpreting what is saying that Google do set the criteria of what metrics deem a higher or lower ranking page. For example: - More time users spend on a page indicates it's more relevant - More high quality inbound links indicates higher quality content - Content seen as spammy are considered can lower page rank The fact is that Google don't discriminate based on the rules they s…
Don't get me wrong, if I'm looking for the Apple website, I should absolutely get Apple.com first in Google, and not a medium-sized blog talking about Apple. So relevancy should matter most.
However, I fear that they are ranking bigger sites and bigger brands above more relevant posts from medium-sized, sites, too. And that I don't like. Give the little guy a chance, especially if his post is of higher quality.
And no I don't think that if the big site's post gets retweeted 100 times and the medium-sized' post gets retweeted 10 times, it should matter much, because resharing is just a side-effect of being big and having a big audience, and I think it's less about the "quality" of the post.
Google ends up promoting bigger and bigger sites at the top, while downranking the smaller ones, who are impacted negatively by a lot of factors (smaller age, fewer backlinks, fewer reshares, etc).
So I guess my point is, on-page "performance" (for lack of a better word) should always count more than off-page performance.