Just because they will index it doesn't mean it won't harm your ability to rank for that text.
Google bot is a headless vesion of chrome - so while they can see that stuff, they also know when stuff isn't "visible" to the user and treat it accordingly.
The problem with tests like this is that you either need to test with site: or with made up terms - but the algorithm isn't static - it changes based on the corpus of relevant results. (e.g. if there's only 3 relevant results, then they won't apply spam penalties or panda weights, etc)
When you have such a small scale test, the corpus of results is always small - so it's not accurate.
I'm confident that if you tried these techniques on a site with content currently ranking in a highly competitive area, then changed it to one of these, your rankings would fall.
Everything Google has said that the bot does, plus a knowledge of coding. They aren't using a LYNX style browser to render javascript and determine the position of ads on pages. They have to be using a headless type of actual browser for that - and it's a safe bet they aren't using firefox or IE or safari.
They aren't telling us how Googlebot is coded, but it's pretty easy to deduce.
Make the SEO play here. Create a static link for each button with the text that I type in, so I can link people right to it. Then, with proper title and headings, etc you can probably get some traffic for "random long tail term button"
My wife gets headaches. A linkable button text allows me to send her a magic "headache relief" button. Much bigger impact than a self-prescribed button.
This takes us down a very slippery slope. Linking, is not illegal and I think we can all agree that the web would be ruined if simply adding a link to a site you own or control were made illegal.
So that raises the question: How do you determine what's a good link or a bad link? Pretty soon you'd have people arrested for linking to somebody's site from a news article or to/from sites like ripoffreport.
What happens if I write an article about how shit McDonalds is, like really bad and post information about the mistreatment of animals, or the horrible practices that they follow and in this article I link to them. I mean I'm writing this article so that people stay away from McDonalds because I feel its damaging to their health. Would a link to there website on that article be illegal?
Yes. It's certainly a slippery slope but we can navigate it intelligently (as we do with defamation) and it's worth it to keep people from building link farms pointing to a competitor so that Google will punish them.
The solution isn't to make linking illegal - it's for Google to stop the penalizing and just simply not count the links they don't like. Penalize for on-site stuff, just ignore the off site stuff.
I realize they want to take away the incentive for spammers, but let's shift the burden of finding a better way to do that onto them instead of changing the laws about how the web works.
They will just =not count= more stuff - same as negative counting.
Overall the entire ranking business depending on external links instead of the actual content will always be exploitable to some degree.
so, I realize this might be seen as spam, but I am always trying out adsense alternatives and regularly maintain a list of the ones I'm trying out. http://www.dotcult.com/best-adsense-alternatives/
TLDR: casale, Lijit, technorati are working best for me.
Don't use Lijit, ever. I was running them as backup to my Adsense, sending them nearly a million impressions a day. They run all sorts of malicious advertisements, and apparently they approve of them. My users were getting redirected from my site, to sites telling them their Javascript is outdated, with download links to malware. My mobile users would get popups about their Android device being out of date, and similar. I looked up the redirect URLs on Google, and this was affecting other sites as well, and I found a handful of forums running Lijit, where their users were reporting the same troubles.
This was incredibly damaging to my reputation. I narrowed it down to Lijit after toggling my ad networks and informed them of the issue. I emailed them, explained how my users are getting these redirects on a daily basis, how this is unacceptable, and how I'll have to pull their ads until they're able to resolve the issue. Their response? They didn't care, they just said, we understand your concern for not wanting to continue our relationship. That was it, they're not looking into it, they didn't apologize, nothing.
I tried them again last month, after I cut them for the previous 6 months. Within a day, I had over a dozen users sending reports about malicious redirects. I disabled Lijit, and things were fine. I used Lijit for 8 months without trouble, and enjoyed their service since the interface is decent, rates competitive, tracking and payments done right, etc. However, since these issues started, I have no choice but to leave. It's sad they have no interest in solving them, because like I said, they have potential. Redirecting my visitors to malware though, and allowing that on the network? It's inexcusable.
Lijit was the best alternative for me, and I went through a good 5-6 networks. However, their CPM's were significantly less than adsense. Their support is really good though and they do actually have control over their inventory unlike a lot of other ad networks I worked with (many networks claim to be able to block audible/video/popup malicious ads but still allow many to slip through). Technorati is decent I believe (only used them for about a month) but their ads must be served out of an iframe (so they can't be contextual - so less CPM) because their ad servers are so slow and they are page blocking.
I still use Lijit for their "backup ads" feature. Basically, I monitor the CPMs I'm getting from other networks, then set my floor CPM in Lijit to that number. That way, I get about 30% fill with Lijit - but it's guaranteed to be at a higher CPM than the other network. Chaining them together works really well - you just need to do it asynchronously so that it doesn't impact load times.
it's really quite simple. The pages that get more +1s and likes and comments and whatever metric you want are the ones that are good. The ones that are good also get more links and other signals that are used in algorithms. The hidden middle-factor here is "quality."
That, or simply: "the pages that have more +1s have them because they ranked and got more traffic. e.g. nobody's +1ing pages that they can't find."
The short answer is, "no, but it depends." If sample size is large and the sample is representative of what it claims to show, .5 is very significant correlation.
The .3 correlation with a large sample size means something is happening. I agree with what Matt is saying: that content that gets +1s also gets links and mentions and everything else that Google might use to calculate rankings.
The pearson correlation, when squared, gives the % of variance (in the strict mathematical sense) that is explained by this variable alone.
So how much is 'weak' or not depends on the situation. If you have something that is influenced by multiple causes, then it is impossible to have any single high correlation. But any correlation, if statistically significant (i.e. highly unlikely to be caused by chance) can be important.
The question is, how much is an 'interesting' amount of the total variance, in the given situation.
(In the topic under discussion here, I have no idea.)
Google bot is a headless vesion of chrome - so while they can see that stuff, they also know when stuff isn't "visible" to the user and treat it accordingly.
The problem with tests like this is that you either need to test with site: or with made up terms - but the algorithm isn't static - it changes based on the corpus of relevant results. (e.g. if there's only 3 relevant results, then they won't apply spam penalties or panda weights, etc)
When you have such a small scale test, the corpus of results is always small - so it's not accurate.
I'm confident that if you tried these techniques on a site with content currently ranking in a highly competitive area, then changed it to one of these, your rankings would fall.