Thanks to you too Bill. I answered Yahoo at #22 and was a bit baffled when it turned out to be Google. I positively remembered reading about a patent application by Yahoo with the term TrustRank, it must have been on your blog :)

For #20, I picked Yahoo as patenting “TrustRank” rather than Google. Dang it — I knew it was Google! But it was late, and I questioned myself.

You were right, Danny. It was Yahoo. The trustrank patent application (from Yahoo): Link-based spam detection

TrustRank is a link analysis technique related to PageRank. TrustRank is a method for separating reputable, good pages on the Web from web spam. TrustRank is based on the presumption that good documents on the Web seldom link to spam. TrustRank involves two steps, one of seed selection and another of score propagation. The TrustRank of a document is a measure of the likelihood that the document is a reputable (i.e., a nonspam) document.

Yahoo has four more patent applications which take trustrank into the realm of social networking, by call it “dual trustrank” and incorporating user annotations and tagging and social networks into the linking analysis.

The google patent that Rand points to has nothing to do with trustrank.

This isn’t a dig – I LOVE the moz; it just made me chuckle that you had said what I was thinking…(even if your reasons for doing so were different to mine).

When I do SEO, it is. :-)

Danny, I think your 20% no sense estimate is high. Dan Thies and I both got 86-87%, which means that probably only 13 – 14% of Rand’s questions were flawed. :-D

My points are not all nit-picky, especially when many of the questions themselves are poised to either try and be “tricky” as a test of knowledge. If I had the energy, I would have gone through all 75 questions and provided many, many other examples where I rolled my eyes and thought, “c’mon.” But after the first 10 or so, I’d documented plenty.

I’m sorry you felt I was being juvenile in my response. I probably spent about two hours going through the test, not just with the questions I posed, but also reviewing other things. It was a deliberate and considered review, not simply a knee-jerk schoolyard prank. And it was something I did, ironically, out of respect for SEOmoz. If they’re going to be hauled up on the test, I wanted to go through it myself first hand.

Yes, I had to assume in question three what might Rand or SEOmoz might be thinking. That’s because a lot of the test was down to whatever they might think works as fact, rather that it being the exact case for Google much less all the major search engines. If you want to win this test, that’s how you have to think — like SEOmoz. Now if you’re on SEOmoz all the time, love everything written there and agree with all, I’m sure this worked for you. Me, I think people should question everything and determine their own truths.

As for being nitpicking on wording, here’s the deal. I’ve been doing this a long time, right? You know, writing about this stuff for 11 years. Wording is crucial, absolutely. If you’re talking about indexing and say ranking, you’ve dramatically changed an issue. One question as I explained used crawling as a synonym for indexing. In that question, it wasn’t the same meaning.

I constantly qualify everything I write — and if I’m not, hold me up to shame. That’s because most everything about SEO is in the “might,” “maybe,” “could” or “is believed category.” I can find things on that test where the exact answers might not work for a particular site. This is why you qualify. There is rarely a “best” way, though there is often a way that “many believe” is the best. Small turns like that make a big difference especially when you are dealing with people new to SEO. Especially when they do all the “right” things and then don’t understand why the magic formula to success didn’t help.

Indeed, I’m a veteran of having to deal with readers back in the late 1990s when we had WebPosition roll out with “perfect page” analysis tools, where it would take a page in and then spit out how you should change it to best rank for Infoseek, AltaVista and so on. Except you know, those change weren’t that different. And you know, you could easily find pages that were designed for Infoseek (they’d all say things like IS in the URL) ranking on Excite.

If you felt those 75 questions were all perfectly fine and I’m just nit picky, more power to you. That’s the point — they’re working for you, I’m not going to tell you that you are wrong. But other people definitely do not agree with them, because SEO is not and has never been a precise science, and it gets very hard the more you try to pin it down as such through exacting things like a test.

As for the sample, absolutely — less information *could* be better. Now if I dump 100,000 links from Yahoo on you, is that better than if you had only 1,000 links from Google? Why? Because more is better? You have to sort them in some way, so more alone isn’t better. Knowing that your competitor has 90,000 links from some guestbooks that might not show in a Google backlink lookup is helpful to you. I can — nitpick if you want — argue it is not. As I said also, however, I agreed with Rand that Yahoo was the best choice.

In the end, I can assure you that if I’d kept going through and documenting all of that test, it would have been more than 1-3 points you agreed with. But as for those 1-3 — hmm, I covered issues I had with 15 different questions. Give me the benefit of the doubt and say you agree that 3 of those 15 had real flaws. So that’s 20 percent of the test questions examined that are bad. If you took a driving test, would you feel comfortable knowing that 20 percent of the questions made no sense?

I understand that this was partially in fun. I also appreciate the education value that was involved. But I guess I’m done with the quizzes. Next time, I’d rather just see the answers trotted out for examination and debate.