A member of Google’s Search Quality team said he’s never seen search rankings impact from improving 3rd party authority scores.
In a Google podcast, Search off the Record, Googlers discussing spam digressed to discuss third party metrics and their impact on Google search rankings. They observed that improving the scores of third party metrics did not result in an improvement in search rankings and suggested expanding to a wider range of factors.
This part of the discussion involved Senior Webmaster Trends Analyst for Google, John Mueller and Duy Nguyen of Google’s Search Quality Team which focuses on catching spammy sites.
