This month issue of IRW will soon be out. Because I was focused on it I was not able to follow the discussion on SEO quackery.
I am now publishing a full response to Rand and Ben demanding a public retraction from both for putting out SEO quackery. SEO quack ”science” is worse than mere SEO myths because involves using scientific concepts in a convoluted way. I guess I would need to open a new category called in that way.
You can see my responses at the following links:
http://irthoughts.wordpress.com/2010/04/23/beware-of-seo-statistical-studies/
http://irthoughts.wordpress.com/2010/06/10/on-spearmans-correlation-coefficients-with-excel/
Here is another reason as to why their methodology is SEO quack science.
http://irthoughts.wordpress.com/2010/06/10/on-spearmans-correlation-coefficients-with-excel/#comment-979
Evidently Ben and Rand don’t understand statistics at all. Correlation coefficients are not additive. So you cannot compute a mean correlation coefficient, nor you can use such “average” to compute a standard deviation of correlation coefficients.