Vince Samios

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I received the below question in my email, and you can see my reply below.

Have you touched on the recent changes by google yet? The idea that all sites must have fantastic content and social metrics and all of that.
What about the guys that want to make micro-niche sites, write on 50 different keywords, link it up, make some youtube videos, and build links, without being experts on the topic? Do you think these kind of people will be exctinct? Is the only strategy now to become an expert on a topic, something you’d feel comfortable about spreading out to your Google Circles?
What if I want to push a yeast infection clickbank product? Now I need to be the master of yeast infections, blogging out to my friends and family about it? What’s your take on all of this?

- Simon

Hi Simon,

A lot of people got burnt recently, including a load of self professed SEO experts. I think the simple facts regarding the recent shit storm are that a few link building services were specifically targeted and nuked. Lazy SEO which relied on those networks suffered with sites bombing it overnight.

But actually nothing has changed. I think the webmaster tools messages people got (I got only one, from a few hundred sites) are literally a info gathering bluff… “tell us which sites you bought links form” - yeah right!

Google isn’t in a position to process all the data required to really make the most of social media etc etc etc, and the world online is too immature to start imposing “must”s - in 20 years maybe. Its all simply scare tactics and manipulation - nobody has been able to prove negative SEO is possible, and if it was it would be extremely easy to prove.

Crack on with whatever you’re doing I say - everything helps, but nothing is required.

By popular request, my thoughts about SEO in 2012.

Social Media becomes SEO

I usually mull over posts like this for a few days adding and removing pieces, reshuffling etc. This particular post has been in draft since about christmas - The below “Social Media becomes SEO” section was written prior to Google’s announcement this morning (Wed 11th Jan) which has been hailed as “most radical transformation ever” - I’ve left what I’ve written unchanged.

For a little while Google had access to the twitter hose pipe, which meant tweets could be dynamically included in rankings, and used as a ranking metric. I’ve done a lot of testing in the past 12 months with large volumes of tweets and retweets (between 200-400 tweets in each test) and at the time I did the test, there was absolutely no affect on rankings whatsoever. Just a few months prior, when Google still had access to the hose pipe, another popular SEO website asked readers to help with testing retweets for rankings, and found them to be quite effective.

Facebook has had a slim effect on SEO because profiles can’t be indexed, and there is no clear crawl path through profiles.

Also last year Google launched its own new social network, Google Plus. From a user interface point of view Google Plus is highly integrated with other google products, such as Gmail and Search. Google seems to have become frustrated with the failure of google buzz, and not having its own social network, and seems to be throwing absolutely everything into the success of Google Plus.

It stands to reason Google will use the data from its newest product to influence search, as this is a search metric Google has been desperately seeking.

I’m not going to share my own tests at this stage, but suffice to say I’ve been looking very heavily into Google Plus for SEO.

The SEO Puzzle

In the old days it used to be a matter of how many times you listed your keywords on your page, and how many backlinks you had with those keywords. These days SEO seems to be more about ticking a bunch of boxes, and not always how many ticks you put in each box.

Its almost as if the rankings are based on a points system. 10 links might give you 1 point, 100 links might give you 2 points, 1000 links might give you 3 points. But having SEO friendly URL’s might give you a point, having a robots.txt file might give you 1 point, having an RSS feed might give you 1 point, Adding the site to webmaster tools might give you 1 point and having keyword optimised images might give you 1 point. Existing for 1 year might give you1 point, existing for three years might give you 2 points, existing for 10 years might give you 3 points. And etc…

The reason this seo puzzle theory has come about is because I’ve been in numerous industries where I’ve had 10,000 backlinks, and keyword density to be proud of, but I can’t seem to leap-frog a website with 100 links, and very average keyword density. There doesn’t always seem to be rhyme nor reason behind the search results, which leaves me wondering if the SEO puzzle theory has legs.

Back to Basics

Over the past few years the basic SEO techniques seem to have lost power, leaving us SEO’s feeling a little powerless to affect improvements. In the past 6 months or so things seem to have gone “back to basics” and many of the old techniques, done right, are working well. Possibly this is just the result of Google loosening up the time based part of the algorithm to allow more dynamic changes within search.

One possibly explanation could be that instead of working with one algorithm, google has multiple algorithms to serve each portion of the search results. For example there is obvious a natural SERP algorithm, and a PPC algorithm, and now there is probably also a Social algorithm, probably separate Image algorithms and Video algorithms too. Each individual algorithm then becomes less important to the full serps, so they can slacken off a bit.

Roundup from 2011:

Split Testing - yes - still happening

User Voting - has evolved into social search

Synonym Match - not so much, but still a factor

Exact match domain names - agree with my 2011 seo guide

Other TLD’s - 50:50 on this one…

Roundup from 2010:

Time - very important

User Experience - very important

Reverse Page Rank - certainly some data to suppor the idea

Variation - yes, still important

Contant - Yes, as always

Ramp - Yes, still the case.

PR Sculpting - Lost to the pages of history

Not the actual High Speed 2 Train AFAIK.

The new proposed "High Speed 2" UK High Speed Train Network will cost an estimated £89.5 Million per mile of new track - with a total of 335 miles in the completed High Speed 2 rail network. Another way to visualise the cost is as approx £55,000 per meter so a rail link from your front door to the road could cost as much as half a million pounds. Jaw dropping!

Some Vital Statistics:

• Up to 250mph (400km/h)
• 119 Miles of track (Phase 1), 335 Miles total
• London to Birmingham - 2026 (Phase 1)
• Birmingham to Leads & Manchester - 2035 (Phase 2)
• Costs Up to £17.4 Billion Phase 1
• Additional £12.6 Billion for Phase 2
• Capacity of up to 18 trains/hour
• 1100 Passengers capacity on each train
• 30,000 Passengers per day at approx 10% capacity

Travel time savings from High Speed 2 are estimated as follows:

The High Speed 2 Route

The predecessor to High Speed 2 was the High Speed 1 rail network which hits a maximum of 186mph between the channel tunnel and London, in comparison High Speed 2 has a maximum speed for 250mph (likely to be closer to 220mph) and in that respect High Speed 2 stacks up nicely.

The cost of High Speed 2 has been a point of dispute, but the entire cost over the next 24 years is less than 0.05% of the UK’s total GDP, not a significant amount, and arguably the link from London to Birmingham, Manchester and Leeds will increase that GDP by more than 5 hundredths of a percent.

The speed of the High Speed 2 network puts trains in a position to compete with flying between major cities as the fastest method of transport. Including checking in, dropping off luggage, waiting around the boarding lounge, waiting for takeoff, landing, taxiing to the air bridge, collecting your baggage and making your way back onto a decent travel network (ever flown to luton?) the journey by train from Manchester to London is likely to take half as much time as flying.

At this rate tickets will be more expensive than flying, in fact the current "low speed" network generally costs more than flying. The cost of tickets is a major problem with the current rail network, and I look forward to some announcement of High Speed 2 ticket prices. But I don’t hold much hope, and I don’t think its appropriate to postulate about prices of a rail ticket in fifteen years.

In my personal opinion, High Speed 2 is an essential move for the UK, just as Australia has made an essential move into a high speed broadband roll-out which leaves most countries to shame. The fact is if a country doesn’t keep pace with development, the country as a whole will stagnate and suffer.

The cost of the network seems entirely absurd - £556 per centimeter of track… that means it would cost me £23,630 to lay a High Speed 2 rail network from one corner of my laptop screen, to the farther corner… a mere 42.5cm

But who am I to say the logistics of laying a high speed rail network such as the one proposed for High Speed 2 should cost any less - all the infrastructure, the costs of the trains, the costs of buying people off their land, the costs of digging great whopping tunnels through mountains.

At this stage my personal view is - yes, its a good move, even in this economy.