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I’ve barely read a Google white paper or patent, and in that regard I can’t mingle with SEO gurus the likes of Aaron Wall, Rand Fishkin, Leslie Rohde, Barry Schwartz, etc… I can’t talk about theoretical formula A, and equation B…
And I prefer it that way…
SEO is a simple concept, yet blowhard X will talk about method Y and the result is BS…
X+Y = BS
Many of the top SEO’s only implement the “Read And Regurgitate” techniques while others throw in a touch of the “Nobody knows for sure, so I’ll say something that sounds good” method….
Blowhard SEO’s use complex names to keep this simple art exclusive…
But really… This is SEO:
1. Make sure your pages are optimized as much as possible
2. Make sure your internal pages interlink intelligently
3. Build links with good anchor text, from good sources
BS Method A:
“Analyse your competitors backlinks, and copy them…”
NO! Spend your time getting the links you can get. There is more than one way to beat the competition, and there are a hell of a lot of other places where you can get links. Don’t waste your time doing things the hard way, since competitor backlink analysis is an imprecise art, especially since not every link is visible to you and you can’t get every single one anyway!
BS Method B:
Analyse your competitors keyword density, and copy them…
NO! Make sure the content on your page contains keywords while still making sense to the reader. Do not compromise user experience for keyword density, and don’t cut down density to match your competitors. In truth a 30% keyword density will work, and a 2% density will beat that 30% density with intelligent internal linking and backlink building.
BS Method C:
“Link baiting… Viral content… etc…”
NO! Its literally gambling… you spend money, and the results are completely unpredictable. Chances of going viral and you getting an ROI are miniscule.
BS Method D:
Focus on one keyword at a time…
NO! There are thousands of keywords that are relevant for every single one of your pages and your site will receive more traffic, sooner, by link building with variety. A good proportion of “bad” anchor text also helps you fly under the “SEO” radar.
BS Methods E:
Anything fancy pants…
NO! Google isn’t stupid, and fancy pants methods generally have some kind of footprint. No-Follow internal linking… with Javascript… or iFrames… or Flash… or Ninja Turtle Nunchaku Links! You just end up waving a big “I’m trying to game Google” flag…
Instead of theorizing, implement!
Instead of analyzing, implement!
Your TIME and MONEY is ALWAYS best spent IMPLEMENTING!!!
But why listen to the guy who doesn’t read the white papers and get his physics professor buddies to explain the formulas?
I get results through implementation – they might not be the most elegant results, and I might over-run rather than nudge the tipping point gently, but I get results. If I don’t get a result, I keep adding pages and building links until I DO get a result – and anybody can do that! The rate of implementation (which you would have to do anyway) isn’t hindered by theorizing, analyzing and playing with myself…
I don’t read and regurgitate, I implement, implement, implement!
I don’t waste my time getting confused over unpublished formulas and algorithms, I just implement and track results…
Dear SEO’s – Stop faffing, and start DOING!
Tags: Aaron Wall, Backlinking, Barry Schwartz, Leslie Rohde, Link Building, No-Follow, Practical SEO, Rand Fishkin, SEO, Theoretical SEO
Posted 2 weeks, 6 days ago at 5:46 pm. Add a comment
When it comes to SEO, you generally get a fair bit of warning if somebody begins to compete with you (or you should, if you have your systems in place) – A common myth in SEO is that you can no longer storm into a market.
While it may be true that SEO takes time, and this won’t change any time soon, it is possible to storm a market un-noticed.
Best illustrated with an example – and one I’m unfortunately not responsible for.
The story takes place in a market I’ve been competing in for almost two years – “Skip Hire” – one in which competition has been heating up dramatically since Mark Attwood began giving talks on the success of his online skip hire business (Which has since, ironically, gone into administration nearly £1,000,000 in the red.)
In the first viewable version of the political website promoting Anthony ‘Skip’ Scirroco for a position as the commissioner of public works in the united states, there is no reference to “skip hire” whatsoever. His website was Skip4DPW.com
Thank you Archive.org for giving us this awesome retrospective data from June 10th 08 http://skip4dpw.com/”http://web.archive.org/web/20080610011702/http://skip4dpw.com/
My research shows that in January 2008 “Skip” Scirroco had been appointed to the position for which he was petitioning with his website, which leads me to believe the website no longer held any value to Anthony Scirroco and the registration was let lapse.
A little over a month after the first viewable cache of the website, the next cache, which was taken on Jul 15th 08, shows that Anothony’s nickname seems to have grown a little. Now known as Anothony “Skip Hire” Scirroco… with five uses of the new term “Skip Hire” on the home page.
Another Archive.org piece of history from Jul 15th 08 http://web.archive.org/web/20080715124752/http://www.skip4dpw.com/
Around the same time I recall watching notifications popping up to let me know somebody was SEO’ing for the term “Skip Hire” – In retrospect it should have seemed too bizarre – a guy with the nick name “Skip Hire” – but the website was US targeted, seemed somewhat legit, and wasn’t ranking in my target markets.
But then a few months later, something happened…
On the 18th of July, 2009, the domain name Skip4DPW.co.uk was registered, and the old domain Skip4DPW.com was 301 redirected to this new domain name.
The effect?
The market is very competitive and since I’ve been responsible for a lot of the competition I know intimately how competitive it is. With that in mind, Skip4DPW.co.uk stormed the SEO listings and hit 6th place overnight – as was expected it did slide down since then, but still olds 8th position last time I checked.
So how can we translate this example into a strategy?
1. Buy a slightly ambiguous domain name in a foreign market (If your market is the US, buy a UK domain name, and vis-versa)
2. Build a website on that domain name with a misleading story to throw off your competition should they ever notice (most wont)
3. Build links to the diversion website with your keywords
4. Wait for a while (continue building links)
5. 301 redirect the old domain name to the new local domain name with a commercial website
6. Continue building links to the new domain name (which doesn’t appear to have happened with skip4dpw.co.uk
While this is an interesting strategy, it will only really be worthwhile in a market that is competitive and is likely to be tracking competition and reacting to threats. I may also be a good option if you don’t intend to compete within that market for 12+ months.
With that in mind I’ve been building a lot of stewing pot businesses, where I’ll build a website and begin link building, with a view to revisiting those sites a year or more down the line. Instead of making my presence known, maybe this strategy could prove to be a safer option?
Will it last? Sure, why not? Search Engines can’t begin punishing people for switching domain names, since so many companies build new websites on new domain names.
While I don’t know who was responsible for this masterful trickery, I have a few inklings and I would LOVE to chat to the perpetrator.
Tags: SEO
Posted 1 month, 1 week ago at 7:46 am. 4 comments
IC stands for “Indexed Content” – but does it matter?
In a word – yes!
But it isn’t the be all and end all in regards to competition research, and it’s a very hard metric to judge.
IC (number of indexed pages) only really begins to matter if the competing website is entirely about your niche subject.
More pages on a website means more chances to capture backlinks, and page rank. Based on googles original patents, every page creates a small amount of page rank. Both factors together result in more potential for authority, on a subject, for a website with an large number of pages.
Further - more pages means more chance for keywords to appear site wide, and more opportunity for a clever webmaster to do some clever internal linking (which can be powaaah-ful!)
Websites in the top 10 results with a high number of pages will either be general websites, or authority websites. General websites can be relatively easy to beat, where-as authority websites can be a nightmare.
Loading the IC figure seems to slow down Market Samurai a lot, and since it’s such a difficult metric to take into consideration, its probably best not to load this metric until you get down into the real nitty gritty.
There is still one metric bitterly missing from Market Samurai – Domain PR… the page rank of the home domain.
I’ve written more about this in the post “what is page rank“
Tags: competition research, indexed pages, market samuari, page rank, SEO, seo analysis
Posted 2 months, 2 weeks ago at 4:42 am. 4 comments
Reading a recent article from SEOMoz which talks about PR Sculpting with nofollow links. While the article concludes that PR Sculpting with No-Follow links is still effective, I beg to differ. I also don’t believe the test platform was comprehensive enough to come to any definitive conclusions.
- Only 50% of the results were in favour of no-follow linking.
- One set of results declared no-follow as least effective.
- Four page websites aren’t relevant test platforms IMHO.
- Where’s the “More Links for PR Sculpting” test?
- Differences in text on each site will result in differences in rank.
If we give each method a score from 1 to 5 depending on how relatively effective they were, the points score like this:
- Nofollow – 29 points
- Consolidation – 24 points
- iFrame – 23 points
- Control – 22 points
- Javascript – 22 points
Statistically there is no definitive trend. The differences seen could be the result of chance. If you roll a five sided dice, you would probably come up with similar numbers and results.
“Control” was most effective twice, and least effective twice. But “javascript” was NEVER least effective, but also never most effective. Whereas “Nofollow” was least effective once, and never second most effective.
In the SEO Guide for 2010 there is a section relevant to this discussion– “PR Sculpting in 2010” – a method which wasn’t tested in the SEOMoz test.
I remember having a conversation with Robert Somerville (AKA Guru Bob) two weeks prior to Google announcing their changed stance on how page-rank flows through no-follow links. I had been operating a number of large silo structured and no-follow pr sculpted sites and I’d began to notice a negative trend resulting from the use of No-Follow links internally.
The effects were nothing short of profound, to the point where removing all no-follow links resulted in massive average ranking increases, and when the web-designer accidentally over-wrote the modified include files, rankings fell out of the sky. During that conversation I’d said something along the lines of “I don’t know why, and I can’t prove it, but no-follow linking doesn’t work anymore”
But a piece of logic seems to be eluding the general conversation about no-follow linking.
Why would internal no-follow links be treated the same way as external no-follow links?
- 1. Why would a webmaster even want to use internal no-follow links unless they had user generated content, or they were trying to game the system?
- 2. Why would external no-follow links carry zero weight? And why would a website be penalised for external linking (PR Leakage)
The first implies that the internal page is either not trusted by the webmaster, or that the webmaster is trying to engineer search results. If the former, Google would naturally de-value that page, and if the latter, Google would prefer to rank sites based on relevance rather than clever linking structures.
The second would devalue Googles search algorithms significantly, as it revolves around linking. Its back to the old Wikipedia links question (Do wikipedia no-follow links still pass juice?) and its worth raising a new point… twitter links are no-follow, however twitter is having a massive impact on search results. This is massively incongruent!
I speculate that the weight has shifted in favour of external no-follow links, and against internal no-follow links. Further I’m suggesting and that both operate independently of each other to a certain degree.
Also, I believe the SEOMoz test was nothing more than a joke, and does not represent a scientific approach to SEO.
Happy New Year 
Tags: iframes, javascript links, link consolidation, nofollow, pr sculpting, SEO, SEOMoz
Posted 2 months, 2 weeks ago at 10:38 am. Add a comment
SEO Guide for 2010