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Nice .. I'd like to see more discussions based on experiments like this instead of listening to you or myself spew personal opinion based on hunches.
Cute avatar.
"Examples of these contributing factors include: relevant text, strategically placed related keywords throughout the body of text, keyword density, keywords in the title tag and description tag"
There's no such thing as the art of SEO copywriting. Write an article; put your keywords in your Title, your H1 and maybe URL. If you're writing about [soup kitchens] whether you want to or not you'll say "soup kitchen" a few times in your article. All you need to do with content on a page is to give Google enough hints for it to know what the page is about. If you want the page to rank higher, you don't tweak the article; you increase its visibility on channels outside of Google SERPs.
"What I meant was figure out how to pull anchor text for more than the first 1,000 inlinks"
I have a tool that does that (and much more) but its inhouse. I'm looking for BETA testers so if you're interested shoot me an email.
The article was surprisingly pretty even handed, though it's Shoe that said "SEO has no future", not Jason. I agree with the spirit of Jason's message, though there are several vital nuts-and-bolts issues like robots.txt and .htaccess that can't be left to chance. SEO is important but its only one aspect of internet marketing. While a great product may not go anywhere without marketing, marketing a piece of crap is also a waste of time. Jason and the SEO industry puts emphasis on opposing sides of that equation; the truth is somewhere in between.
I trigger-finger desphunn this but the links to patents make this post worth bookmarking. Too bad there's no way to take back a desphinn.
I agree almost whole-heartedly with Seth. When I used to play pipeline on America's Army Online, the only people who constantly used cheats were those who sucked at the game. If you were good, there was no need to cheat. In fact, I got an adrenalin rush from stalking and picking off defense one by one when outnumbered 12 to 1 partly because I was beating my opponents on a level playing field. Where's the fun if the other guy has no chance of beating me?
That said, there will always be ways to beat the system. If your primary interest is making money fast or if working the web is a sport not a labor of love, black hat is still an option.
There are also very few - if any - real white hats out there. People conveniently justify their behavior as legitimate marketing to keep their conscience clean. With or without Google Guidelines, if your primary incentive is higher SERP rankings, regardless of how clean you think your marketing tactics are, you aren't a white hat.
"What if your primary goal isn't higher rankings, but increased targeted traffic and conversions? Would you call that person a white hat?"
No Jill. If my primary incentive is personal gain, I'm no white hat even if I pull all my punches and my tactics are squeaky clean. And if I'm working with a client who is only interested in higher conversions, that relationship would put me in a similar spot. That might sound ridiculous to you - how can I not be a white hat if I don't break any Google Guidelines - till you realize the color of an SEO hat isn't defined by what Googlers tell you.
"And what's with the blue-text-on-blue-background footer links with anchor text "online reputation management"? "
John, that's a yellow link by default - turns blue after you visit the ebook page.
This may be a response to an earlier post on SEOmoz discussing how much of your personal data Google has at its disposal. One of the issues Matt responded to was the use of cookies, where, for example, if you search [malpractice] and then search [lawsuit], you see Google ads targeting [malpractice lawsuit]. Matt objected that cookies weren't used in the way portrayed by the blog post. This could be an extension of that discussion.
Good read. No, you don't need clients. And if you're in the business of selling SEO services, make sure the ROI justifies the hours you spend helping someone else get richer.
"Personally, I have no desire to create my own sites to get rich off of. I just like helping clients and others to learn SEO and do it the right way."
Jill, its not just about money. If you've got a passion to create something new on the web, but you're too busy to do any of it because you've got clients, you wouldn't be happy. I think the blogger got it right - this is just personal preference.
You want to help other people through SEO services; I may want to do the same through other channels.
Anyway, the question was do I *need* clients and the answer is still no. Having clients is a choice not a necessity.
"But it does provide a reliable income."
Yeah, it does. And I'm all for better web presence - I guess I'm just sick of helping people who are only interested in ranking and making money and no interest in investing serious money into "content" development. So I guess it depends on the client. If a client is unwilling to pay for anything but manipulative link building and time-wasting site tweaking crap - well I don't care how much I get paid a month someone else can have that gig.
If building a better web presence means creative marketing, relation building, and creative content development that I'm willing to lend a hand.
"why have we abandoned phrases like “in my experience”"
because we all want people to think we're an authority. Funny thing is Matt Cutts does a better job of keeping the back door open (e.g. using phrases like "as far as I know") than most SEO bloggers.
What I often do is cite a source (e.g. "According to this article, footer links don't pass value.") or say "I think" if there's no easy way to back up an opinion.
Some of us are also in the business of using misleading headlines and one-sided opinions to grab more eyeballs. Push a false/unverified story to the front page of Sphinn - if people dig deep enough to figure out the story is BS, no biggie. The burden rests on the readers, not the blogger.
If your goal isn't to inform or engage but to get attention, build authority, or get links, backing up opinions with facts obviously takes a back seat to getting readers to click through to an article or getting readers riled up using emotionally-driven, one-sided portrayal of an issue. So I'm not surprised - like Jill said - that 90% of what I read on SEO blogs is misleading.
I don't really care if people "snitch." I think its a natural reaction if someone feels out-gunned, have time on their hands to track competitiors' rankings on a daily basis, and falsely believes strong defense is the best offense. For newbies it may feel like the easy way out (all you gotta do is spend a minute filling a spam report and your competitor poofs from the SERPs, right?) and they get disillusioned when nothing happens after multiple spam reports.
The intention of this post I'm guessing is to damage Trulia's brand so realtors will stop linking to Trulia. Why swap links with Trulia if you don't get any juice back? What realtors should be doing instead is to stop obsessing about their competition and start thinking creatively about how to add value to their 5k cookie-cutter template websites someone else like Point2, number1exprt, VKI or REW built for them. Of course that's hard - most realtors just want a turnkey site that ranks and makes money right out of the gate; they're not interested in making a great site just want a site that ranks high, and are in the habit of doing the least possible to make the most sales. That means don't do anything creative with their cookie-cutter sites; just optimize the hell out of it and hope to rank higher. Now Trulia is giving people a good scare - but not enough of a scare to abandon old habits.
Realtors are still looking for the easy way out - as this post proves, though sometimes what seems like a short cut is a long detour to nowhere.
Dave, "black hat" is not a derogatory term - you could take it to just mean a black hat is more of a technician than a marketer-type, or a dark elf instead of a wood elf. On moral grounds, often black hats are no less ethical than self-proclaimed white hats who call sidebar TLAs "advertisements" to make it easier for them to sleep well at night. Without Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker, Star Wars would have flopped. Neo also had his evil counterpart to create balance - agent Smith. It's the old Yin and Yang; there's a place for both forces in the online world.
Echoing what WebGuerilla posted, here's a response from Trulia:
"Having opinions is one thing, but name calling is just really unprofessional and despite being called morons, liars, leeches and various other unseemly names, there is nothing secretive going on here.
In fact, we very publicly launched the Trulia Publisher Platform earlier this year as a way for publishers to get 100% of the Trulia search experience for their users - without paying even one software engineer - on their sites.
Here are the facts:
The Trulia Publisher Platform (TPP) gives consumers access to our search experience, and innovation – via their favorite websites.
Every TPP has a disallow directive to crawlers in the robots.txt file, to tell crawlers not to index the TPP pages.
Because search engines sometimes do not respect the robots.txt directive, we have put in place a redirect to the Trulia.com site to avoid the duplicate content issue. As many of you know, we don’t want duplicate pages to exist at the same time because Google considers that spamming the index.
For example, kiplinger.trulia.com/CA/San_Francisco/ is basically the same Trulia page as http://www.trulia.com/CA/San_Francisco/ - to have Google index both would be spamming the index.
For example, Parade Magazine readers can click on their “real estate” section and have access to our 3 million listings and all of our search tools, including those that we haven’t created yet. And thanks to the disallow directive and redirect, this shows you that Google is not indexing Parade Magazine’s TPP:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Aparade.trulia.com&btnG=Google+Search
The TPP pages uphold the spirit of the original page’s content – so the redirect goes to http://www.trulia.com versus abc.trulia.com. The user experience for the consumer is the same on both pages and the content is the same.
Finally, we do not require links for the use of TPP, and in fact many of our TPP partners do not link to us as part of their implementation.
More information is here: http://www.trulia.com/publishers/platform/"
Thanks Eric the pictorial is much easier to follow.
"the more successful you become, the less you can get away with."
That's definitely true when it comes to Trulia's relationship with partners, though its a different story with Google. Of course if you're big site out to make Google look stupid, you may get a slap on the wrist, but the main question Googlers ask IMO when dealing with spam is does this site belong on the front page. Regardless of what realtors may think, if Googlers think users looking for [seattle real estate] should land on Trulia, it doesn't matter what kind of violations are taking place. Penalizing a site in cases like that means harming user experience - a move that goes against Google's business model.
Where did John say the URL was too long?
"this seems to be taking it a bit too far and I have a bit of trouble identifying anything that matches in the content of your page."
Ok John says this in the comments:
" One of the main problems with URLs like that in particular is that there is an infinite number of valid URLs that appear to be static pages but are really just dynamic URLs with parameters that can be ignored. Having URLs like that can confuse the best crawler and so we end up crawling everything but the kitchen sink and may miss out on the other great stuff on the site.
The easier you can make it for the crawlers to crawl your full site, the higher the chances that they'll get all of it right. Long URLs are not a problem if they're unique (though obviously having long URLs can lead to more users adding typos in links, but that's a different problem altogether)."
And in GGWH he mentions "Long & crazy URLs" which to me isn't the same as long URLs.More important, he mentions "Broken HTML code In general, we try to get it right regardless of what a webmaster uses on his page. However, there are limits to what we can guess at." A nice reference for people who argue validation is a waste of time.
"Yea, we all know what he meant, because we are active sphinners. But what about newbies?"
After reading the post, some newbies may think long URLs may hurt you - which isn't exactly what was said. I do appreciate the post though, because it pointed me to an interesting GGWH thread.
So now Graywolf is encouraging Google to go after not only TLA variety links but also a bunch of other types of links? Way to dig ourself a deeper hole.
Calling Google out on AdWords ads like "buy links" lead to Google disabling those ads. We keep pointing things like this out to google, Google is only going to widen the net.
The last Matt Cutts interview was phenomenal; this one is just as good. And I'm not just saying that because I downed a few Heinekens.
"It does a disservice to everyone to call this a penalty rather than what it actually is -- a filter."
Jill, I wouldn't even call it a filter since I think Google does this at the crawl level. When I coded PageRankBot I had to check file extensions (e.g. WMV, jpeg, and a slew of others) to prevent the scraper bot from retrieving files containing large amount of data (for example, WMV files might run up to 300MB or more). By preventing the tool from crawling those files I kept it from "stalling." It's basically just a method of crawler resource optimization, nothing more.
Story: Google counting only the first link to a domain - rebunked