SEO Advice from Someone Not Selling It (Some Contrarian)

http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2009/04/search-engine-optimization-seo-tips.html

by epi0Bauqu • 17 years ago

58 25 17 years ago

jrockway3• 17 years ago

SEO tips seem a lot like black magic to me. Nobody ever explains why, and nobody shows any data... they just say things you are supposed to believe. I find this annoying.

(I have never focused on SEO, and my website always comes up for terms that I expect it to come up for.)

epi0Bauqu5• 17 years ago

I'd be happy to say more (why, data, etc.) on anything in particular. The post was already getting a bit long, which is why I left it at that. There is some why in there already though.

jrockway3• 17 years ago

I was mostly interested in this one:

"Use directories instead of subdomains."

patio112• 17 years ago

The "why" inevitably boils down to "we have found this to be effective while black-box testing a constantly changing algorithm developed by an adversarial company with many, many more engineers on staff than we have".

I show data, occasionally. Most people think it is competitively sensitive.

rgrieselhuber2• 17 years ago

The people selling black magic tend to use techniques that end up getting them busted in the long term. But there are some things that are just good practices from an SEO perspective and have nice usability and accessibility benefits.

There are companies that have the data to back up the statements in this and similar articles. They just don't give it away for free. :-)

azanar• 17 years ago

There are companies that have the data to back up the statements in this and similar articles. They just don't give it away for free. :-)

Not just directed at rgrieselhuber so much as the whole community, what would you say are the predominance of such companies relative the whole SEO market?

My experience so far has suggested a vast number are just floating on borrowed time until someone busts them, but I'll be the first to admit my sampling might be biased.

randfish2• 17 years ago

I left a comment on Gabriel's blog, but if you're a startup building a site and doing SEO, be careful not to take all of this advice, particularly #9 and #13, but #6 is also not entirely wise.

p.s. Yes, technically I fit into the "someone selling it" category, but I also despise misinformation on this subject.

p.p.s. sachinag - your assessment of "independence" due to being on a subdomain and use of "pass PageRank" isn't accurate either. All pages pass PageRank, and PageRank is not limited to "independent domains." There are other link weighting factors that certainly do apply to separate "root domains" but the logic you're trying to apply isn't going to help get better rankings in the way you suggest.

patio112• 17 years ago

#13 (write less pages and less text to conserve ranking potential) is directly contrary to both the truth and my experience. The more content I add to my website, the better it ranks in aggregate and the better the front page ranks in particular. If you want I can even show you a graph of amount of content versus traffic as a result of Google. Let me spoil the surprise: it fits n * (# pages) ^ (1 + y).

Your pages do compete against each other in some narrow senses: for any given query, you'll typically be capped at two results in the SERP (results page), so if you had a third best option on your site it gets left out in the cold. However, pages on your website are (and should be treated as) comrades in arms.

The more links my page on, e.g., Jane Austen bingo cards collects, the more trust my domain will have and the more juice that individual page will pass to the literature category its in and the other page it links to. This helps me rank both the other literature pages (which have scant anything to do with Jane Austen) and also the almost wholly unrelated, e.g., Easter bingo.

epi0Bauqu5• 17 years ago

As I said in the blog comments, I realize #13 conflicts with #10 & #11, but who ever said it couldn't :) ? It's all about your SEO goals & priorities.

Sure, in general, the more content, the more Google traffic you are going to get. I'm not really disputing that. All I'm saying is if you take away stuff, the ranking that is left will be concentrated on what is left on the page.

For example, take the situation where you really convert on one key phrase and not much on anything else. In that situation, you really want to concentrate on that term and you probably want to strip out things that don't help you rank on that term. This advice becomes most useful on the homepage/landing page itself.

In any case, I've noticed it and wanted people to be aware of it, because it isn't that obvious. I'm not saying you should do it or that it is universally true--probably not; after all, what in life is...?.

epi0Bauqu5• 17 years ago

#9 -- Apparently, I stand corrected on this one--sitemaps do appear to help some people, just not me :). My main gripe with them is I expected my priorities to at least somewhat translate into what pages were indexed, and at least on my sites, these priorities seem to have no effect. A second gripe is that for some people they are difficult to set up, and so if you were going to pick whether to do link building or sitemaps, I'd choose link building. But I guess it is a case by case thing.

#13 -- It's all about your SEO goals & priorities. I just have noticed it and wanted people to be aware of it, because it isn't that obvious.

#6 -- sure, case by case it might make sense. I sort of offered an exception in the description. I'm just warning people of the rookie mistake of going after a key phrase without taking into account the likelihood of actually getting ranked for it in any useful manner.

ellyagg• 17 years ago

If you're a startup, be careful not to accept the sneaky certitude of randfish's opening paragraph uncritically.

#9: I've installed Google sitemaps on many, many client sites and have never gained anything as a result. I believe Google sitemaps help GOOGLE in some edge cases, so of course they'll recommend them (they're not doing the work!), but on a costs/benefits basis for clients, it's a giant waste of time. Well, a little waste of time, at least.

We know that you get virtually no traffic if you're not in the top 10 in Google. We know that if a term is driving any significant traffic, there are more than 10 websites vying for that term. We know that your page needs link power (PageRank, anchor text) to rank for a competitive term. If your page doesn't have enough link power to even be indexed, it's certainly not going to rank for a competitive term just because you submit it via a sitemap! And if it's already indexed, inclusion in the sitemap doesn't do anything for you.

If there's some problem on your site where Google isn't spidering a significant number of pages, fix the linking structure of the site. Now the missing pages get indexed and, since they're part of the coherent link graph of the site, Google can use linking signals to rate them for SERP placement.

Now, you can use the sitemap to alter the priority with which Google visits your pages, but frankly, instead of spending even a moment's thought on that, hunker down and write more content or research new keywords or obtain backlinks or look for other traffic opportunites. Instead of hassling with a sitemap, I'd ALWAYS rather be doing something more productive.

#13: Well, yeah, this one seems a little confused. There are ways to channel your link power to achieve the effect the author intends.

#6: Totally right. You should waste no specific effort on a term for which you can't get in the top 10.

Let's be clear that we're talking about making hand edits, etc., to increase the rankings for one term, NOT making systemic changes intended to improve the rankings of a broad range of terms. That's a completely different issue.

Traffic increases exponentially with position[1] and if you're not in the top 10 the traffic's essentially zero. In fact, for most terms, if you can't get in the top 3, you're wasting your time by hand optimizing for them.

PS - For the vast majority of people and businesses, #7 is right on the money.

PPS - SEO pros all sound like they really know what they're doing, even when they're saying things that directly contradict what some other SEO courtholder is saying. Be wary of anecdotal information. Be wary of pro SEOs.

[1] With a little googling one can find a position/traffic curve based on leaked search engine data.

rms• 17 years ago

Also see http://www.seomoz.org/blog/the-web-developers-seo-cheat-shee...

Finally there are many degrees of so-called black magic and it's paranoid to suggest that Google is instantly onto all of them and will inevitably penalize your site. I would be happy to answer questions by email on this topic.

epi0Bauqu5• 17 years ago

It's no secret that I'm paranoid about getting penalized, mainly because I don't want to repeat that unfortunate experience.

kiba• 17 years ago

At my wiki, I don't try any SEO tricks at all. I just write a lot of content and focus on submitting to social news site and post my wiki on in certain forums to get feedback. Eventually, I just stop doing them.

Eventually, the search engine traffic just overtook the organic traffic that I have built over the years.

I still don't know why search.live.com show up consistently as the #1 referrer to my site even though it is completely about FOSS.

fallentimes• 17 years ago

It's referral spam that Live's crawler sends out. Google analytics appears to block it, Clicky and numerous other analytics programs do not.

epi0Bauqu5• 17 years ago

Do you know the exact cause? I see this too and it is just plain weird.

njharman• 17 years ago

"Beware of nofollow links."

Is the end all be all search? Is it not worth trying to drive direct, actual traffic(as opposed to search engine referrals) to your site.

If I provided service "foo" or consulted on "foo" I'd love to have links to my articles/sites in the citations and or external sites list on the "foo" wikipedia article.

boundlessdreamz• 17 years ago

#9 is not great advice. Sitemaps will not affect your ranking for any term ever. If you are looking at Sitemaps as a tool for better ranking, then you are doing it wrong. Sitemaps help is discovery. If some of your pages are not crawled or just poorly crawled sitemaps can help in that regard. If those pages have good content then you may rank well. The ranking benefit of Sitemap is just a side effect.

SEO Advice from Someone Not Selling It (Some Contrarian)

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