Straight from the Horses Mouth about SEO as of lately...

For me, the best way to SEO your site now is to actually forget about SEO (the external stuff, i.e. link building in its traditional form, on site optimisation is still important). Concentrate on producing great content, providing true value to your audience and promoting that content through social media and fostering genuine relationships with other sites in your niche. Build traffic through referrals and social shares at first and the traffic from google will come anyway... and more importantly you won't have to worry about any future updates slapping you down.

Unfortunately there is still a lot of disinformation telling you that you still need thousands of links to rank your site, when actually one link, genuinely earned from an authority site will do your site much more good rankings wise.

bull*

Without proper links you have nothing. Almost nothing.

Long term SEO has always been links from relevant domains not just single relevant pages on sites that target hundreds of random niches, it's the one thing Google can't reject (overall relevancy).

If I'm selling car rims/tires (example) it's normal to have links on automotive sites.

Total BS. I get so tired of seeing this crap. Google cannot possibly tell what is quality content and what isn't. In fact, only experts in a given subject can tell if info is valid or bogus. And sometimes, even the experts will disagree.

Google can look for back links that it deems to come from relevant sites and guess that since the back links appear to be from what it deems to be relevant sites, then the subject site has good info. But it is only a guess.

Modern SEO: money talks and bull***t walks..

If you can spend enough cash you can create enough content/purchase links to get by. If not, you're facing an uphill battler.

So basically it's relevant backlinks and quality content you can depend upon.

>>
if you are doing high quality content whenever you are doing SEO it shouldn't be a big surprise you shouldn't have to worry about a lot of different changes.
>>

I "kind of" agree with this. This is so funny because I just came back from a blog where someone stated how extremely important keyword research SUPPOSEDLY IS (after Hummingbird) and "if you need content you need to make a list of good keywords and analyze them".

This is just not the case anymore.

Hummingbird is indeed about "good content" and even less so about focusing on "keywords". (In fact over-optimized pages are getting slapped, especially pages which optimized for long-tail keywords).

Hummingbird is about more flexibility in terms of "keywords", it's about that Google is getting smarter recognizing relevant content...also from interpreting what they call "conventional speech patters"...aka "how people talk in real life".

"You do not need to worry if you do high quality content" is insofar correct because "high quality content" will definitely satisfy their more wider criteria WHAT exactly is relevant..away from thinking in "keywords" and "search phrases".

I always say: It's Google's job to determine relevancy from good content - NOT THE OTHER WAY AROUND.

(If, say, a scientist writes a paper about nuclear fusion...and Google is "too stupid" to determine and see the relevancy of the paper to the subject, it's Google's problem, not the writer's problem).

The funny thing is that "good content" and backlinks goes hand-in-hand. (Of course I won't deny it's not always the case in practice because you STILL will have to build your links in "real life", regardless what Cutts says)...but hypothetically speaking it's of course "quality content" which automatically makes people link to it. (What else should the criterion be?)

Also.."relevant backlinks"...yes...this is obvious..but it's also A LOT about "social signals". Many links and mentioning on social media are not necessarily "relevant"...but they are a HUGE factor today.

Since when Cutts the horse of SEO?

I can't believe you did not listen to this in, oh say a few months back?
This is November. Summer has been over for quite some time.

Nothing new then either. The more people try and shmooze the algo,
the more the algo will try and stop it.

Absolutely nothing new then, and certainly old info is old info either way
you slice it.

I think people just come up with all sorts of ways to start a thread to spam
a link. This thread most assuredly did not need to have been started.

What is one supposed to think about people asking about old info that
they just discovered?

Paul

I normally discount most of what Matt says. His sole role is to be the Minster of Propaganda when it comes to SEO, and he's been caught "misdirecting" more often than not.

But this particular line got my attention. And frankly it's something I've always thought Google should be doing, but wasn't. Maybe they're about to.

Think about this for a minute... what would stop Google from using analytics data to determine who was going to blackhat forums and simply factor that in to de-value their own pages? Google already knows who YOU are and what sites you run... they're set up under your Google Analytics account, and set up under Google Webmaster Tools. They're running ads from your Google Adsense account. They know who you are, and what sites you own. So why not compare that data to the visitor data on the blackhat sites? Now they know which sites are owned by people who go there.

So is that what he's implying here? Personally I think it's bogus, if Google really wanted to "fight search spam" they could simply kick all of the sites out of Google that are owned by people who frequent black hat sites.

I don't think that google cares about "people going to blackhat forums". I am pretty sure Cutts is on there himself. People can go on those forums all-the-time, it's about their websites, not about what forums they frequent.

Keyword research is dead, SEO is dead, Wordpress is a footprint and links don't matter.

Google always likes to ACT like they know every dang thing about every dang thing. But if you've tried to seriously search anything since Hummingbird your results will demonstrate that they are fooling their arrogant little selves. Their topic assumption engine is pretty flipping annoying.

To think they actually have the resources and time on a PERSONAL level to track the sites you visit is just as arrogant and self-centered at best. With the kajillions of users they have, they can't afford to fly a black helicopters over every single presumed bad guy's house. Have you ever tried to manage data on even a few thousand ever changing items, or suckers? Pfff.

Everything they do has to be done in aggregate. Like when they whipped through neighborhoods stealing weak wi-fi passwords instead of knocking on each door...it was nothing personal. And how many times was that denied?? And they are the good guys??

All of their penalties on spammers is from collecting footprints in aggregate. And if you were a good guy but unfortunately and innocently left the same 11 toed footprint as the 11 toed black hatters, well....NO SOUP FOR YOU either!

The idea is to SPAM to your heart's little glee...as long as you leave the exact same 10 toed footprint that all the purists leave. Plain and simple. Don't believe everything you read or hear...especially mind-control from less than honest behemoths.