What you KNOW about SEO and can back up - not what you think

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Misinformation in this part of the forums is getting to a critical level. In the last week I have seen people claiming nofollow links are definitely good for SEO, paid directories work, PR doesn't matter and on and on.

My point is not to debate those issues here. I just realized how absolutely confusing all those things must be to a newbie. This is a lively board with lots of opinions and thats not always a bad thing but sometimes you just want to KNOW what really works. What is based on solid evidence not just a personal alleged experience yada yada.

So I'd like your help in compiling a list of things that we KNOW about SEO - That is things that have been proven by tests or by Google confirming it themselves (lets face it they are the only ones that can say they know whats in their algorithm)

So I'll kick it off here again not with things that I think are right but with things that I KNOW are right because they can and have been proven. Proofs are now in bold and contain links to one source of the evidence for the position.

SEO FACTS THAT YOU CAN BANK ON

1) WE KNOW that content relevant to a keyword search helps rankings. We can see it in the results and even in the way that Google highlights the words of the search. We know that Google uses some for m of related words to judge content (they've spilled the beans several times)

2) WE KNOW that keywords matching in the title of a page, post and/or name of a website (showing on the page) helps ranking. (because the search result page on every search shows us the words that helped place it there - even denoting the words in bold)


3) We KNOW that backlinks from other sites helps to rank your page. Multiple tests done on this forum and elsewhere indicate that very few sites rank number one for a competitive term without any backlinks.

4) We KNOW that anchor text ( the words that are in the backlink to our sites) have an impact on search results for that term. (Google has confirmed this several times)

5) We know that for some reason many people have ranked higher on google after getting backlinks on High Pagerank pages even when the page they get the link on isn't that high. We've had several threads confirming this experience - see link in number three. Why is not yet proven.

6 ) We KNOW although SEO is not an exact science it most definitely is one. Search engines rank sites according to a mathematical algorithm calculated by a computer program (well known and obvious fact). It would be an exact science if the algorithm was fully known but elements of it are known and can be deduced from search results.


Might seem basic but believe me I regularly meet people new to SEO that don't fully understand at least one of those as is now obvious in posts in this thread.

I could and will go on but I'd like others to chime in on other things about SEO that have been proven . I don't mean for us to limit to only the basic things. I will update this post with any and every thing about SEO that can be actually proven or that has been proven. This is just a start. We can debate in other thread. If you can prove it then I will add it here.

Just looking for at least one recent thread where all the smoke gets cleared out and theres only real fire.
#search engine optimization #back #seo
  • This post is flawed because you've given us 5 facts that we "know" to be true, but have offered no proof for them. The 5 facts you've given us are so basic that some people might think it's ridiculous to ask for proof...but unless you set the stage for exactly *how* to prove or disprove anything related to SEO, this will just become another thread filled with misinformation. Is something "proven" once *you* are sufficiently convinced that it's true? How can you really prove anything? And is there a point to this endeavor? The search engines are constantly changing, so most attempts to game them are futile.

    Just do what's in your users' best interests, that's really the only rule to play by.

    People try to treat SEO like its a science. It's not.

    You don't prove SEO. SEO proves you.
    • [1] reply
    • Actually I did (but not for all) but just so you won't miss it they are now in bold.


      Fair enough. Like all things scientific when you test it, it turns out to be right repeatedly and the data can be verified independently by anyone who cares to look at it.

      Sorry but thats the kind of worthless observation I am looking to avoid. What exactly is a newbie to get out of that? Anyway thanks. After reading your post I was able to add number 6.
      • [1] reply
  • Lee, one hand i agree, on the other i dont.

    For example, feel free to prove that #1 is not correct. Try to rank a site with 100% irrelevant content to a subject where content has nothing to do with the keyword you are trying to rank.

    Possible? Actually i think it is (backlinks...)...but it's easier to rank the same site if it has relevant content, wouldn't you agree?
    • [1] reply
    • Google is becoming increasingly better at defining artificial links made purely to manipulate the serps.
  • let's get this back on track shall we. it's a good topic and good topics are a good thing for all of us.

    Agree.

    However, I don't believe that it's the actual content that is important but having your keywords and SEO elements in the right places.

    As far as I can tell, the SE bots are looking at key points on a page to determine it's content relevance. Having your keywords in the Title, H1-6 and somewhere in the content seem to be enough to do the trick. The rest of the content could be lorem Ipsum as far as the SE bots are concerned.

    Keyword density and the amount of text content don't appear to have as much of an impact as they once did.

    From my results, for pages that pick-up long-tail traffic and have few - no backlinks... a page with 200+ words is enough to convince google that the page has real content and is worthy of being included in search results. I haven't seen any results to suggest that having more text makes any difference except for the chance that the page could rank for additional long-tail keywords.

    No argument from me on this.

    Agree.

    But I don't believe you need 100% anchor text to rank for a keyword.

    From studying many sites that rank well for certain keywords and looking over their anchor text I've seen many cases where these sites may only have 25% of the anchor text matching the keywords the site is ranking for.

    I don't know what the connection is but I do think there is a connection between keyworded anchor text, on-site SEO and site authority. Google looks at all of these criteria when determining a sites ranking.

    A site with a lot of authority doesn't need as much keyworded anchor text or on-site SEO (amazon/youtube) but a site with low authority (many of our sites) needs an extra does of keyworded anchor text and SEO to compensate.

    I'm still on the fence on if the Pagerank of the domain has much of an effect on the value of a backlink on a PR n/a page. I'm not sure if anyone has run an experiment on low vs. high PR domains.

    A definite benefit of a high pagerank domain is that the page with the backlink could develop it's own pagerank depending on the sites internal linking.

    Aside from that, these backlinks do work. Mileage does seem to vary from platform to platform.
  • Oh yeah... what do I know.
    Blog commenting is a very fast and effective means of building up high quality backlinks.

    I'm on the fence on mass automated commenting... it appears to be a hit and miss quantity over quality approach since there is no discrimination of quality where these links are dropped. I guess if you hit a few thousand sites your bound to land links on a few good pages

    However, aiming for and leaving comments on quality, high pr, low comment count pages does make a big difference quickly.

    It's also a proven way of boosting the pagerank of a site... does pagerank = authority, I'm not sure. I think it plays a part.
    • [1] reply


    • I'd be willing to add that to the list except theres been alot of talk about Google devaluing blog commenting. If we could get some hard data (tests) that show that they are blowing smoke that would be great.
  • It's hard to say if they are blowing smoke yet or not or to what extent they might be reducing the value of comment backlinks.

    If they nuke comments I'm going to have to find a new secret sauce for quick PR. My own network of sites doesn't have enough juice to bump a new site up past PR 3 yet. I still have to rely on other sites to get past that.

    I have a couple of new sites that are only default WP themes with no content that I've been casually adding blog comment backlinks too.

    Problem is, I have to wait until the next google PR update to see what effect the comment backlinks are going to have.

    Under previous conditions I'd expect them to jump up a few PR spots.

    It probably wouldn't be a bad idea to create a couple of sub-domains, pick a nonsense word and throw different backlink types at each of them and see which one comes up on top. I''m sure somebody has done this already I just don't recall seeing it. Terry Kyles experiment was close but he didn't use the same keywords for each site so the results aren't 100% reliable.
    • [1] reply
    • Not sure why. I mean for PR yes but can't you see movement in the Serps to determine if its working?
  • The method I'm using for these sites is similar to what I had posted here...

    http://www.warriorforum.com/adsense-ppc-seo-discussion-forum/164060-your-number-one-link-tactic.html

    *edit* I dunno why the link isn't working :confused:

    So, at this point in time I'm not as concerned with keywords and anchor text as I am with boosting up the authority and PR of the sites and letting them age until I get around to working with them.

    The whole idea is that by the time I do get around to working on the sites I've let them age for a couple of months and have a bunch of quality backlinks already pointing at them that I wouldn't be able to get normally. The britannica blog doesn't like linking out to sales sites but I really really like their high PR, low OBL pages.

    This method of mine may be total crap and a waste of time. I don't know of anyone else who does this. I just like hitting the ground running on a new site with as much going in my favor as I can get.

    *edit #2* I do seem to get better results on a site when I do follow this method over a new site using a brand new domain with no backlinks or PR. The sites tend to have content indexed faster and pick up traffic faster.
  • This is a great thread and technically I am a newbie as I have only been doing this for 6 months, but it has been a very aggressive 6 months.
    I will add one more point here, and that is that the sandbox is real! I am competing for very high traffic terms and one day in the middle of the night about 5 months in, Google let me out of the Sandbox and I hit page 1 for my main keyword. I don't believe that I am entirely out of the Sandbox yet (my main domain url is just over 7 months old) but I can't prove that the way that the Sandbox thing happened to me. For non high traffic phrases, I was able to be on the first page at number 1 the second I onlywired my other sites.
    So to me the Sandbox is real, but only for high traffic phrases. There can be no doubt about this, because I had a ton of natural backlinks which I got manually hour after hour of working.
    Thanks for this thread Mike.
  • Thanks for sharing the nice info .
  • Thanks for sharing. Google states that it uses more than 200 signals to determine which pages are most important. Is this what you meant by 'elements' in your point above? Do we know what are they? Regards.
    • [1] reply
    • Yes that was what I was referring to and no we don't know what they all are but we do know some key ones. Google will never release all the keys as the secrecy keeps people from entirely gaming the system.
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    What you KNOW about SEO and can back up - not what you think

    Misinformation in this part of the forums is getting to a critical level. In the last week I have seen people claiming nofollow links are definitely good for SEO, paid directories work, PR doesn't matter and on and on. My point is not to debate those issues here. I just realized how absolutely confusing all those things must be to a newbie. This is a lively board with lots of opinions and thats not always a bad thing but sometimes you just want to KNOW what really works. What is based on solid evidence not just a personal alleged experience yada yada.