The SEO industry is plagued by know-it-all SEO’s who conclude that they know this or that about Google, or who prophesize that this or that strategy is the best way to succeed at Google. Remarkably, the real ‘secrets’ of SEO are actually well known: good keyword-heavy content, well structured tags, and lots of links. Beyond that: hard work. And don’t think that you know it all, because you (and I don’t). We see through a glass, darkly.

A Little on Links, a Lot on Conclusions without Facts

By Jason McDonald
Senior SEO Instructor – JM Internet Group
Posted: April 7, 2011

Contents:

Outsmarting Google: Can it be Done?
TrustRank, PageRank, and Links
Nuclear Football: Keyword-heavy Content for the Long Tail

Outsmarting Google: Can it be Done?

Evan Bailyn - Outsmarting GoogleI bought this book because I was intrigued by the title: Outsmarting Google as well as the authors, Evan Bailyn and Bradly Bailyn, who have run some very successful websites. These are smart guys who definitely do know what they are doing. Unfortunately, they are in the geek group of SEO people: too smart for their own good, and not necessarily the best at explaining to others what can and should be done to get to the top of Google, for free.

The book’s tone, starting with the title, is very smarty-pants. The authors tell us some secrets about Google, but upon closer analysis, the secrets really boil down to what everyone already knows about how to get to the top of Google – namely:

  • Identify your best keywords, especially long tail, high value keywords.
  • Write good keyword-heavy content.
  • Use the proper tags, beginning with the TITLE tag.
  • Get links.
  • Emphasize links from high PageRank sites, or as the Bailyns emphasize high TrustRank websites.

Leaving TrustRank aside for the moment, the most useful part of this book is the discussion of link building. Some of their ideas are:

  • Systematic emailing (a.k.a., asking others for links).
  • Press Releases
  • Create Funny or Ridiculous Content
  • Create Interesting Content
  • Top 10 Lists
  • Compendiums
  • Contests
  • Widgets
  • Social Media (namely, profiles with links)
  • Awards
  • Advertising (a.k.a., surreptitiously buying text links)
  • Guest Posts
  • Research bulletins
  • Link Reverse Engineering
  • Link Only Photos
  • Wikipedia

What concerns me about the book is the lack of attention to detail. For example, the authors correctly point out that a link with the REL=NOFOLLOW attribute fails to pass link juice, but then argue that you should seek out links on Wikipedia, all of which are REL=NOFOLLOW. Another example: in the discussion on AdWords, the authors talk about match types, but fail to distinguish between BROAD MATCH and BROAD MATCH with MODIFIER, a critical, money-saving way to better focus AdWords.

Throughout, they also make assertions such as Google does not care about word order in terms of keywords in a TITLE tag, or that Google (unlike Bing) does NOT pay much attention to the H1 family. None of this can be substantiated through actual searches, and actual results. The authors fail to point out that we really do not know what we don’t know about Google, and some factors (such as H1 / H2 tags) may correlate strongly with SEO success, but that of course does not mean that we know FOR CERTAIN that they help.

That said, why shouldn’t you use them? They clearly do not hurt, and the probability that they do help is very high – as you see them again and again on successful websites. We see through a glass, darkly, with respect to Google. That fact should be acknowledged by all SEO’s, in my humble opinion.

TrustRank, PageRank, and Links

TrustRank is an appealing, interesting concept in terms of links and link building. Essentially, Evan and Bradley Bailyn hypothesize that Google has a hidden factor that ranks sites it trusts more than sites it does not trust. Clearly, new sites on the web are valued less than older, established sites. Sites with many inbound links from other high quality sites are valued more than other sites.

So the authors make a distinction between PageRank and TrustRank, but throw the baby out with the bath water here. They argue, cynically, that PageRank on the Google Toolbar is a Red Herring designed to throw us off Google’s trail, whereas the top secret TrustRank is the critical factor. The distinction is spurious. Again, if we acknowledge that we see through a glass darkly here, the game clearly becomes –

  • Solicit links, as many as you can.
  • Don’t pay for links; don’t participate in link farms.
  • Try to get links from authoritative websites in your keyword families, as measured by their PageRank and by their position on searches that matter to you.

Duh. This isn’t really rocket science. It’s just common sense. Get links, lots of them. Links help with SEO. Clearly yes yes yes yes.

Nuclear Football: Keyword-heavy Content for the Long Tail

Finally, the authors give some secret advice which they term the The Nuclear Football. Beyond the hype this is basically advice on focusing on lots of keyword-heavy content, that focuses on the long tail of your keyword searches.

Blogging is one way to generate such content. Another is user forums. All of this is great advice, but not really that revolutionary. So, in sum, the book is a good one. But there are many other better books out there for SEO (my favorite: Peter Kent’s SEO for Dummies), and this book just disappoints at providing new insights into how to outsmart Google.

Ultimately do we really want to outsmart Google? Or just provide to Google what Google really clearly asks us to provide: keyword heavy content, structured well through HTML tags, with inbound links from quality websites? It’s a lot of hard work, but there just isn’t any magic nuclear football.