[i-like-water]

I used to think there was some magic sauce to SEO - that only good content with proper promotion would get high rankings. I've worked with SEO consultants on every level. I've worked with two separate individuals who are extremely well known (sorry NDA prevents sharings names), hired writers, and outsourced work overseas. For my particular industry, which i won't share because it will identify me, my content is pretty much un-linkable. You don't want to talk about it. I paid a writer for years to write top quality content that is actually useful to users and promoted it accordingly. Because good content is what Google wants, right? Wrong.

After spending well over $100k in SEO i can tell you sadly the most effective tactic has been spam. Yep, tons of links on sites, setting up gateway pages that are focused on particular keywords, spamming social sites with links, setting up blogs to target keywords, etc.. I've hired/fired about 5 different companies in India and finally found one that is working magic for us.

Google's algorithm is not a mystery - most 'SEO' people will try to sell you some snake oil. I was paying 10k a month to a top name SEO consultant (very popular SEO book, well respected) and never felt so cheated in my life. Beyond the basics of SEO like semantic structure of your HTML and URL's - SEO is primarily a popularity contest.

[aaronwall]

That comment sorta makes me cringe for choice of branding, as sometimes when anyone who talks bad about someone with a "very popular SEO book" people will assume that it is me.

I would just like to clarify that I have never had a customer paying 5 figures a month that was unhappy with what they got from me. ;)

Also agree with you that spammy links can work better than what one would think if they attended Google's sermons about quality links. Though typically from a risk profile it is better to mix and match so whatever your promoting doesn't stick out as an outlier & get whacked at some point.

[i-like-water]

Just to clarify it is not Aaron.

[pbhjpbhj]

>Google's algorithm is not a mystery - most 'SEO' people will try to sell you some snake oil.

Google's current ranking algorithm is a mystery. Sure we have some good clues to go on but outside of Google's own info (which on at least one occassion I've considered to be a deliberate attempt to mislead, though I might be wrong) or industrial espionage the only way to determine the nature of the algo is to experiment (or use other's experiments).

Yes they have a heavy reliance on site authority and the external link structure but this is not all there is.

Good content is arguably what Google wants because it is how they mine their product (people) to be delivered to their customers. Whether their algo is optimised to deliver good content is a separate issue - you clearly think not.

Haven't you been stung with any of the algo updates?

[aaronwall]

Follow the money.

What % of spam sites are wrapped in AdSense? Greater than 5%? Greater than 50%?

For all Google's talk of content quality, they are clearly willing to make some concessions with who they have as business partners and the type of "content" they are willing to fund.

[pbhjpbhj]

>What % of spam sites are wrapped in AdSense? Greater than 5%? Greater than 50%?

It wouldn't matter if it was 100%. Google apply pressure via their ranking algorithm to encourage quality content which in turn relies incoming links and to a lesser extent well crafted pages. Basically Google don't primarily themselves judge the quality - that would be futile with so many pages, they allow the net to do it, that's the whole point of PageRank to attain a metric for quality without actually measuring the quality per se.

On the subject of "spam sites" - spam is unsolicited content delivered to you, that's not possible unless you're talking about popup/popunders. You actively seek out the sites.

Now if the top rankings on Google are unwanted poor quality sites and Google are advertising spamily and not flagging malware, etc., then I think you'd have a point.

[aaronwall]

Have to disagree with that 100%. Maybe 110%, if I am allowed.

Bloglines is now a scraped "answers" website. If I took our old Threadwatch.org and did the exact same thing would Google let it rank based on existing link equity? If not, what would be the difference? Ask is a bigger partner so the editorial judgements are not made against them the same way they might a smaller player.

Google has frequently exercised editorial judgement against some folks, while letter other folks get away with doing the exact same thing in bulk.

Further, those who are creating original high-quality content have real business costs. Google paying scraper sites like Mahalo and Ask to borrow your content & wrap it in ads means that you are sometimes getting outranked for scraped duplications of your own content. That drives down publisher margins and pushes marginally profitable publishers into losing money.

That said, Google wants to get big into television ads. And that is going to mean having better respect for copyright. To some degree as we see the Google business model change we will see their approach of "paying anyone to steal anything & wrap it in Google ads" (to soften up copyright) change to a model where the put themselves as a gatekeeper on DRM content & push the "official" sources of the media (and try to make a cut of the profits).

Slowly but surely the search results will fill up with official hotel sites, official music sources, official video sources, official ebook sources, etc etc etc ... with Google putting a big foot on the gas.

As that shift happens the longtail spam model will lose out on its profitability because it will be forced to compete with higher quality content that is automatically mixed into the search results. (The whole point of universal search was to allow Google to short cut certain types of information right into the core search results...as they start making money from micro-payments and such look for that trend to accelerate).

[tlack]

I've also observed that off site factors (incoming links) trump onsite factors (optimizing content and producing more of it). I think Google feels that it's way easier for a black hat to come up with great SEO-focused content then it is for them to engineer a lot of authority links, even if the latter is becoming easier and easier all the time.

[naithemilkman]

thank you for confirming my suspicions