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by benologist
5158 days ago
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1) You can't get any of those things from Google at all. You can get a few little morsels of vagueness from GWT which is free because it doesn't do anything worth paying for. And GA is a whole other service that has little to do with anything I described. Probably the only decent tool they offer is the AdWords keyword research tool and again ... it's not worth paying for, you have to come up with the keywords yourself... that's not useful. There's a whole industry of SEO tools like http://ginzametrics.com/ and of course http://seomoz.org/ that aren't cheap and compensate for the lack of 1st party tools. 2) There's a whole SEO industry that operates on a hazy interpretation of what Google is supposed to be doing these days ... lots of companies know what SEO is, they know what it does, they know why they need it, and they pay out the arse for it. This brings clarity to that industry and those companies instead of letting them reverse engineer the changes you make and speculate on what matters. If they're willing to pay $100s/hr for SEO they'll surely pay $1000s for a roadmap straight from the source. That's like a printing press for money because that data expires when you act on it. Money creates an unfair advantage right now. Pay people to spam backlinks to your website and you'll rate higher. Pay people to write summaries of blog posts and eventually you'll rate higher than those blogs you're sourcing your content from just because you can afford to generate more content faster. Pay people to submit and vote on digg, reddit, bla bla bla. Pay people to write about your product and create content. Pay people to market your site by writing content tailored for social media communities and get 1000s of backlinks. Pay people to do viral marketing stuff. Pay people to link to you. Pay Google to feature you above the search results. The 'pardoning' is a little scammy and would be difficult to implement but the goal isn't to encourage them to take advantage of the system, the goal is to get your share because they're going to take advantage of it regardless. Google does this already via AdSense. |
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Furthermore I don't think there is a way to get data that is any less vague than it is now. Each site is so unique that this solution can't scale and you'd have to settle for analyzing the data yourself. Also, Analytics does have to do with what you described when it comes to seeing what's working as far as SEO goes and yes, AdWords would be more appropriate as an example when talking about competitor and keyword research. For some reason I thought those tools were in GA.
Generally though this really seems like a return to the bad old days except instead of keyword stuffing your meta tags you pay to play. Your whole plan would lead to the end of truly organic results. Yeah, the system a Ready gets gamed now but at least everyone has am equal shot of gaming it. All you need is the knowledge. The current paid techniques of gaming the system would simply shift from third parties to the search engines themselves. I also feel like what you describe is closer to a paid directory with search functionality than a search engine. I mean, even if it worked like search does today plus those paid features it wouldn't be long before the true search functionality became irrelevant and we'd be left with a directory where whoever paid the most came out on top.
To your credit, I agree that it would be nice to get some more data, better data, and data presented in a more human-friendly/layperson-friendly way but you lose me as soon as you get into a lot of these paid features that help you rank higher.