Learning SEO

Im going to really go against the tracks here. I would warn and I hope that some of the more experienced guys will agree with me here on my statements.

Do yourself a favour and go to webmaster central and have a look at all the complaints about website ranking. About spammers and webmaster not following guidelines yet still tanking well for years.

I remember when i first started doing seo for my GMB listing I recall looking through Moz and following everything they had said citations, local citations all the stuff and one day a website with my exact keyword match just poped up. He didnt even have a associated website with his listing yet he still whatever i do to this day outranks me.

I have seen on the google forums people doing massive posts on seo only to later eat their words.

People say google will penalise you for keyword stuffing? Ive seen so many website stuff their footers with keywords to duplicate pages in which only u the city name is the difference.

Oh google will get them ? They have been there for years.

Bad back links? Most of the websites i see on the top of the serps for my niche have a ton of backlinks from Chinese and Russian websites that arent even in the same niche.... I was also told google will get them.... that was also about two years ago. They still lead the organic listings.

I think you can follow good seo but to be truly effective you need to push the boundaries and take a risk. I also think that there is no one size fits all strategy and that most "seo experts" tweak until we get the right formula and for me many times that formula is just just outside of googles guidelines so to say.

Google is losing the its war against black hat seo, you may say oh but thats impossible google needs to look after its users with good search results to stay in business, thats very true. But with so many people doing paid advertising its probably the only links you will ever click on and it is in that area where they try assert quality control.

Organic seo is just not important enough for the ever more stretched google resources.

You can most definitely learn and improve your ranking through it but be ready to compete against overnight black hat websites all year round IF one get penalized another is already waiting to be indexed. As a business owner if i lose 3 months of good ranking waiting for google to penlize site x and then two weeks later site y pops up back hatting too and i have wait another three months... I would be broke.
 
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@PeterShene - you raise some very valid points when it comes to the blackhat nature of things. For years, Google has said EMD (Exact Match Domains) would decrease in rankings, but you can still find plenty of them. The part which people didn't read is what's "in between the lines" when Google makes statements.

EMD for instance - wheretobuybluejeans.com - this will suffer a demotion, but hostingdiscussion.com will not. The reason is that the HD forums are the actual name of the business/organization and it's not a marketing gimmick. So EMD does get penalties, but only for those that are purposely trying to trick the system.

When it comes to the backlinks from China and Russia, yes, some do work, but again, it depends on the niche. For the majority of people, they will have no effect. NoFollow/DoFollow links have been another argument for years, and if SEO is done right, and word of mouth marketing is done right, you SHOULD have a mix of both DOfollow and NOfollow links. If you have 99 DO follow and 1 NO follow, there's something fishy going on - but the volume is too low for Google to care about it. Most of the rules put in place are targeted at the big guys, not the small. So if you have 900,000 DOfollow and 1,000 NOfollow - you can be your butt you're getting a penalty :)

All that said, links don't play as high a value as content on the actual page. You need links to expose the content, but once it's exposed it's the content that will determine the ranking position. And it's not that it needs to be structured sentences either, it just needs to meet all the criteria of Google - 10 words in each sentence, 50 words in the first paragraph, 3 H3 tags, 1 H6 tag, 4 links - whatever the metrics are, you just need to match them for your industry. - A good example of this is what Kyle Roof was able to do with his tactics. I had the pleasure of meeting him earlier this year and chatting, but here's an interview about a competition where he used science rather than theory to beat the competition - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NuwTOG02BKk

And that' really what SEO is all about these days - less theory, more proof. As you said, there are tactics that still work on Google, and they work because they meet the MATH behind the algorithm. They do violate the guidelines, but they do meet the computer math.

You can definitely play on the edge, but only if you're willing to get cut. Getting cut could mean losing 100% of your online presence - but if you're willing to risk it, then that's the choice you make.

For us, we work 100% within the whitehat limits for our clients, but we do play in the GrayHat and BlackHat world for some of our testings. We're always testing how far the limit is, but our clients are never on a bleeding edge.
 
I agree playing with your own site is your own choice, playing with a clients site is not an option because if they get cut they will look for somebody to blame.

Google say alot of things, Seo's say alot of things work. Like the skyscraper technique sure youve heard of it... so google something like top ten online whatever. You will find most of the top ten contain the same same content... what happened to duplicate content.

Keywords spamming, my niche is dominated by international companies will duplicate pages on which the only difference is the cite name and in the footer they have them all listed.

I agree with your links vs content.. that i have seen in my own website and on client sites. When i was new I would tweak content not just keywords but semantic keywords, alts texts speed, url structures mostly onpage user experience type things ( theres no formula for it , its just adjust and observe ) and i used to get above sites that had many more back links than i had or domain Authority ...

I think another variable that s coming into play more and more are the user metrics. Sometimes i cannot discern why a site ranks well analysed it for speed, links, content and all the rest and the only other thing i can think of is this site must just have really good user metrics.

MY stance on seo however stands, its a big resource consumer. Corporates and bigger businesses are putting that money into social media marketing, paid advertising and real world offline advertising. Seo organic seo is way too volatile to count on as you primary means of acquisition.

We always hear about penalties i have heard litrally of 2 yes two south african websites that have had penalties. Do you think that google proiritizies its search engine variants?, like google.com .co.za .co.uk I have actually seen from some tools that i have that their algorithms have independent updates.

Your lorem ipsum experiment is awesome do you have somewhere where i could read more of it, sounds to me like when google found out they didnt like it very much ahahaha. !!!!! I couldnt hear properly the name of the tool you said you were using sounded like quora or something... YOu mind sharing it?
 
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@petershene - yes, Cora is the software made by Ted Kubaitis with seotoollab.com and it is awesome to work with. Ted is always around to help too, so if you get stuck, he's right there. The tool is NOT a solution tool, it's an analytics/metrics tool - a Correlation Software. You still have to know SEO and what logically makes sense. When the tool says add 14 more H3 tags, and add your keyword 42 more times inside the body tag- you really need to be sure of what you're doing. Could those 42 keywords really be TEXT, or could some of them be HTML Tags, Name/ID, ALT, bulletpoints, CSS Class names - etc. So it still requires common sense and an understanding of SEO. The software is not cheap, and nor should it be. It's a crazy powerful tool to analyze a single keyword in a single niche against a single set of competitors.

The other tool is pageoptimizer.pro made by Kyle. His experiment was awesome, and yes, as you can imagine, Google freaked out and delisted his site (and other sites he owned).

Blacklisted sites and penalties are definitely rare to hear about, but I can assure you they do exist, as does the Sandbox (which everyone claims doesn't exist). I can attest, and Artashes here at HD can verify, my site was delisted for nearly 3 weeks in the search engines (sandbox) and it was 100% attributed to links - actually a link from this forum discussion.

In my previous life, I ran a web hosting company (sold it 5 years ago) but we provided the servers for HD. Artashes was being nice, and we put a "hosted by" tag in the footer of the forums - overnight, 100,000 new links pointed to our site. Within a couple of days, we were gone from the search engine and the ulcers kicked in :) Lots of troubleshooing, limited feedback from Google and several audits and bottles of tums later, we modified the link and in a day or two or site was back online at the top of Google for "cpanel hosting" where it belonged.

Since that time, Google has created filters for links in Footers etc, and they do filter some domain name extensions, so the world is a better place :) Some extensions definitely work differently in different countries if Google has a separate search engine for that country, those other extensions generally get preference. But it depends on context and how it's being used.

With regards to user metrics and social - it does play a factor. If something is popular on social media, it's in Google's best interest to show it at the top in a search too. Dwell time on pages I still believe are a factor to the extent that the user is getting something and converting or clicking to another page in the site. Fast entry/exit are an issue for the user, and in turn, Google wouldn't want to show it to other users.

Boy has this topic evolved :)
 
Indeed and thanks for sharing.

I just want to clarify something, i know penalties and sandbox exist lol :), the latter is something which frustrates me with new sites but its a very understandable thing. Especially for new sites. Imaging popping up one day and the next day you have 10k links, take a top three ranking...can you imagine the spam sites. Why should google trust that.

I am just saying that in South Africa we seem to get away with alot more.

I have heard that certain countries are monitored more aggressively due to repeated issues from said country.

As for your tool thanks for sharing, I didn't mean to attribute all your success to the tool alone. I myself have a really good tool in my humble opinion website auditor by seo power suite ( its free if anybody wants to give it a bash) but there is as you say alot of reading between the lines another thing I do is use multiple audit tools and see what variances they spit out.

They can help you get a few steps forward, but their full potential is only as good as the person using them at the end of the day. Yoast is much simpler example ( i dont class it highly ) but it can help somewhat if you have little knowledge. The other problem is likely that most of your competitiors will be ussing yoast so you cannot seperate yourself via the tool alone. If you follow it blindly you can forget for the most part of have content that is optimised to its max.

Some of the tools that I work with have your traditional suggestions of where to put what keywords and all that but instead of basing that on a set of rules they take the top 20 results for a search term analyse and make suggestions through that. They still get it wrong at times so this is where as you say your discretion should be used.
 
SEO is not difficult, but can sometimes be hard work.

- You need to find your niche
- Start with researching long tail keywords
- Lately AMP is gaining traction
- Working on backlinks can help
 
There are lots of youtube channels managed by SEO specialists. There are also many SEO blogs that you can read.

But make sure that the videos/articles you watch/read are up-to-date!
 
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