Seo Test - Real Search Engine Tests

I make no claim to be an SEO expert, to be honest I’ve not even been at it that long. With that said, I am a very quick learner and pay (obsessive) attention to detail, especially where a subject is overwhelmed by contradiction and biased opinions that can’t be backed up by facts.

To an extent, this is why I am conducting my own real world tests. It’s not because I don’t believe the general consensus of things but in order to be creative (and it’s obvious you need to be for seo) I need to see things with my own eyes. Not only does this make me feel I am not wasting my time with other peoples claims and opinions but, by doing my own experiments I create a long term embedded ‘database’ in my own head. For me, this is the foundation of creativity. Seeing things with your own eyes makes you commit to long term memory, things that appear to have no importance at the time but often become your “rabbit out of the hat” when you need it. I am a firm believer in experimenting. Even if Google gave away their algorithms, I would still do a lot of experimenting that others would think pointless. This would be my edge because it would lead to a lot more out of the box thinking than doing everything by rote.

What does any of this have to do with becoming black hat? Well to be honest, to an extent I’m just rambling but I am kind of going somewhere with it. When I first decided to learn about SEO, I went on a long mission searching for every blog, book and whatever opinions I could find on the subject (and it’s way from over). In that time I have spent 90 percent of that time researching real black hat methods, even though I have no intentions of pushing my web sites using black hat methods. Possibly a little grey but mostly as white as I can keep it. I have no moral issues with black hat most of the time but for me personally I want to avoid it just because I feel (at the moment) I will be building more long term stability. Time will tell.

Anyway.. Why would I spend so much time researching black hat if I don’t want to use their methods?. It’s about understanding how things work so that I can apply it in my own (borderline white) way. If you want to understand how anything works then go straight to the people exploiting the system, any system no matter what it is. If you’re trying to learn something and gain knowledge then stop convincing yourself that you’ll have nothing to do with what’s considered “unsuitable behaviour” just so that you can feel all warm and cuddly among the cliché gang. Use them and learn from them. Most of the time, what they do, they do because they work hard to get inside and truly understand things. If you want knowledge then this is where the action is. Learning from them doesn’t mean you have to use the same methods. Take that knowledge and then use it to your advantage in your so called “white” methods. Everyone’s exploiting the system.

When I first got into computer programming, I purchased book after book on the subject and spent a long time reading and experimenting what seemed like a black art. Either nobody could write a decent book on the subject for beginners or nobody wanted to. It was at this time I first got connected to the Internet and discovered the world of cracking (reverse engineering) software. Thanks to guys like Fravia and Greythorne (are they still around?) I learned more in a month about computers, programming and search engines than I could in ten years of reading books at fifty quid a go!. I had no interest in cracking for money, I never put any of my cracks online, everything I done stayed on my home computer and went nowhere, I hardly even use the software I cracked, believe it or not, if I did use it I would end up buying it. It was pure education for me and the best education I could have got on the subject. I didn’t want to learn how to crack, I wanted to learn how computers and software worked. It turned out to be thoroughly interesting as well, especially if you’re a real geek!

The trouble is there are a lot of snotty noses out there ready to condemn anything that’s not considered “suitable behaviour”. This is fine, and I could agree, if only I kept my eyes so tightly closed that I had no way of seeing that what I’m doing is nothing more than feeding off and exploiting the same system. People like to draw lines so that they can feel morally settled in their comfort zone. Well, I hate to break it to them but we can move that line anywhere we like, we are still exploiting the same system, white hat or black hat, the bottom line is we are both trying to shove ours or somebody else’s products down peoples throats uninvited. The so called white hatters can all stroke each others egos but most (..I said most, not all) of them are still happy for the end result to be supplying some overpriced piece of absolute shit or terribly bad service to the consumer that he doesn’t need or want. If we are staying truly white hat then let’s not forget Google’s own words.. “quality guidelines”.

The difference for me is I want to stay on the side of the line that might help me stay in the business long term without the worry of getting banned. It also might be the side of the line that ensures I don’t stay in the system because I will never be able to compete, which brings me to my point.. It seems Google are now the ones moving the line, and in the direction that favours the Black hatters. Why?…

Because it’s getting harder and more unrealistic to push a website using Google’s recommended methods. At this point no doubt there’s a mob of angry white hatters armed with their sharpened and completely un-researched clichés ready to denounce me as a supporter of black hat but lets put the most important thing into perspective here.

Google wants to push relevant and high quality sites to create the best user experience. Ok, fair enough so lets presume some hobbyist has created a fantastic, non profit website about some niche that really does have a lot of value to the end user and reigns relevancy. He reads up on Google’s Webmaster Guidelines to find out how to get his site noticed. Let’s consider their main recommendations.

How can I improve my site’s ranking?
Sites’ positions in our search results are determined based on a number of factors designed to provide end-users with helpful, accurate search results. These factors are explained in more detail at http://www.google.com/technology/index.html…..

and that link basically tells us…

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value

It then goes on to say…

In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to their pages. For more information about improving your site’s visibility in the Google search results, we recommend reviewing our webmaster guidelines. They outline core concepts for maintaining a Google-friendly website.

So lets think about some of these guideline highlights..

Have other relevant sites link to yours

I don’t know about you but I’d call those sites the ‘competition’. I’m not sure we will get very far with that one.

Submit it to Google at
http://www.google.com/addurl.html

Okay, we can submit a site but as this isn’t even necessary, we’ll count that as no help so far.

Submit a Sitemap as part of our Google webmaster tools. Google uses your Sitemap to learn about the structure of your site and to increase our coverage of your webpages.

Okay, so far that’s one thing we can do, won’t help much in the serps but it will help get the pages indexed

Make sure all the sites that should know about your pages are aware your site is online.

Er.. Um.. What sites would they be then? There’s a problem here with the words “should” and “aware”. The only ones that “should” know, are the ones that I will be expected to pay for. Okay, maybe I should think about paying some of them to gain some traffic but what’s this got to do with the original statement “In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites”.
So once I’ve paid those sites that “should” know about me, will it be Okay if I ask them to not use rel=nofollow?. Sorry, we were talking about “rank” wasn’t we? Or do they mean, “awareness” increases rank?. Cool, in that case I’ll just tell a few mates to spread the word.

Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo…

I won’t even comment on this one, it’s obviously an oversight and this guideline should have been removed in 1999.

..as well as to other industry-specific expert sites

What, you mean those sites that “should know” and be aware?

Right, now before I go any further let me just say I have nothing against Google. I am not a Google basher, in fact far from it. One way or another I make money through the Internet and it relies mostly on the existence of Google. I have no problem with Google at all or how they run their business, which is theirs … Seems a lot of people are forgetting that lately.
I’m also not bashing white, grey or black hat, in fact the only people I bash are those that only know how to talk cliché.
My point here is I’m losing faith that it’s even possible to push a website without getting your hands dirty. The bottom line is Google themselves claim that backlinks are the key to getting up in the serps, but at the same time they are saying we will be penalised for the very thing they recommend.

Quality content is becoming harder to find through search engines no matter what anybody tells us. The serps are dominated by black hat as much as white hat and if we want to go down the road of drawing lines then lets talk about the quality content, which after all is what’s supposed to be Googles top priority. If the white hats care so much about sticking to Googles guidelines then they should factor “quality content” into their white hat credibility. Or is it Okay for them to push any shit they like as long as they push it with a cleaner brush!
This is all about optimisation after all. Can the white hatter stay completely within the guidelines set out by Google and even stay in business?. Reading through Google’s Guidelines, you learn mostly two things. Search engine optimisation according to Google means optimising your own site “within” to make it friendly to the spiders. Their advice about backlinks is so contradictory that to stay purely white hat you would either need to perform miracles by getting your strongest competition to link to you out of the goodness of their own heart or simply not take any chances on gaining backlinks without it bordering into grey at the very least.

Note: I use the term black hat loosely throughout this article. I do not in any way support hard core spammers

Posted on October 20th, 2007