Seo Test - Real Search Engine Tests

This is just a quick note on an observation I made a few days ago. This is not about ways to get indexed quicker, more to the point of what actually happens once you are indexed.

 Getting listed in the Google index is one thing but something I never realised until now is that merely showing up in the listings is only part of the equation, it seems to take quite some time to settle. A search for the first five or six words “in quotes” of your listed webpage takes a lot longer to show up. This must mean that your keywords are also not performing straight away. The site I noticed this on has taken over a month from getting listed with the site: comand to showing up for any of it’s content.

I’ll say it again.. this is just an observation. It definitely happened but it’s not something I have monitored or paid any real attention to. It may have been a one off situation on one website. I’ve wrote about it here for a reminder to me for further investigate later on.

Top of serp = lots of backlinks and high PR right?

Nothing is more annoying than widespread misinformation. There is nothing wrong with being wrong as long as an opinion is stated as opinion or theory but when so many spout the words “expert” and “I’ve been in this for years” along side their unresearched paraphrasing and ego’s, I get a bit peeved. I suppose at this point I should dish out my regular reminder about me and this website..

Everything in here is experimental and based on ideas that I have had or found somewhere else. I am not an expert, I am documenting as I learn and most of what I write is based on either opinion, gut feelings based on results of SEO experiments or proof based on the results of SEO experiments. If you speed read this site then please don’t leave comments saying I am giving out misinformation unless I clearly state something as a fact and you can prove otherwise with evidence, which by the way I would welcome, I and hopefully ant readers I get will all benefit from it. That’s why we’re here!.

And on that note.. here is something with proof. PR and backlinks are not the most important element to get you listing high in the SERP’s. I’m not going to give you any of the keywords I used for this because five minutes is all it takes to find plenty yourself. Here are the results of the top websites returned for just one very competitive key phrase typed into Google.

Key:

• PR = PageRank
• GI = Google indexed
• GL = Google links
• YL = Yahoo links
• LD = Yahoo linkdomain
• Age = Domain age /year

Pos 1: PR= 2 __ GI = 59 __ GL = 23 __ YL = 1250 __ LD = 1460 __ Age = 2005

Pos 5: PR= 4 __ GI = 1190 __ GL = 590 __ YL = 4450 __ LD = 4640 __ Age = 2002

Pos 13: PR= 5 __ GI = 4,690,000 __ GL = 3 __ YL = 282 __ LD = 1,340,000 __ Age = 1999

Pos 20: PR= 6 __ GI = 4660 __ GL = 13,000 __ YL = 262,000 __ LD = 369,000 __ Age = 2005

All of these sites are very much on the same topic and all have the key-phrase in their title tags. None of them have the keywords in their domain name and all links point to the home page except for the one in position 13 which is a review site. This one is the only one that the site is not based on the niche of the key-phrase I used but does have plenty of pages on the subject. I thought this makes a good contrast to list among the others above.

For the site in position one, the backlinks listed in Google are… 3 internal to the domain, 8 are all from one high ranking forum but linked from low ranked pages within the forum, one from a well known article site and the rest are a mixture of non ranked pages, forum entries and a couple of low ranked directories. All in all, nothing that could cause you even the slightest headache if you had to go on a backlink war with this website.

The differences between position 1 and position 5 is are the two that interest me the most. I will be spending some time studying these two websites to see if I can spot anything out of the ordinary. Why?..

Pos1 is a very relevant website but if  compared it to pos5, first impressions say pos 5 is much more relevant, much more content, in fact all round more than what pos 1 has going for it. There are some extremely valuable clues to be had here but as of yet I can only find one possible reason, which I’m not confident about at the moment. The other thing to note, and this is very surprising.. Pos1 is a uk site and pos 5 a .com. The result above are taken from a google.com search. The google.co.uk search shows pos1 holing firm but the site above in pos 5 now lists at pos 73!. Hmm?

I’ll report on this when I figure anything out.

PageRank is a Google term. There’s no point in me repeating what they already tell us so here is their own explanation for PageRank.

Why is it important for you to know what PageRank is? Simply put, you need to know just enough about it to prevent you getting confused by the vast array of incorrect and varied opinions which might lead you to wasting lots of your valuable time.

It seems a majority of webmasters think it’s the be all and end all of getting listed high up in the SERP’s. A minority of them have said all along that they think it’s unimportant, not surprising really, two minutes of playing with the SERP’s might not tell you every fact about PageRank but it certainly tells you that those claiming it is the most important thing are clearly and absolutely, definitely wrong! Does this mean the minority are right?..

Well kind of, I suppose, but like everything else dominated by opinion, the majority of opinions are usually distributed with a large chunk of important facts missing.

The first and most important fact you need to know about PageRank is this, there aren’t many facts about it!  It’s a closely guarded secret. All that leaves us with is the power of simple observation to decipher what PageRank actually does for us.

First let’s get something out of the way here, this is probably where so much misinformation stems from. The PageRank indicator on the Google toolbar, do a search if you don’t know what that is. The toolbar gives us a little green gauge that displays a webpage’s PageRank on a scale from 0 to 10. The best thing you can do with this scale is forget all about 0 to 10 and think of it as just a little green bar. The more green the bar shows then the higher that pages rank is. It’s just a rough indicator to give you an idea of a webpage’s rank. Learn that, know it and then make use of it only if and when you need to. Use it for your observations and experiments but never associate it with what PageRank actually is.

Pagerank is not a set number, it’s infinite. Google cannot run out of PageRank to dish out, this is not how it works or what it is. Think of it as points, a page with a rank of 10 on the toolbar might have an actual rank worth billions of points. This is hard to explain without getting too technical so I won’t bother because it’s not important.

Any given webpage’s PageRank can, in very basic terms, be looked at as the sum of the other web-pages that link to it. All links are valid, they all count something towards a page’s rank whether they are internal from your own site or external links, they all count. External links from other websites are called backlinks and it’s these that get the most attention. They are however not the only links that matter, it’s just that most of the time one external link is worth a lot more than an internal link. Links that are relevant, anchored, not anchored, internal, external etc. all carry a certain amount of weight, some very little, some a lot more but they all add to your rank to some degree. As far as I know, no link is diminishing, none of them will knock your rank down but rather just not add anything if it’s considered worthless.

With the current changes that’s gone on inside Google and penalising paid links, it’s a bit hard to tell yet whether this is true or not. It does seem so far that your rank will only be penalised for selling links, not for receiving them but it’s unclear at the moment. Many people are saying that they have been penalised for buying links but I’m not so sure because they are basing this presumption on the fact their rank has just dropped. But why has it dropped? Is it because the links have actually diminished their rank? If those links just simply no longer count then a drop in rank is going to happen anyway because they’ve now lost their validity. Time will tell on this one.

The bottom line is that everything is valid, not just PageRank. It’s all a question of how much. Saying that PageRank is everything is clearly wrong, type in pretty much any keyword and the SERP’s will tell you this straight away. Saying it is completely unimportant is also wrong.

Google obviously likes internal links, external links, relevancy, PageRank, amount of pages and all the other things. The more you have of one the less you need of the other. The more you have of them all, the better. A  PageRank of one (on the toolbar) might be worth more than a hundred internal pages with a 50,000 word count, I haven’t a clue. What we need to weigh up is how hard it is to get achieve what we want with what we can actually do easily and efficiently.

It’s easy to work on relevancy. It’s easy to add unique content and multiple pages. It’s not so easy to get one way backlinks, even harder now that so many are using nofollow tags.

Everything is valid. Make everything relevant and it becomes even more valid. If it’s difficult to get backlinks to help up your PageRank then stop wasting too much time on it, let them come slowly and naturally in time, instead place your real efforts where you know you are continuously moving forward. A lot of unique content with internal links will also increase your PageRank to some degree.

Forget everything you have learned so far about SEO and the Google search engine and let’s just put ourselves in their hypothetical shoes for a moment. Forget all your suspicions, opinions and everything you have heard others declare as fact and just for the next ten minutes, let’s presume what Google tells us is the truth… for a website to perform well in the Google search engine then it should strive for the following.

• High quality
• Useful, information-rich
• Unique content
• Relevancy
• Well structured
• Natural Backlinks / PageRank

Those are some of the key-points you will find in Google’s webmaster guidelines, which according to them is what you need to pay attention to, in order to create a website that ranks well in their search engine. I don’t know about you but I have no reason to believe they are lying about the fact they want high quality, relevant websites to show up at the top of their SERP’s, so let’s go with that and think about how we could make that happen if we owned a search engine with a high budget.

The first thing I would do is a general study of common practices and behaviours of all kinds of websites and the people that create them. Are the majority of high quality sites generated by hobbyists or webmasters? How do they create their pages. Do they know HTML or use junk like Frontpage etc.  I would use this information to decide importance of things like header tags, anchor text etc and how often is it utilised in the general high quality website. (btw I think header tags are over-rated).

How can you tell a computer to decide if a website is information rich and useful? Well obviously you can’t but what you can do is gather all sorts of common patterns and create sets of likelihoods to take a reasonable guess. This could be even more effective if we hire some language experts and have them work closely with some expert mathematicians and computer programmers.

In the past, guessing the likelihood of a site being high quality would rely a lot on Pagerank (backlinks) but nowadays I’m not so sure as backlinks are too easy to create unnaturally. We must not presume that no matter how good an algorithm is at decoding information, we can leave it indefinitely. People will always figure a lot of it out and find ways to make better predictions.  For instance, the majority of today’s backlinks are created by SEO’s for business and MFA sites more so than the person creating a high quality website for pure hobby. This means our algorithms will need constant reviews and updates otherwise the whole Pagerank thing becomes pointless.

Unique content isn’t so hard to find (or create) , all we’d need to do is decide how to deal with it. Don’t forget in Google’s own words.. Duplicate content is “mostly not deceptive in origin”. It isn’t penalised as such, it’s more a matter of what version will carry the most weight.

Relevancy. How do you get a machine to decide if content is relevant? Well I guess it can be done to an extent and produce reasonably accurate results, somewhat similar to the way you would check for quality content.

Well structured. This isn’t so hard to figure out, not foolproof, but easy to spot the difference between a site well structured and most of those thrown together in minutes or computer generated. Although the computer generated ones have got better, they can still leave traces of irregularity.

Okay, so here I am, the owner of a search engine trying to program algorithms that will make these decisions for me. So far I have a fairly good idea of how to spot the obvious and to make reasonable assumptions at whether a site is good or bad. All I have to do now is decide the best compromise between achieving those results and not penalising those that are great sites but don’t work too well with the algorithms.

This can be really difficult, almost impossible to decide, so the best thing would be to make a help page public so that we can inform the honest webmasters what their best practice is and what they should avoid doing.

Hmm.. this is all sounding a bit familiar isn’t it?

Ok that’s the hypothetical part over, how does this help us? Well let’s have a think about it.

Again, presuming Google are telling the truth, we can summarise. Relevant, high quality, unique, useful, well structured and backlinks all help us get better ranked results. An algorithm can’t produce perfectly accurate results but can produce good results if the human side of things take notice of what the algorithms don’t like. I.e.. non relevant, duplicate, etc as well as things that the robots don’t work too well with, script, flash, frames etc.

Right, we have two choices here.

1. Believe everything Google tells us and go with it.
2. Believe everything we read on blogs and SEO forums, or should I say, baclink, backlink, backlink, backlink…

Now is there anything I might be missing? Damn I’m trying my hardest to think if there is any way we can put this to the test. Nah, I just can’t think of, … um, er, wait a minute? what if? No don’t be silly, that could never tell us anything surely? Hmm, I wonder. Oh bollocks to it, I tell you what let’s just try it and see what happens if we type a keyword into Google and take a look at the top ranking websites!!

Three minutes later…

Well fuck me! I weren’t expecting that? I took a look at the top ranking websites for a few different keywords and guess what, most of them are well structured, unique, average to high in quality, definitely relevant, not driven by script, frames or flash. The only thing I noticed that seemed to have a widespread variation of importance was pagerank and backlinks. For some reason they didn’t seem to matter too much to what was at the top of the list compared to relevancy. If anything it seemed the most common element between all those top ranking sites was indeed relevancy.

Something is obviously not right here. I have no doubt wasted three minutes of my time because Google must be lying. Fuck it, I’m going with backlinks!!

If you are a complete beginner to search engine optimisation then no doubt your first few Google searches have led you to places like the forum at digitalpoint and various blogs on the subject. The obsession with backlinks and pagerank has obviously led to so much confusion that the entire subject has almost imploded in on itself, leaving very few facts, engulfed with clichés and misinformation. There are some forum members and bloggers that post very informative posts but they unfortunately get very quickly buried and widely ignored as well as disagreed with by those that obviously have no idea what they are talking about.

When I first started to get interested in this subject, I like everyone else, spent some time reading through all these expert opinions presuming the majority opinion must be the most substantial. Unfortunately this is not the case. The amount of people speaking out on this subject with some actual worth are minimal. My guess is they are so fed up with arguing nonsense that they have given up trying to educate people.

There bottom line is this. It does not matter how many people tell you something, if you feel something doesn’t add up then don’t take anybody’s word for something if they cannot provide some sort of evidence. Let’s think about a common beginner’s question, “how do I get my website noticed in the search engines”.

Post that question on the average SEO forum and you will have a hundred expert opinions. Once you have waded through those replies you will see differing opinions on “pagerank”, “content is everything” and “backlinks” and most likely come to the conclusion that you need a lot of backlinks to get your website noticed in the search engines.

Even though these answers are all true to an extent, they are also very misleading. I will explain why in the next few posts where I will reveal my thoughts on the largely misunderstood term, Pagerank

Thinking inside the box

When it comes to figuring out puzzles and searching for innovation we rely a lot on creativity and what’s often termed “thinking outside the box”. There is a lot of value to this term but what’s often overlooked is thinking outside the box often means looking deeper into it.

Again, I’m not an SEO expert but from all of the searching I’ve done so far it’s pretty clear that most of these experts aren’t really doing much more than using everyone else’s ideas and taking them as gospel. This is why I have some respect for the black hat guys. You can slag them off all you like for what they do but one thing you can’t take away from them is their knowledge and their ability to think around the box from every dimension. The ones that come up with the new ideas are absolute innovators. Armed with nothing but obsession, knowledge and an ability to think out puzzles from every angle deserves some admiration.
The people at the top of any game need to have an edge to compete. If this is SEO then what is your edge. What have you done with all the information you have to try and figure out something that others may not have thought about yet.

What about me, what have I done?

Like I said in my previous post I’m quite new to all of this but I do learn quite quickly if I can give something my attention long enough. Unfortunately this only seems to happen for things that might earn me money. And this is what the blog is about. It’s a place for me to document my experiments and share them with you lot. Why would I want to share them. I could give you lots of answers here but I’ll go straight for the honest one. If my experiments end up with any worth (which they might well not) then this blog will get well known and I will (hopefully) then use the popularity of the domain to my advantage!

If it ends up I’ve wasted my time then I’ll disappear and park the domain along with my big mouth. If the experiments end up with a little bit of value then I’ll keep them logged here. If they end up pretty good then I’ll make this place members only and select who gets to see the results. If the experiments lead me to real valuable info then I’ll disappear, I won’t be sharing any of it until I’ve creamed it to the max!!

Anyway…. Back on track. Thinking inside the box, or the Google box should I say…

Google has an algorithm, it’s a big secret and if one of us had the formula then we’d use it to rank number one for every page we had. That would be cool. So how do we get the formula! Well obviously we cant, all we can do is research what we already know and play with the results to try and get closer to figuring out what the algorithms are actually doing. We still won’t know what the formula is but who cares, if I’m closer to the formula than my competition then that’s all I need.

Deductive, inductive and natural reasoning.
I’m no mathematician but I do know that 2 + 2 = 4. I also know that if X + 2 = 4 then X must equal 2. There are all sorts of terms categorised under some form of reasoning or logic, and grouped together they all have one overall thing in common… to predict or calculate a definite, or probable, outcome based on information we either have already, or can deduce from what we already know and then use the result as part of the next set of reasoning.

To use these forms of reasoning we have to think a bit deeper than immediate or obvious presumptions. With the equation x + 2 = 4 for example most people will immediately presume X to be one thing.. X=2. Which of course it is, but it isn’t always the right answer. Most of the time, that kind of reasoning will be correct but it’s still based on presumption. We instantly presume X to be a single digit. Using deductive and inductive reasoning we would never presume X to be a single digit. In fact we would go so far as to question and test the entire equation before committing to a definite or even probable answer.

X is the unknown. For the equation above it could have meant .. X = 3 * 9+ 2+1 / 15 therefore 3*9+2+1/15+2=4.

What if X = A * B + C + D / E? Now things get a bit more difficult. Still, nothing impossible. We know X must equal 2 so straight away we have something to work with. We can now presume A B C D and E all to be 1 and test the result, if that doesn’t equal 2 then we could presume A to be 2 and so on testing every possibility until we get a result. Not the most efficient way to work that equation but that’s irrelevant here.

I can now take things a step further and say that yet again we are presuming A B C D and E to be single digits, but again, they are all unknowns. The bottom line is X could be anything, a string of nested equations for all we know and the deeper it goes the more we have to make presumptions to get closer to the real answer.

The following quote is taken direct from wikipedia
“Deductive reasoning applies general principles to reach specific conclusions, whereas inductive reasoning examines specific information, perhaps many pieces of specific information, to derive a general principle”
So how does that help us to solve Google’s algorithm? Obviously it doesn’t but we aren’t interested in cracking the algorithm to get to the top of the results page. All we need is to know a bit more about the probable effects of the algorithm than those getting to the top in the SERP’s. As long as we achieve this then we will be armed with all the necessary information to either reach the top of the page or realise that we will have so much work to do that out time is better spent elsewhere.

In other words I only need to be able to make enough reasonably good guesses about the algorithm to let me know whether to waste my time or move on to a different keyword. Given enough parameters, this is entirely feasible to figure out with a set of presumptions as long as those presumptions can be tested, which they most certainly can but this is where we hit the biggest problem of all.. The test results take too long. If we need to test, let’s say, a thousand presumptions to get one notch closer to predicting a likely set of results from the algorithm then it’s not going to happen with the speed at which Google update the index and calculate Pagerank, probably for good reason!

Well I doubt that’s anything groundbreaking, anyone could have figured that out, (although I’m not so sure going by what I read from some of the experts!) Is it possible that we’re missing out on the fact that half of the results are there already, staring us in the face. All we need to do is analyse what we already have access to and then figure out if there’s a quicker way to fill in some of the the blanks to see if we can find out anything new. There’s a lot of ready made information that we can analyse, and one possible thing that I don’t know if anybody has thought of yet, I’m testing it now to find out but I won’t be revealing it for at least a few weeks. How much this will help us I don’t yet know but we’ll find out as I’m going to put some ideas to the test.

We’ll get a bit deeper into this throughout the next few posts.

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

Okay, like I said it will be a few weeks before I get this rolling but the basic idea at the moment is something like this, although this may end up completely different when I start if I think of flaws in the idea or improvements.

1. Some things I want to test are.
2. Duplicate content - how much does it really matter.
3. Nofollow  links- Do they still help your position in the SERPS
4. Amount of pages and internal linking methods - how much does it matter
5. Domain name - how important compared to html name for instance
6. Domain Age - with previous links and without
7. Footprints - i.e. is it a bad idea to have your sites all listed in googles webmasters tools. Does it devalue your interlinking
8. HTML vs Database driven
9. Bold text, Header tags vs normal text
10. alt tag in images, does it give weight to the keywords in the page

I’ll edit this post as things pop in to my head and add to the list.

How am I going to do the test?

Well, I’m going to create the pages from scratch, mostly new domains and mostly single pages to start with. I might do one or two with aged domains (probably a good idea) and then build them all as time goes.

Why am I doing this? It’s for my own curiosity but I also want to clear some of the ambiguity that surrounds SEO. It’s not that I disbelieve any of it, my main beef is that I think only a small handful of so called experts speak from actual experience.

My main goal is not to find ways to race to the top of the SERPS but learn how to NOT waste time when I am racing up the SERP ladder. In other words, I think we spend a lot of time avoiding techniques that don’t have as much negative impact as the general consensus

I don’t even know where I’m going to start yet. It will be at least three weeks before I have time to do anything so in the meantime I’m just going to post some of my thoughts here as they come into my head (if I’m near a computer) more than anything, so that I don’t forget them.

When I first thought of doing this it was only a week ago but since then I have thought of lots of ideas to improve the original idea. Sometimes it’s very difficult to remember them all so I might be writing some of these posts fast.. too fast to spell check or worry much about grammer.

My problem is my brain is a thousand miles per hour and if I don’t type things down quickly I forget them before I’ve finished typing the sentence, in the meantime I’ve had another fifty ideas and forgotten them all!