Seo Test - Real Search Engine Tests

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.

Posted on October 25th, 2007