I have a bit of a problem, every time I go to look up information on SEO all I hear about is PR and links. Why do so many people put so much trust in just these 2 things (PR of which doesn't help how close to the top you are). I've read the Google patent for their search algorithm and have come up with a few key things that I thought I'd share.

1. Change your content often - Let's think about this, if you have a page that is 4 months old and a page from someone else's site is 2 weeks old, which one has the latest most up to date information. The newer the page content the more relevant, the higher the ranking.

2. How can google's toolbar affect rankings - there are a few ways google's toolbar can affect your rankings. First if someone votes for your site, second if someone visits your site for their favorites (speculation on my part but it makes sence)

3. Another thing is how long does your link appear on someone else's site. This may sound stupid but there are alot of link farms out there and if your link appears one day and not the next it's a black mark to google.

4. Google will actually see how long you have owned that domain name and if it has changed owners. (done through whois)

5. How often does your link in google get clicked over someone else's? If people click yours more often then people must think it's relevant.

There is a lot more information if you go to

http://appft1.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-...RS=20050071741

hopefully the link shows up. I'll admit that the above have never been proven by myself but any time you think that by doing something it could help google give relevant results, it's probably a good thing.

and every one of those would be wrong!

What Google have as a patent and what they use are 2 totally different things.

1/ Nope, just because it is new doesn't mean it is better or more relevant than some thing that has been around years

2/ Too easily manipulated.

3/ There are many many many reasons why a link would disappear from a page.
3a/ How would they determine how long a link stayed in place unless the same page was crawled every day???
3b/ If this were the case, how could blogs have "magical ranking properties" when many links are replaced on pages as new posts are made.
How would forums survive in Google when links to threads move around constantly?

4/ Google (in the voice of Matt Cutts) have said that they could do this should the need arise but it is NOT done as a matter of course.

5/ same as 2 too easily manipulated

All these points have been discussed ad nauseum when the patent originally surfaced about a year ago.

As I stated I never said I could prove it but can you prove what you have said. Obviously if Matt has said something it should be taken as gospel but is it so outrageous to think that newer content is given a slight edge or that google uses their toolbar in some way for rankings. Unless you actually have talked to someone who develops the algorithm or you yourself have contributed to it's development there really is no way you can tell me that these AREN'T taken into account in any way. If you have contributed, my apologies, you are right, but I doubt that you have.

If you can prove what you are saying, please let me know where I can find this information so that I can better educate myself and not make this mistake again.

Originally Posted by WebcyteDesign

1. Change your content often - Let's think about this, if you have a page that is 4 months old and a page from someone else's site is 2 weeks old, which one has the latest most up to date information. The newer the page content the more relevant, the higher the ranking.

Originally Posted by WebcyteDesign

Abut is it so outrageous to think that newer content is given a slight edge

Now suppose it's a page on candles. You know, those things you set on fire when you have a girl coming over? Turns out from a technology standpoint, candles really haven't changed much for thousands of years.

What if it's a page on Canon's 135 mm f/2 L USM lens? It was brought to market in 1996 and not changed since. Does a page from yesterday have any more informational value than a page from four years ago, or a page from 1997? In this case, the answer is yes if Google's customer asked for comparative tests against newer digital backs, but anything else, and what was true ten years ago, is true now.

How about a page on the internals of the Vista operating system and how to tune it? There's a case where new content is almost by definition better than old content.

But as a general rule ... there is no rule.

All I am trying to say is that these could be one factor not THE only factors for determining ranking. I understand what you are saying about candles (especially the part about the girl) but all I here from people is link this link that, PR this and PR that, Google has to put into account a lot of things when it creates it's rankings, some are more important than others, so why do people dismiss an idea about ranking if it doesn't apply to every single site. Chirshirst said that #2 is too easy to manipulate, what about link building, that is quite easy to manipulate yet he himself believes in it as I have read in previous posts. As far as I can tell the best guideline is the patent as it comes straight from Google.

And Chrishirst I understand you've read this stuff over and over again but think of it this way, how would you try to rank a site programatically.

Why does this crop up so many times? The SEO forum is full of threads about either how to manipulate PageRank or some conspiracy theory about how Google works...

Who cares? Work on your content rather than worrying about PageRank and similar SEO rubbish that doesn't really matter at all.

The secret (that most people don't seem to know) of SEO is this:

GET GREAT UNIQUE CONTENT and the PageRank (for what its worth) will come and so will the improvements in search engine rankings. Forget SEO tricks and things, it's for the most part, a waste of time. Provide visitors with unique, quality content that they will find useful. If you do a couple of useful link exchanges to get the ball rolling on a new site, then you'll get visitors coming in and hopefully other webmasters will notice you and start linking naturally to your page, simply because they think their own visitors will benefit from it.

In brief:

1) Provide good quality and unique content on your site
2) Don't go over the top on link exchanges - try to minimize them and ideally, none is the best (of course, if this is your first site, then it might be hard to get the initial visitors there, so the odd related complimentary link exchange may have to take place).
3) Ignore PageRank for the most part. Most of us like that little green bar for some weird reason, but it's actual value is very minimal.

Just think about items 2 & 5.
If you could reduce the competitions ranking by finding all the phrases their pages rank for, then continually clicking the "frowny face" , or if you could increase your ranking by clicking on the results for your own pages?

What would you be doing???

Yep, link building is good when done the right way, and link building for ranking used to very very easy to manipulate, currently it is much more difficult to link your way to page one for anything other than uncompetitive terms and it is progressively getting less and less of an attractive proposition in terms of cost (both time and monetary) and the point of diminshing returns is getting lower and lower.
Even the hardcore linkers with their several million page networks are finding the going harder.

Build your linkage carefully and without thought to search engines and you will do much better.

The problem is with the ones who rattle on about links and more links, PR and more PR is, that's all they know and it doesn't occur to them to open their eyes and look beyond their personal horizon. As SEOs, SEMs, marketers etc they will go the way of the dinasour and die out eventually.
As the website owners become more knowledgeable about SEO/SEM and learn that rankings are meaningless, it will be their own short sighted attitude and inability to evolve that will be their demise. Of course there will always be the gullible and the inexperienced, who fall prey to snake oil sellers. But generally the clients are going to get better and the
*** Guaranteed #1 rankings. Or your money back *** scammers will become less.

how would you try to rank a site programatically.

I wouldn't! been through the formulaic "SEOing by numbers" phase, and it doesn't work.

The best way "programatically" is to give others the tools and the backend code to ensure that the copywriters are able to change every part of a page where text will be.
Ensure they can change the meta information, titles, headings, bolding & italics etc easily, make systems that don't need several URL parameters to function.
Develop navigation that is crawlable, accessible and useable.
Basically make it good for users and it will be great for SEs.

Actually, all of these are too easily manipulated.

1) Content jacking. How many of us out there have seen our exclusive content appear on some turdstain "blog" which does nothing other than to syndicate content that we never gave it permission to?

2) "Proxy voting" (see the six thousand StumbleUpon/Del.icio.us/other social media submission threads) makes this very easily manipulable. If you don't believe a toolbar can be manipulated, just look at all the info online talking about how to raise your Alexa rank. Same concept here.

3) It would be too easy for a competitor to submit to 1000 link farms on your behalf, making the link appear and disappear after a day. This has been going on for years now.

4) If you have any foresight, you could squat on a domain for years, throw up a site, and assuming what you said is correct (which it's not), it would rank immediately due to its age.

5) The link you provided has to do with geospatial ranking, and not what you were talking about.

And if a link is clicked from a SERP over another link...well, that's easy to manipulate too. See "proxy voting" in 2).

There's nothing that you've suggested here that isn't manipulable in some way. This is just bad advice, dude.

I view SEO as a cake and each slice are aspects of SEO. Of course you can miss a few slices out but to do so you will never have a full cake, think of the full cake as page 1 on google.

The aspects I refer to are

1. Have a URL that contains your keywords
2. Have good description tags on all pages, view each page of a website as a seperate website
3. Make sure the site content is original and easy to read
4. Use your main keywords or keyphrases in the first few sentences of the site
5. Use anchor text throughout the site
6. Have an on site and google sitemap
7. Have a good link building strategy
8. Add unique content regularly
9. Avoid flash
10. Avoid tables
11. Content is better than pictures
12. Try and utilise a video clip

These to mention just a few, I don't regard one aspect more important than others, and guess what...Google loves my business website.

Hi there

Interesting reading, nice to read some stuff from people who talk sense, but wot the hell is geospatial ranking lol ?

Woc

Thank you everyone who replied, I really just wanted to hear something different for a change on this subject and thought I stir the pot with a few "ideas" (not facts) of my own. Thanks again everyone.

Originally Posted by whym

The secret (that most people don't seem to know) of SEO is this:

GET GREAT UNIQUE CONTENT and the PageRank (for what its worth) will come and so will the improvements in search engine rankings. Forget SEO tricks and things, it's for the most part, a waste of time. Provide visitors with unique, quality content that they will find useful. If you do a couple of useful link exchanges to get the ball rolling on a new site, then you'll get visitors coming in and hopefully other webmasters will notice you and start linking naturally to your page, simply because they think their own visitors will benefit from it.

There are two steps, basically: create something worth seeing and recommending, and then get the word out. Perfect content by itself isn't enough. Imagine Paul Revere, with the most link-worthy content there was at the time - The British are coming! - putting up a blog entry and expecting people to find it themselves. Instead he went out on a midnight ride to spread the word.

Most of us don't have a message important enough to wake people up in their homes over ... but if we want people visiting our site, great content is only the first step, unfortunately.