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I was thinking about this topic today and was wondering if anyone has some feedback.
Let me explain what I was thinking about. We tend to look at high ranking pages on Google and try to uncover why they are high ranking. Imitating the reasons we think a page's rank might be so high. And much of the "wisdom" on high ranking says this or that feature will help get you a high rank.
Since many of us are not SEO experts we tend to take the "wisdom" along with the correlating "proof" that this wisdom works and apply it to our own pages. The "proof" being that so many high ranking pages are applying this "wisdom".
Yet I wonder....
Lately I have seen pages that are extremely well ranked but that use little of the prevailing "wisdom". And I have asked myself if maybe, just maybe, we are acting like those who said in the well known parable, how nice the king looked in his new clothes. When he was walking around naked.
These pages that rank highly out of tune with prevailing "wisdom" lead me to believe that a real high ranking is based on considerations that are either simpler or different than that which the prevailing "wisdom" touts so much.
The high ranking pages are there because of these underlying true reasons but the confusing part is that they also use a lot of what the current "wisdom" says is great to have.
The result? We all go around touting techniques that high ranking pages use as the key when in fact there are other hidden techniques which a high ranking is *really* based on.
Simpler techniques. Much simpler.
That the high ranking obscure flubby pages are revealing.
Any comments?
Thanks
Carlos
It's the black box discussion. You have a black box and you can't see what's inside it. You take all of the observations about what's happening inside and outside of that black box and then you theorize about what's going on inside of it.
The best theories tend to take higher precedence, but, as in the atom, we've seen that the theories tend to change over time as more discoveries are made.
Since many of us are not SEO experts we tend to take the "wisdom" along with the correlating "proof" that this wisdom works and apply it to our own pages. The "proof" being that so many high ranking pages are applying this "wisdom".Yet I wonder....
I'm not saying you're right or wrong, but this is what we have to work with, just as the early physicists worked on in the early 20th century. It definitely doesn't hurt to think about alternate possibilities.
The high ranking pages are there because of these underlying true reasons but the confusing part is that they also use a lot of what the current "wisdom" says is great to have.
You are wise like grasshopper.
Despite the fact that page in my profile is OBVIOUSLY a JOKE - some take it serious and have had a few people write me asking for more details/clarification/etc.
People believe what they read on the boards, what they see on other pages, and gee whiz - what ever you do - don't look for SEO info from traditional sources - otherwise you will spend all your time on meta tags.
Just because you see something - doesn't mean that is why it works
Just because you can't see something - doesn't mean it isn't there
Always ask - What Would Google Do?
WEBMASTER/SEO: Answer -- my site!
GOOGLE: Question to a Google User -- what would you like to see at ranked position number 1?
GOOGLE USER: Answer -- the best answer to my query!
Everything else is just semantics. What's good for Google Users is good for Google.
No. I generally analyse pages that are past 1k for some absolutely irrelevant query.
You all confirmed what I had already suspected about this. It goes to show that what the crowd is usually looking at or doing is not always the best way to determine what is best to do for one's own web site.
It takes a bit of courage and a willingness to risk the loss of traffic to do things differently than the crowd but sometimes it pays off very well.
Previously I had been looking at keywords in my area of interest, looking at high ranking pages, analyzing them to uncover hidden "techniques", and trying to implement those techniques readily observed by me and others.
I think I will henceforth look at totally irrelevant and non-popular keywords and THEN look at the high ranking pages that float to the top.
Much better way of analyzing Google results I think. And less prone to being swayed by all the hype and guesses floating around.
Carlos
YES. Very much so. The trick, of course, is to figure out how they got to be high ranking. ;) What "startup" says is good advice. If trying to figure out how the algo works, using searches on terms that return lower number of pages available is best. Also, make sure to do this using search terms that almost certainly nobody would be doing intentional SEO for. It is easier to figure out how Google really works this way.
Remember to consider off page things like text in back links. Here is a recent discussion on the importance of anchor text in links [webmasterworld.com] but there are many other discussions about this as well.
I believe the cached version of the page is what is used to help generate the current rankings so I focus on the cached pages.
It is helpful to focus on commonalities among high ranking pages. However, I think it is more beneficial to focus on differences between the high ranking pages and the lower ranking pages for a particular search query.
Lastly, regardless of what I discover in these little SERP experiments, I always try to make spam free, relevant pages so that as Google’s algorithm improves then so will my rankings.
In the black box case that bobriggs mentions, the best approach is to isolate the variables, one by one.
When trying to understand how a search engine works, the best approach is to find examples where all but one of the variables are constant. You can't do this by analysing high ranking pages in a large hypertext search engine.
If you collect enough minutiae, you can find some of the rules. Then, you can apply those rules to the high ranking pages, look for anomalies and come up with new possibilities to test. To test them, you need to find another controlled environment.
Those are my two cents.
Greetings
