Search Engine Myths Exposed

Jonathan Leger www.SearchEngineMythsExposed.com Table of Contents Why I wrote this report ....................................................................... Myth #1: Google Knows All and Sees All ............................................... Myth #2: Google Will Not Rank Duplicate Content ................................. Myth #3: You Must Get Links From Related Subject Sites to Rank ........... Myth #4: Your Site Must Focus On One Subject To Rank ........................ Myth #5: High PageRank Means Good Rankings ..................................... Myth #6: To Maintain Good Rankings, You Must Add New Content .......... Myth #7: The Biggest Myth: Ranking in Google is Hard ........................... A Case Study On Ranking in Google ....................................................... The Easiest Way To Rank In Google ....................................................... Earn $2,525 by giving away this report! ................................................. About the Author .................................................................................. 3 5 6 15 20 24 31 34 41 47 48 49 © 2008 SearchEngineMythsExposed.com | Page 2 Why I wrote this report I’m going to keep each section of this report as short as possible. If you’re like me, you’re busy, and you don’t want to spend the next week trying to suffer through 300 pages of e-bloat in the hopes that you get a few nuggets of wisdom that you can really use. This report is only as large as it is because of all the screenshots from Google, Yahoo and other sites I’ve included so you can see the facts for yourself. With that in mind, feel free to skip this section. However, if you’ve been struggling to rank in Google, reading the next few paragraphs will help you to see that I was in your shoes once, too. That I got frustrated too, before finally seeing the light and cutting through all of the baloney. I wrote this report because I used to think that ranking in Google was hard. I thought it was hard because I was listening to all the “gurus” who talked about ridiculous things like meta tags, keyword density and PageRank. I listened to them, used the methods they were hawking, and failed miserably. So I turned instead to the search engine optimization (SEO) forums to see if what they had to say was any better than the “gurus” who had taken my money. I read the posts of the “forum gods” that everybody bowed to, listening and trying to replicate their methods for ranking, only to meet with more failure. In desperation I took the few things that I had found to be true and worked on them, ignoring all of the conventional “wisdom” that is still being spread all over the web about how to rank in Google. No matter how much the nay-sayers protested, if I saw it was working I kept at it. And you know what? Only then did I start seeing real results. I was floored. Had the “gurus” been lying on purpose to keep me from ranking? Were the “forum gods” doing the same, trying to stifle competition by spreading false information? The conspiracy-theories going through my head didn’t last long, because I had an epiphany about what was going on. The “gurus” and SEO “forum gods” were repeating what they had heard, not what they themselves were doing. How do I know this? Because none of the bogus advice was backed up with facts, proofs and examples. It was just empty words promising the world if you “did this” or “did that.” The nay-sayers were doing the opposite, saying “this” or “that” wouldn’t work because they didn’t think it would, not because they could prove that it wasn’t working for themselves or others. © 2008 SearchEngineMythsExposed.com | Page 3 The “forum gods” could be forgiven, since they were just hanging out with nothing better to do then spread their “wisdom” (I often wondered if any of them had jobs, or were still living at home with their parents. They seemed to have an awful lot of time to post on forums.) The “gurus”, however, were more reprehensible. They were selling bogus information without checking it out first. If they had done the research ahead of time, then they would have quickly seen that it was false. Apparently they were so busy taking peoples’ money and cashing their checks that they didn’t have time to actually verify the methods they were hawking. Now, much of what the “gurus” are selling perhaps used to be true, before Google came on the scene and obliterated the competition. Things have changed dramatically, and yet the information being hawked is almost exactly the same. That’s why I decided to write this report. It’s time to dispel the myths, get out of the 90’s and start proving the facts that work now. It’s time for you to stop paying the “gurus” that aren’t proving that their methods work. Okay, that’s enough of that. Now let’s get into it. © 2008 SearchEngineMythsExposed.com | Page 4 Myth #1: Google Knows All and Sees All This myth really burns me up. Try this: post anything that goes against conventional Google-ranking wisdom to an SEO forum (no matter how successful you’ve been with it) and watch dozens or hundreds of people flail you about how wrong you are and how Google ‘surely knows how to negate that method.’ Will they offer proof of their nay-saying? No. They just have blind faith in Google’s ability to know all and see all. Blind faith is the only phrase I can use for this thinking, because it’s not based on reason or proof. The conventional SEO wisdom teaches simply that Google is a deity which knows all and sees all. But what is Google, really? Google is an algorithm. And who created the algorithm? People created Google’s algorithm. (Sorry nay-sayers, Google was not handed the algorithm from the Divine.) Yes, people wrote Google’s algorithm. Are people perfect? No. Then can Google’s algorithm be perfect? No. Do people know all and see all? No. Then can Google’s algorithm know all and see all? No! In fact, it never ceases to amaze me what Google doesn’t see. One forum that seems to be more honest than the rest is WebMasterWorld.com. I think it attracts a higher caliber of posters because it doesn’t allow signatures. The people there are actually there to share information, and not try to pitch or sell you on something. WMW has a forum dedicated to Google’s search engine, and I’ve been reading through it for a couple of years now. It never ceases to amaze me how many complaints I read about how badly Google is performing in a variety of sectors and keywords. How the sites ranking in the top 10 are all spam or Made For Adsense (MFA) sites. These posters complain that they continually notify Google of the problem, and yet the sites remain in their top-ranking positions. Now does that sound like the work of a Deity? It doesn’t, does it. It sounds (*gasp* dare I say it?) like the work of people. Yes, Myth #1, that Google knows all and sees all, is undeniably false. So stop being afraid of Google. Now let’s get into a few specific myths surrounding how Google responds to a variety of methods and tactics, starting with Duplicate Content. © 2008 SearchEngineMythsExposed.com | Page 5 Myth #2: Google Will Not Rank Duplicate Content If you’re worried that using duplicate content is going to somehow get your site penalized, deindexed, or otherwise make your site fall out of favor with Google, stop worrying: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/06/duplicate-content-summit-atsmx.html The above post is from Google’s official blog. Notice the second bulleted point, underlined in red. Google says quite plainly that duplicate content won’t hurt your site. © 2008 SearchEngineMythsExposed.com | Page 6 But is it possible for duplicate content to rank well? Absolutely. Let’s talk about that. Click this link and take a look at all of the duplicate content that appears in Google’s results: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%22Get+Motivated+to+Create+New+AdSen se+Content%22&btnG=Search That link will search Google for the title (in quotes) of a blog post that I wrote and later submitted to EzineArticles.com quite some time ago. There are currently 315 copies of the article published in Google: Now, if Google filters duplicate content, why is it that 315 results are shown, and not just one? Ever think about that? You might say, “Yeah, but you put the title in quotes. That makes a difference.” Okay, here’s the link to the title without quotes: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Get+Motivated+to+Create+New+AdSense+ Content&btnG=Search © 2008 SearchEngineMythsExposed.com | Page 7 The top 10 results are very similar, with or without quotes! What does that mean? It means that Google is not filtering the duplicates! “That’s because it’s such a long query,” you say? Then let’s shorten it. Let’s search Google only for “Motivated to Create Content”: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Motivated+to+Create+Content&btnG=Searc h © 2008 SearchEngineMythsExposed.com | Page 8 Oh look! The top 2 results are still duplicate copies of my article! Or how about “New AdSense Content” (with quotes)? As of right now, six of the top 10 results are still for duplicate copies of my article (including the number two spot, shown above). What does all of this mean? It means that Google will rank a duplicate copy of an article. After all, that article originally appeared on my blog, and yet my blog post is not in the top 10 for any of the search queries I've shown! Does that mean that you can just run out and publish thousands of private label rights (PLR) articles, or articles from free article sites and get a flood of traffic from Google? No, that’s not what it means. Why not? In Google’s own blog post shown at the beginning of this section, Google’s representative said that “Google wants to serve up unique results and does a great job of picking a version of your content to show.” Let’s break this statement down into its two parts: 1. Google wants to serve up unique results. It’s Google’s goal to only show one copy of any particular article or page in the search results for a given query. Having ten duplicate results of the same article for a query doesn’t help the person performing the search nearly as much as having ten unique articles for the searcher to choose from. © 2008 SearchEngineMythsExposed.com | Page 9 In another blog post Google makes this reason very clear: “Our users typically want to see a diverse cross-section of unique content when they do searches. In contrast, they're understandably annoyed when they see substantially the same content within a set of search results.” http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2006/12/deftly-dealing-with-duplicatecontent.html That leads us to the second part of Google’s own statement: 2. [Google] does a great job of picking a version of your content to show. Ah, yes. Google picks a version of the duplicate content to display. What do they base that selection on? Primarily two things: links to the page and the title tag. You see, when you search for a set of keywords (in this case an article title), Google will first check to see if any pages in their index have links aiming at it containing the search query. So when you search for “Get Motivated to Create New AdSense Content”, Google will first check the links going into the pages to see if they contain that exact phrase (or important parts of it). Now, almost no pages are going to have many (if any) links with that really long phrase in the anchor text. So Google then has to default to looking for pages whose title alone matches the query. That’s why all of the duplicates show up in the results when you search for “Get Motivated to Create New AdSense Content” – Google is relying on the title tag to find matching results due to a lack of related links. However, the shorter our query gets, the more pages Google will find whose in-bound links do match the search query. Now Google’s hands are untied: it can start showing other results, and pick only the “best” version of the duplicate content to display. And what determines what the “best” version is? The links aimed at the page, of course! Did you notice that the same result was #1 for “Motivated to Create Content” and #2 for “New AdSense Content” in Google? That’s because it actually had some links aimed at it from other sites that included the keywords. © 2008 SearchEngineMythsExposed.com | Page 10 (I’ll be using Yahoo to demonstrate link quantity, since Google’s link: command shows very, very few of the links actually aimed at a page in order to prevent – I believe – precisely this kind of analysis.) Since the competition isn’t fierce for the keywords I used, it only took 20 links for this piece of duplicate content to get ranked. My point is, though, that it still ranked. It was not filtered, despite being a duplicate copy of an article that was not published on that site before any other. That’s important, too, so let me repeat it: Google does not always rank the site that originally published the article. Google shows the page that has the most linking power for the query. Like I said before, the article I’m using as an example was published first on my own blog, and then submitted to EzineArticles.com. My blog isn’t anywhere in the top ten for any of the queries shown here. Why not? Because I wrote the blog post for my email list. I wrote it, emailed my list about it, and that was it. I didn’t optimize my page at all. No optimization means no ranking! “But maybe your blog post just wasn’t indexed first?” you say. © 2008 SearchEngineMythsExposed.com | Page 11 Let’s think about that. Maybe it wasn’t indexed first. But EzineArticles.com’s copy was indexed overnight after being published, and yet EzineArticles’ copy of the article does not rank #1! Why not? It’s indexed in Yahoo: But Yahoo says there aren’t any links aimed at it: It doesn’t matter if the page was published first on EzineArticles if there aren’t any links aimed at that page. That’s another pile of baloney myth that is spread all over the web. The “gurus” claim that the page indexed first wins. That’s not true at all (as demonstrated here). The page with the most links wins! © 2008 SearchEngineMythsExposed.com | Page 12 While not wanting to come right out and say it, Google gives a strong hint that this is true in a blog post about duplicate content: “Syndicate carefully: If you syndicate your content on other sites, make sure they include a link back to the original article on each syndicated article. Even with that, note that we'll always show the (unblocked) version we think is most appropriate for users in each given search, which may or may not be the version you'd prefer.” (emphasis mine) http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2006/12/deftly-dealing-with-duplicatecontent.html Why would Google want you to make sure a link back to the original article is included in the syndicated copy? Quite obviously this helps to ensure that there are more links to the original article, helping it to rank better than the duplicates. In another post from that same blog, Google also makes it clear that your original article may not be the one to rank: “Q: I've syndicated my content to many affiliates and now some of those sites are ranking for this content rather than my site. What can I do? If you've freely distributed your content, you may need to enhance and expand the content on your site to make it unique.” http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/06/duplicate-content-summit-atsmx.html The bottom line is: if you want duplicate content to rank, you need to get links containing the search keywords you want to rank for aimed at your copy of the article. The more competition there is, the harder it is to rank a duplicate page (because remember, Google wants to show 100% unique results if it can). Your copy has to be the copy with the most relevant links in order to rank for a given search query. That’s a compelling reason to have unique content: the competition for ranking is less fierce. Think about it: If you have a page of unique content, and your page is just a little less optimized than another unique page optimized for the same keywords, your page may rank #2, just under the better-optimized page at #1. That’s still great! © 2008 SearchEngineMythsExposed.com | Page 13 However, if you have a page of duplicate content, and your page is just a little less optimized than another page of duplicate content for the same keywords, the betteroptimized page will rank well, but your page won’t be in Google’s results at all for those keywords. That’s because Google selects the best duplicate page to rank for a given query, and leaves the others out completely unless there’s just not anything else unique to display that matches the query. All that said, just because it’s harder to rank duplicate content does not mean Google won’t do it. They make it clear on their own blog that this can and will happen if the original article is not well optimized but a duplicate copy is. Myth #2, that Google will not rank duplicate content, is undeniably false. © 2008 SearchEngineMythsExposed.com | Page 14 Myth #3: You Must Get Links From Related Subject Sites to Rank I’m more inclined to be understanding of people who believe that this myth is true than most of the other myths, simply because it does seem like it would be true. It seems like Google’s algorithm would be advanced enough to give more value to links from pages that are related to the subject matter of your own page. Does Google do this? Does its algorithm give these related-subject links (known in the SEO world as “themed links”) more value? I’ll be honest: I don’t know if themed links are more valuable to Google. The reason I don’t know is because it is so difficult to get themed links for niche sites, and I deal almost exclusively with niche sites. Finding hundreds of places where you can get a one-way link for a bonsai tree or deep sea fishing site is no easy task! Even if you can find enough potential places to get a link in niche subject areas, there’s no guarantee that the webmasters are willing to sell (or trade) links with you. Besides, I don’t trade links, because my research shows that reciprocal linking just doesn’t have a lot of link power with Google anymore. One-way links help you out in Google much more (as do links that appear to be one-way – more on that later). Because of this problem, I am forced to get links from sites that have little or nothing to do with the subject matter of my own niche sites. But you know what? Despite the fact that links to my sites are completely off-theme, my sites still rank wonderfully well in Google! I’ll be giving you an example of one of my own sites shortly, but first I’m going to show you a site that ranks really well for very competitive keywords that does not rely on themed links for its ranking in Google. The site is submitexpress.com. As of today, January 9, 2008, SubmitExpress ranks #4 in Google for the phrase “search engine optimization.” Talk about a competitive set of keywords! All of the top SEO gurus are working hard to rank well for that phrase. That’s a real feather in the cap for the guys who do SEO for a living. Here’s a screenshot of the current Google rankings: © 2008 SearchEngineMythsExposed.com | Page 15 SubmitExpress has maintained a great ranking for those keywords for at least the past 6 months, because I wrote a blog post related to this subject on June 27, and submitexpress.com was #3 back then. (Boy, did the nay-sayers have a field day with that post! Of course, not a single one of them proved me wrong. My favorite one is from a well-known SEO group that started off their “rebuttal” with the fact that there are exceptions to every rule. My whole point is that if the “rule” has such huge, glaring, undeniable “exceptions”, it’s no rule at all! Okay, moving on…) So what kind of pages are linking to submitexpress.com? Are they related to SEO, or even general webmaster topics? Very few of them are! © 2008 SearchEngineMythsExposed.com | Page 16 To demonstrate this to you, I wrote a script that extracts the primary keywords in the page titles of the 1,000 backlinks reported by Yahoo. I wanted to see just how many of the first 1,000 links reported actually had anything to do with search engine optimization. Here’s a list of the top keywords appearing in the page titles, along with the number of times the keywords appeared in the linking page titles. real estate => 81 county real => 25 search engine => 11 oregon real estate => 8 beach real estate => 8 web hosting => 6 web site => 6 soy candles => 5 digital camera => 5 civil war => 4 goat milk => 4 palm beach => 3 fairy wings => 3 promotional products => 3 labrador retriever => 3 acupuncture needles => 3 myrtle beach => 3 karo hali => 3 comforter sets => 3 business opportunity => 3 fund raising => 3 Yes, 23 of the 190 occurances shown here do have something to do with search engines or web sites. “That’s 12%,” you say? Not quite. This list is not exhaustive. The entire list consists of 750 keyword occurrences (most of which are completely unrelated). That means that only 3% of the links to submitexpress.com (at least in the 1,000 samples provided by Yahoo) actually come from pages that have anything to do with search engines or web sites. That leaves 97% that come from completely off-theme pages (as you can see from the list above). There’s no reason to believe that the rest of this site’s links don’t fall into a similar pattern. That means that submitexpress.com has achieved the vast majority of its link power, the link power that has it ranked #4 for an incredibly competitive set of keywords, from off-theme links. © 2008 SearchEngineMythsExposed.com | Page 17 Shocking? Not to me! My sites have been ranking from off-theme links for a long time. Now that you can see that sites can rank really well for really competitive keywords with off-theme links, let me show you an example that’s a bit more down to earth. This is an example of one of my own sites, ArticleBuilder.net. Here’s a snapshot of its current Google ranking for the phrase “free web content”: It’s currently #5, but it’s ranking ranges from #3 to #7 (Google shifts things up a bit from time to time). It’s always well positioned on page one, though. Pay a visit to Yahoo’s site explorer to see how completely off-theme the links are to this site: https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/advsearch?p=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.articlebuild er.net&bwm=i&bwmo=d&bwmf=u © 2008 SearchEngineMythsExposed.com | Page 18 The pages linking to it range in subject matter from building custom furniture to lasik eye surgery to alcoholism treatment and so forth. Virtually none of the pages have anything to do with “free web content.” And yet my site has been enjoying page one ranking (and traffic) for close to a year now. A kind of funny proof that links don’t have to be on-theme can be seen in Google’s results for the phrase “click here”: Seriously, do you think that the links aimed at these sites are from pages or sites related to “click here”? Or is it just that the links contain the phrase “click here.” The answer is obvious. Need I say more? Myth #3, that you must get “themed links” to rank well, is undeniably false. © 2008 SearchEngineMythsExposed.com | Page 19 Myth #4: Your Site Must Focus On One Subject To Rank Accepted SEO “wisdom” states that your site needs to contain information that is all related to each other in order to rank well. Having a “themed site”, as they call it, is the only way to win Google’s love. This is pure mythology. Let me give you an example: © 2008 SearchEngineMythsExposed.com | Page 20 I have a blog (hotnewsitems.blogspot.com) that has an archive page which ranks #8 for the phrase “zoon mp3 reviews”. In case you aren’t aware, Zoon is a brand of mp3 player. Is that blog about mp3 players, or music, or even electronics in general? No, it’s a general news blog that was part of a case study I was doing. In fact, there’s only one post on the site that has anything to do with mp3 players, and that’s the post that is generating the ranking in Google! So how is it that my blog ranks so well for that query? Links, of course! The blog is too new for the backlinks to be showing in Yahoo!, so I can’t give you a screenshot of the links here. I can tell you, though, that I submitted that post to about 70 social bookmarking sites, so it has quite a few links aimed at it (from completely offtheme sites, too, by the way). Does your site have to be all on the same theme to rank well in Google? My blog ranking for an mp3-player set of keywords sure screams No! Let me give you another great example that proves this notion of themed content to be complete mythology. Did you know that the US Social Security Administration has a section of its site devoted to popular baby names? It does! http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/babynames/ According to Google, ssa.gov has about 90 pages devoted to the topic of baby names: What percentage of the SSA’s total content is that? Well, according to Google, ssa.gov is made up of about 20,000 pages: © 2008 SearchEngineMythsExposed.com | Page 21 That means that less than 1/2 of 1% of the pages of the SSA’s site are devoted to baby names. If you believed conventional SEO “wisdom”, that means that there’s no way the SSA’s baby names section could rank well for the phrase “baby names” – after all, those pages are completely unrelated to the theme of the rest of the site. I’m afraid Google disagrees: © 2008 SearchEngineMythsExposed.com | Page 22 With more than 12 million competing pages, this government web site with only a tiny fraction of its pages devoted to the topic of “baby names” is ranking #4 in Google for the keywords. Need I say more? Myth #4, that your site must focus on one subject, is undeniably false. © 2008 SearchEngineMythsExposed.com | Page 23 Myth #5: High PageRank Means Good Rankings In case you’re not familiar with PageRank, it’s merely a number from 0 to 10 that indicates the link popularity of a page in Google’s index. So, basically, the more links a page has, the higher its PageRank will be. It’s not quite that simple, since the PageRank of the linking pages also effects the PageRank of the linked page (that is, one page can “pass” PageRank to another). I’ve seen the formula Google uses to calculate PageRank, and it’s pretty daunting. Fortunately, it’s also unimportant. PageRank is the currency of link buyers and sellers, to be sure. The higher the PageRank of a page, the more it will cost to buy a link there – period. People pay a premium for PageRank because of the ever-present myth that having a high PageRank will help your site rank better. Untold millions of dollars are wasted on purchasing links at exorbitant prices because the pages where the links will appear have a high PageRank value. The reason why this myth persists is that it appears to be true. Many top ranking sites do have a high PageRank, and therefore the connection is often made that their ranking is because of their PageRank. To demonstrate this, I ran 500 very competitive keywords through Google and checked the PageRank of each of the top 10 ranking sites for each set of keywords. Here's the average PageRank for the top 10 ranking sites across the board: 1. 6.722 2. 6.866 3. 6.292 4. 6.234 5. 5.968 6. 5.88 7. 5.73 8. 5.662 9. 5.656 10. 5.604 Now, just looking at the averages, you might say, "wow, I guess high PageRank sites do rank better!" And you wouldn't be entirely wrong for saying that. Yes, overall, sites with higher PageRank are ranking better in Google. But the question is: is it the PageRank that's causing the high ranking, or is it something else? © 2008 SearchEngineMythsExposed.com | Page 24 Here is a list of the number of times for each ranking position that the ranking site has a lower PageRank than the site beneath it in the results. For example, if a site with PageRank 5 ranks #3 for a set of keywords, and the site ranking #4 has a PageRank higher than 5, that adds one to #3 in this list. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 155 133 148 152 167 178 165 187 178 If you’re more visual, here’s a graph showing the percentages of lower PageRank sites that outrank higher PageRank sites for a given search position: So about one-third of the time sites are outranking other sites with higher PageRank, demonstrating that higher PageRank doesn't always win. © 2008 SearchEngineMythsExposed.com | Page 25 Here is a list of the number of times for each ranking position that the ranking site has a PageRank at least 3 points lower than the site beneath it in the results. For example, if a site with PageRank 4 ranks #3 for a set of keywords, and the site ranking #4 has a PageRank of 7 or higher, that adds one to #3 in this list. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 85 64 68 55 64 65 60 72 62 Again, here’s a graph representing these results: So (roughly) 14% of the time sites are outranking other sites that have a PageRank a full 3 points higher than theirs. Google must be looking at something else to rank these sites. © 2008 SearchEngineMythsExposed.com | Page 26 Let's take a look at a few specific examples of this happening, then I'll talk about why this is possible. Here’s a screenshot of Google’s first page of results for the query “play games.” I used SEO Chat's PageRank tool to get the PageRank along with the results: © 2008 SearchEngineMythsExposed.com | Page 27 From the sites ranking #1 to #7, notice the PageRank of the sites: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. PR7 PR7 PR5 PR4 PR3 PR5 PR7 As of this writing, the site that ranks #5 on Google for the phrase "play games" is valleygames.com. This site has a PageRank of 3. Look at who is #7? MiniClip.com -- a site with a PageRank of 7! And though it's not in that screen shot, Yahoo Games is #9, also with a PageRank of 7! Let's take a very competitive phrase as another example. Here’s a screenshot of page one from Google’s results for “airline tickets”: © 2008 SearchEngineMythsExposed.com | Page 28 Here's the PageRank of the sites, from #1 to #10: 1. PR6 2. PR7 3. PR6 4. PR5 5. PR7 6. PR5 7. PR5 8. PR8 9. PR7 10. PR8 © 2008 SearchEngineMythsExposed.com | Page 29 As of this writing, the site that ranks #4 on Google for the phrase "airline tickets" is traveldiscounters.com. This site has a PageRank of 5. The site that ranks #5 is orbitz.com, with a PageRank of 7! #8 is travelocity.com, with a PageRank of 8! Are you stunned? Does it seem amazing to you that pages with much lower PageRank can beat out pages with much higher PageRank values in Google? Don't be stunned. It's not really amazing. To understand why this happens, you need to understand how a site gets PageRank. A high PageRank can be achieved two ways: 1. Getting a lot of links from low PageRank pages. 2. Getting a few links from high PageRank pages. So if you got a million links from low PR pages, you're going to have a high PageRank, or if you get a few links from very high PR pages, you're going to have a high PageRank. But you see, it's not the PageRank of a site or page that Google focuses on primarily when ranking a site for a set of keywords. It's the keywords that those links contain that is of the greatest value in Google's algorithm. For example, the PR3 site (valleygames.com) has 21,639 links (according to Yahoo!), whereas Yahoo! Games has a boatload of links (150,014). How is it possible that valleygames.com is winning the game if it has so few links in comparison? I can gurantee you that most of the links pointing to Yahoo! don't contain the keywords "play games" as often as they do in the links pointing to valleygames.com. The owners of valleygames.com probably realize that in order to out-rank the others, their site must have links that contain the right keywords. They’ve gotten the right kind of links, and so they’ve won the game. No doubt this is the case with almost all of the lower PR sites that are beating out their higher PR competition. Now, generally speaking, the sites with higher PageRank are focusing on the keywords in their links, which is why (on average) higher PageRank sites are holding the top positions. But this is not always the case. As I said, about one-third of sites I’ve tested have a lower PageRank than the sites they are out-ranking. Myth #5, that high PageRank means good rankings, is undeniably false. © 2008 SearchEngineMythsExposed.com | Page 30 Myth #6: To Maintain Good Rankings, You Must Add New Content I hear the SEO “gurus” and the “forum gods” talk about “content freshness” all the time. They claim that you have to continually add new content to your site in order to maintain your ranking in Google. This notion certainly deserves its place among the great SEO mythologies. Google may in fact place some weight on the freshness of content. I will honestly say that I’ve never tested a fresh page against an old page to be 100% certain. What I can demonstrate, though, is that it is far more important that you have a lot of links to your page or site than that the site contain fresh content. Let me demonstrate this with a few examples. A great one is Google’s first page of results for “old time radio”: The site that currently ranks #1, radiolovers.com, has been in the top search results for “old time radio” since it first came on the scene in 2003. I know this because I’m a big fan of old time radio shows and I’m constantly looking around to see what’s going on in that community. © 2008 SearchEngineMythsExposed.com | Page 31 The site still looks exactly like it did back in 2003. In fact, if you visit the Internet Archive timeline for the site, you’ll see that it has only rarely been updated: http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://radiolovers.com The Internet Archive indicates that the site was only updated 18 times in the past 4 years. That is very rare indeed! And I can tell you that the updates were small ones. At one point the site changed ad networks. That constitutes a “change” according to the Internet Archive. Compare that to some of the results ranking under radiolovers.com. For example, oldtimeradiofans.com ranks #5, and the Internet Archive shows it being updated 24 times in less than two years. That’s more than one update per month (on average). Why does Radio Lovers’ continue to rank so well then? Links of course! Yes, as shown in the screenshot above, radiolovers.com has a lot of in-bound links. Almost three times more than oldtimeradiofans.com, according to Yahoo: So even though oldtimeradiofans.com is updated more often, radiolovers.com wins the search game because it’s got more links. © 2008 SearchEngineMythsExposed.com | Page 32 Let’s look at another example, one that we’ve already seen in the section on the “themed content” myth. The Internet Archive shows that ssa.gov’s subdirectory on baby names has not changed since September 22nd, 2006 – more than a year ago. http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.ssa.gov/OACT/babynames/ Meanwhile, the ssa.gov’s site is outranking thinkbabynames.com, which has been updated quite a lot since it was created in December 2004. The Internet Archive is full of updates for thinkbabynames.com. http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.thinkbabynames.com How is this possible? Need I say it again? Versus: It’s all about the links. Yes, Myth #6, that you must add fresh content to rank, is undeniably false. © 2008 SearchEngineMythsExposed.com | Page 33 Myth #7: The Biggest Myth: Ranking in Google is Hard This is by far the biggest myth in the Great Book of Google Mythology. Ranking in Google is not hard (unless, of course, you’re listening to the “gurus” or the “forum gods”, in which case it’s virtually impossible). To rank well in Google, especially for niche sites, you only need to do three things: Make sure you have some on-page relevancy. Make sure your title tag contains the correct keywords. Get lots and lots of links. That list is in order of least important to most important. Let’s take a more detailed look at each point one at a time. 1. Make sure you have some on-page relevancy. Until pretty recently, Google used to not care if the ranking page actually had anything to do with the keywords that it ranked for. This gave rise to what was called the “Google bomb”, or “link bomb”, where a group of people would aim thousands of links at pages that they disliked (or whose owners they disliked) for some rather unkind keywords. The best known example is the phrase “miserable failure”, which until January of 2007 linked directly to President George W. Bush’s page at WhiteHouse.gov. You can still see this effect in Yahoo: © 2008 SearchEngineMythsExposed.com | Page 34 (Notice the “also try” keywords – “google bombing” and “google bomb”.) The effect can also bee seen at MSN Live: In order to counter such attacks, Google appears to have adjusted their algorithm to require that the page has some relevancy if it’s going to rank for the keywords. This is a no-brainer, but just be sure that the page actually matches the keywords in the links to some extent (at least in the title tag and a mention somewhere on the page). 2. Make sure your title tag contains the correct keywords. While not 100% necessary, Google will certainly move your site up a number of notches in the rankings if you have the search query you’re trying to rank for in your page title. For example, if you want to rank for “old time radio”, then the phrase “old time radio” really should be in your title tag. I tested this with one of my sites and saw a jump of six ranking positions within two weeks when I changed my title to include the search keywords. That site is now resting comfortably on page one. This can present a problem if you want to rank one page for multiple sets of keywords, so you have to be a little creative and put some thought into it. Let’s say you want to rank for three phrases: “old time radio” “old time radio shows” “old time radio show downloads” You want a title that contains all of the phrases, so this would work: “Old time radio show downloads” Now, that’s not perfect, since your second set of keywords has “shows” (plural) and not “show” (singular), but it’s a good compromise. © 2008 SearchEngineMythsExposed.com | Page 35 Here’s the problem though: while your title tag certainly needs to appeal to Google, it also must appeal to the people performing the searches. Having a great title tag will dramatically increase the number of click-throughs you get on the search results page. So your ultimate goal is to find a title tag that appeals to both Google and a searcher. For the example I used, you might go with something like this instead: “Thousands of free old time radio show downloads!” That way your title contains the keywords, but also appeals to the searcher. That’s very important. 3. Get lots and lots of links. Matt Cutts is currently the head of Google's Webspam team. If you’ve done any investigating into ranking in Google, you’re probably already familiar with who he is. He’s repeatedly stated that there are hundreds of factors in Google’s algorithm that determine how pages rank. That’s right from the horses mouth, so no doubt it’s true. However, I’m here to tell you that the importance of the hundreds of factors pale in comparison to the importance of the links aimed at your site. No doubt if you were trying to rank for keywords like “real estate” or “stock market” you would need to make sure that you had all of the hundreds of factors taken into consideration. When competition is very fierce, every little edge counts. But for ranking sites in niche subjects that are less fierce, the only thing you need to focus on after your title tag is in place and your page has some keyword relevancy is links, links, links! Investing a lot of time in the hundreds of other factors is a waste of your time, time that you should be spending building up the links to your site. However, not all links are created equal. There are a few factors that you need to be aware of that my own research and results have shown to be very important. The major “linking factors” are: Make sure your links have the right anchor text. Make sure your links come from a variety of diverse locations. Make sure your links don’t happen too fast (particularly for new sites). There are a few details to be aware of for each of these points: © 2008 SearchEngineMythsExposed.com | Page 36 1. Make sure your links have the right anchor text. As I demonstrated in earlier examples in this report (such as in the section on PageRank not being a strong factor in ranking), it’s far more important that your links have the right anchor text than that you have a whole lot of links. If you’ll recall, the site valleygames.com outranks Yahoo! Games for the phrase “play games” even though ValleyGames.com has only 21,639 links (according to Yahoo!), whereas Yahoo! Games has a boatload of links (150,014). That’s because of the anchor text. So be sure that when you’re getting links, you have the keywords that you want to rank for in the anchor text if at all possible. Warning! A word of caution is in order here. You don’t want every link to your site to have the same anchor text. Google sees that as link SPAM and will discount the links heavily. So be sure that you vary the link text some. I’ve found that if you vary your link text in a 60%/30%/10% fashion, that’s enough variety for Google to be happy. In other words, if 60% of your links contain your primary keywords, 30% a secondary set of keywords and 10% a third set of keywords, Google won’t penalize you. You want to be creative here, too. Your secondary and third set of keywords can be selected in a way that they reinforce your primary keywords. Using the “old time radio” example, you could select these three link texts: “Old time radio” “Old time radio shows” “Old time radio show downloads” Since the second and third keyword phrases start with the primary phrase that you want to rank for, that really helps to reinforce your ranking for the primary phrase without throwing a red flag in Google. 2. Make sure your links come from a variety of diverse locations. If you already know what an IP address is, and a Class-C address, you can skip this next brief section. If not, then be sure to read it. How An IP Address Works An IP address is like the address to a house. Each section of the IP address represents a larger area of virtual “space”. For example, here’s an IP address and a mailing address we can compare: © 2008 SearchEngineMythsExposed.com | Page 37 Mailing Address 123 EZ St. Beverly Hills, CA 90210 IP Address 192.168.72.3 Think of the “192” of the IP address like the “state” of the mailing address (California), the 168 like the “zip code” (90210), “72” like the street (EZ St.) and “3” like the house number (123). Each of those numbers, going from left to right, represents smaller and smaller blocks of virtual “space”, just like the State is a larger region than the zip code, and the zip code is larger than the street, and the street is larger than the individual building represented by the house number. If all of your links come from the same “street”, so to speak, Google figures you’re up to something crafty. But if they’re spread out across different “states” and “cities”, Google is more inclined to trust the links. An IP address is broken down into “classes.” Using the previous example of 192.168.172.3: 192 Class A State 168 Class B City 172 Class C Street 3 Class D House # Variety in Class C IP Addresses Is Important Google likes to see your links coming from a variety of Class C IP addresses at least, otherwise it will discount the links. So if you have your own web server with even 100 IP addresses on it, but all of the IPs are in the same Class C (or even a couple of class Cs), don’t expect those links to help you nearly as much as if the links come from a large variety of Class Cs. It’s even more complex than that, though. If your links do come from a lot of Class Cs, but they are “close together” in the realm of virtual space, Google can discount that, too. So, for example, if all of your links come from virtual “cities” that are next to each other, Google figures something is up and discounts the links. This means that it’s not necessarily enough to have links from dozens of sites on two servers from the same web host, even if the Class C IP addresses are not the same. To help reinforce how easy it is to know where an IP address is located, try running the IP address of a few of your sites through this geolocation tool: http://www.geody.com/geoip.php If you know what city your host is located in, you’ll see that the site’s IP address almost always translates into that physical location. © 2008 SearchEngineMythsExposed.com | Page 38 Let me give you a couple of personal examples. I have two servers that I host with a particular hosting company in Dallas, Texas (The Planet). Notice how the primary IP addresses of those servers translate using the geolocation tool: http://www.geody.com/geoip.php?ip=70.84.20.226 http://www.geody.com/geoip.php?ip=70.85.202.162 Both geolocate to Dallas, Texas – the location of the host – and the hosting service is often known by the IP address as well. So you want to make sure that your links are geographically wide-spread and from different hosts. This is actually a lot easier than it might sound. If you’re just going out and finding sites that you don’t own and getting links on them, chances are you’re getting links from lots of diverse Class C IP addresses registered at a large number of web hosts in a variety of geographical locations, so you have nothing to worry about. The only time this is really an issue is if you’re trying to put links to your sites on sites that you personally own. In that case you need to make sure that you have your IP addresses heavily diversified, both with Class C diversity and geographical diversity. The problem with trying to create your own personal network is that it’s very, very expensive to do it right (not to mention a management headache). I have tested this by having a large number of sites on the same server interlinked, and seeing that Google virtually ignored the links in its rankings for the linked site. But it never fails that when I gain links through a natural network of diverse sites on diverse IP addresses, Class Cs and web hosts, Google eats those links up and ranks my sites very well. 3. Make sure your links don’t happen too fast (particularly for new sites). I’ve found Google to be wary of new sites that appear and sudden have hundreds of links aimed at them. Google assumes (probably rightly so) that links gained in this manner are not “natural” links, and those links are put in what has come to be called the “sandbox”. The links sit in the sandbox for many months before Google applies their link juice to the linked site. I have tested this by aiming hundreds of links at a brand new domain. The sites will initially jump into the search results after the links are crawled, ranking very well. But after approximately 2-3 days of ranking the domain disappears from the results when Google dumps the links into the sandbox. Because of this “sandbox effect”, you need © 2008 SearchEngineMythsExposed.com | Page 39 to make sure that your links grow slowly, especially if you have a new site. There is a bit of mythology surrounding Google’s sandbox as well, though. What I’ve read from the “gurus” and the “forum gods” almost always states that Google will always sandbox hundreds of links suddenly appearing. This is a myth. I recently performed an additional set of tests, aiming hundreds of links to sites that are already established and have a number of links aimed at them already. When I did this, within two weeks the sites were ranking great, and have held onto those rankings for some months. I actually performed the test on my established sites first, which led me to believe that the sandbox was all mythology. But after repeating the test on a some brand new sites, I realized that it wasn’t completely mythological, but rather was primarily an issue to be aware of for newer sites (or older sites with few links). My tests and their results really make logical sense if you think about it. Google has no reason to trust a new site. It hasn’t been around long enough to establish any authority or reputation, and so Google is naturally more cautious about ranking those sites when links suddenly appear in large number. But more established sites are already trusted by Google, having built up authority and reputation over time, and so Google doesn’t seem to mind if those sites suddenly receive a lot of links. The solution, as stated before, is to acquire links more slowly. In the case study that follows, I’ll give you the details of a site I created from scratch and got onto the first page of Google in 10 weeks using this method. If you’re already thinking, “Yeah, but how can I get hundreds of links to my sites?” Don’t worry, I’ll share with you an easy way to do that, too. So, to recap, make sure your links contain the right link text, are from a variety of Class C IP addresses from a variety of web hosts in diverse geographical locations, and make sure your site doesn’t acquire links too fast (especially if it’s new). © 2008 SearchEngineMythsExposed.com | Page 40 A Case Study On Ranking in Google I want to share with you one example of ranking a niche site starting from scratch by following the linking advice in the previous section. I created a brand new, ten page niche site from scratch in mid-August and applied my new linking technology to it. The site is related to a certain kind of fitness equipment. took me about 5 hours total to create the little site (including all of its content). I added links at the rate of 0 to 8 per day over the course of about two solid months (as recommended in the previous section to avoid the Google sandbox). In the end the site had 250 links aimed at it from a wide variety of completely off-theme sites. The next pages contain my traffic stats, followed by my AdSense income from the site over the last 4.5 months. Take a look at the progression of traffic this little site has received from Google since August 15th: August © 2008 SearchEngineMythsExposed.com | Page 41 September October © 2008 SearchEngineMythsExposed.com | Page 42 November December © 2008 SearchEngineMythsExposed.com | Page 43 Here’s a chart of the site’s traffic growth: Yes, this one site went from zero to over 2,300 unique visitors from Google in just 4.5 months. Considering that this site took only 5 hours to create, that’s really astounding. It’s on page one of Google for both of the major keyword phrases I was trying to rank it for. Now let’s take a look at the AdSense revenue from the site. © 2008 SearchEngineMythsExposed.com | Page 44 What has the revenue been for this one site? Here's the AdSense channel history: © 2008 SearchEngineMythsExposed.com | Page 45 And here’s a chart of the income growth: This one little 10 page niche site earned more than $150 in December from AdSense. At $150 a month, this 5 hours of work will earn me $1,800 in the next 12 months. The site isn’t particularly fancy and the content, while good, is not fantastic. Yet look at how Google has rewarded it with traffic and AdSense dollars! Why? Because I followed my own advice: I selected the right title tags. The page content has relevancy to the keywords. I added a variety of link texts (60%/30%/10%) slowly. The “hard” part of ranking a site is getting enough links to the site. But I’ve taken care of that, too. I promised I would tell you how I do it, but you may already know what I’m going to tell you about… © 2008 SearchEngineMythsExposed.com | Page 46 The Easiest Way To Rank In Google So you want to know how I rank my sites in Google with ease (including the case study site in the previous section)? Here it is: The easiest way to rank in Google is to automate your link building. To do this, I created a service that now has more than 4,500 live web sites that have traded more than 1.2 million links. This link trading has resulted in more than 2,360 pageone rankings in Google for the keywords selected by the website owners. How is this possible? Because the service automates the trading of 3-way links instead of reciprocal links. Google has largely discounted reciprocal links (where site A links to site B and site B links back to site A). However, Google loves 3-way links (where site A links to site B, site B links to site C and site C links to site A). Google sees a 3-way link not as a reciprocal link trade, but as 3 one-way links. That’s why the system is so powerful, and why it works so well. The system was designed to follow all of the methods I’ve laid out in this report, and it does so automatically. It only takes about 10 minutes to add a site to the network, and once a site is approved by a human reviewer (very important to maintain a quality network) links start getting added to the site daily. Read more about this powerful system at: http://3waylinks.net/ If you’re serious about ranking in Google quickly and with as little effort as possible, you’ll sign up for an account today and join the hundreds of other webmasters on Page One of Google! An account lets you have 50 sites in the network, so the return on your investment is incredible. As an example, if you create 50 sites that repeat my $5 a day AdSense revenue in the case study example, that’s $7,500 a month on autopilot! © 2008 SearchEngineMythsExposed.com | Page 47 Earn $2,525 by giving away this report! Did you know that you will earn 25 cents for every person you refer who downloads this powerful report? PLUS you’ll earn 25 cents for every person they refer who downloads the report. Think about that. Let’s say you only refer 100 people who download the report. That earns you $25 right there. But if each one of those people also refers 100 people who download the report, you’ll earn $25 for each of their efforts as well! If each of the 100 people you refer turn around and refer 100 additional people, you’ll earn $2,525 total! $25 for your direct referrals plus $25 for each of the 100 people that they referred: $25 + ($25 x 100) = $2,525 Now that you’ve read this report it should be easy to convince people to download it, and the signup page is very convincing – your reading this is proof of that! To promote the report, you can send a quick email to your mailing list about it, or post to your favorite forums (if it’s allowed), or post about it on your blog or web site. If you already have an account, get your referral link by logging in at: http://searchenginemythsexposed.com/?action=login If you don’t already have an account, you can sign up for one for free at: http://searchenginemythsexposed.com/ © 2008 SearchEngineMythsExposed.com | Page 48 About the Author Jonathan Leger has been a full time Internet Marketer since the fall of 2004. He is also a programmer and web developer, and has created numerous products well-known in the IM world. A few of them are: 1. Instant Article Wizard 2. 3WayLinks.net 3. Real Traffic Exchange 4. Site Super Tracker 5. OffTo.net He is also the original creator of the $7 Secrets scripts (which he sold to Don Morris). Jon runs a very popular Internet Marketing blog, where he regularly posts advice and case studies. His in-depth experience in Internet Marketing, search engine optimization and software development make him uniquely qualified to review the real potential of products in the IM niche. On a more personal level, Jon is married to Natalie Leger and has a daughter, Janelle, both of whom he loves very much. He is an avid student of the Bible and is active in his ministry work as well as his secular work. © 2008 SearchEngineMythsExposed.com | Page 49