Wired News online was linking to an interview with “SEO Guru” Jason McQueen (haven’t heard of him before, but let’s give him the benefit of the doubt). I’ll take this piece by piece:
Question 1: Jason, How do search engine algorithms work on a high level?
I would say that most crawler-based algorithms are particularly interested in location and frequency of keywords on the web page. That’s probably the most focused area of the algorithm. Each engine has a set keyword saturation, meaning it allows a certain number or percentage of keywords within a particular block of content.
Poor Jason… In the very first paragraph, he’s already knighted himself as a complete beginner to the field of SEO. Any success he and his firm may have had is, apparently, a product of fortune, since it’s obvious he doesn’t understand the basics of search engine operations. Does Jason go on to mention KW use in title tags or on-site anchor text? Does he discuss how Google measures the quality of links?
I also want to discuss linking with concern to the algorithm itself. Not only is keyword density ratio important as far as the algorithm is concerned, linking is as well. Google is particularly interested in a site’s linking schema — meaning a site’s inbound links. These are more important to Google than outbound links. It’s not just about getting an inbound link, but a relevant inbound link for a site.
That sounds like a “no.” He’s glossed over linking and skips right to the political stuff (where no real knowledge or experience is necessary), about which, his knowledge is… limited, to say the least:
Black hat SEO is the practice of using techniques deemed illegal or unethical. These can include using hidden text in your site. The search engine can read the text in the site, but it’s not visible to the human eye. That’s just an example of keyword stuffing. There are “door-in pages,” which allow users to come into your site through a page and then push you to another thought or product or service — things the consumer didn’t initially want to visit. Those are all some examples of illegal techniques.
“Door-in pages”, huh? “Illegal techniques” are they? I feel like the next thing he’s going to tell me is that meta-tags are the key to rankings… But, instead, he focuses on something that gets remarkable results for his clients… Is it linkbait? High quality content? Buying old websites and creating an underground link network? Nope… it’s “rotating content”:
From a content perspective, I recommend rotating the content and keeping it fresh. It can be a huge boost to your site ranking. You’ll see immediate results if you do that. I usually suggest that we switch out content every other month and continue that trend.
There’s nothing wrong with suggesting folks go after the fresh content boost, but with an ace-in-the-hole like this, he’s got to have some very unhappy customers (or maybe he leads a blessed life). Let’s move on to Jason’s opinions about blogs:
The reason that blogs are showing up is simple. Blogs that are sitting on a searchable URL satisfy two of the main search ranking criteria. First, they are constantly changing content — daily, sometimes twice daily. Second, they are filled with inbound linking. They’re getting ranked. Some of the major sites that have been sitting at the top of search results for years are getting irritated that a bunch of blogs are showing up and skewing (or diluting) the results.
If you can read between the lines here, Jason appears to be minimizing the value of the inlinks while promoting the value of changing content. Is anyone else thinking – “sure, stupid like a fox.” Maybe Jason knows exactly what he’s talking about and just doesn’t want to share it (actually, I’m giving this a 1 in 1000 chance of being true, given that if he did know what he was talking about, he’d also realize how visciously the cognescenti in SEO would skewer him).
Finally, when asked for some good SEO resources, he mentions a grand total of two sites – his own blog (sorry, no link for you) and SearchEngineWatch (a safe, innocuous choice that illustrates further how surface-level Jason’s knowledge of the SEO world is).
In all honesty, the blame doesn’t lie with Jason. It’s with Bryan Zilar of Webmonkey, who somehow decided that this interview was worthy of publication. I’m embarassed for the industry (which happens about 50% of the time media and SEO get together). If this sounds like a bitter tirade then you’ve been paying attention. Nothing gets under my skin like mis-representation of the SEO industry… well, that and the myth of keyword density.
p.s. Just finished some takeout Chinese at the Intercontintental here in Toronto. I’m trying to smash out a gangbusters presentation so EGOL won’t have my arms broken (scroll down to his comments) 🙂
UPDATE: Finished reading through Jason entries at his blog (appliedseo.com). He’s really not coming from a technical background and says so – he also notes that he’s most active at Doug Heil’s IHY forums, which goes a long way to explaining his lack of knowledge about SE functionality. But, the saddest part of all this is that Webmonkey got very positive overall feedback about the interview – I guess if no one pays attention, BS can pass for solid gold….
