On: White Hat SEO: It F$#ing Works

[a5seo]

We all have our biases, but not all biases are legitimate.

I'm biased as a developer who started a site that ranked top 3 for about 5K very competitive long tail phrases. So I've seen first hand the enormous benefit of allowing some time/effort/thought toward usability for bots.

It's not a given that Google will just "figure it out" and your reward will be in heaven. Anyone who thinks that is just hoping Google will do their job for them.

The upside for me is not having to work for the man thanks to selling the aforementioned site.

[catshirt → a5seo]

"It's not a given that Google will just "figure it out" and your reward will be in heaven. Anyone who thinks that is just hoping Google will do their job for them.'

i imagine in Google's perfect world there is little or no room for SEO. doesn't that mean it actually is Google's job?

[tga → a5seo]

I think the key phrase here is 'usability for bots'. If you recognize bots as an important customer (after all, they bring over most of your new traffic), then it makes sense to optimize things for them to find. That said, somewhere in between of not writing your whole site in Flash and creating a link farm, things start getting slimy and your arbitrary line will likely differ from, say, Google's.

[rahoulb → tga]

I think the difference between the best SEO agencies and the majority is that the best continually run experiments to try and understand what Google is doing. This takes no little skill and a lot of time and effort.

The rest just read and regurgitate the results of those experiments when the experimenter decides to release those results (ie when it's not too much of a competitive advantage).