My Naïveté
Michael Martinez is of the opinion that most SEOs are clueless idiots who spend far too much time analyzing and chasing links, and not enough time looking at on-page factors.
Apparently, based on his comments in a post from last Thursday , he considers me one of those idiots:
The momentity of the task is made more clear by the naive comments posted by Greg Boser (aka "Webguerilla") in his Amish Gokarts and Mini Bike Furniture post on August 23, 2006. Within a day, dozens if not hundreds of SEO blogs around the world have picked up Boser’s inaccurate analysis and hailed it as another marvel of great SEO reverse engineering. Boser’s conclusion that a host serving two domains from the same IP address is responsible for a Go Kart site ranking well for "Amish furniture" fails to take into consideration two links that Boser clearly didn’t know how to find.
When one of the A-listers of SEOdom fails to pinpoint two or three obvious and easy-to-find links that clearly demonstrate why the Google algorithm would mistake a site for being relevant to "Amish furniture", it’s time to ask if these people are really worth the money they are being paid by good businesses for their advice and consulting services.
OK, fair enough. I’m certainly open to the idea that my observations may be off-base. And I’m always more than willing to listen to opposing theories. So I thought it might be educational to explore Michael’s position a bit more.
In a nutshell, Michael doesn’t think it’s the amish related anchor text pointing at the gokart site that is responsible for it showing up for the phrase “amish furniture”.
Instead, Michael believes that the site shows up because of the content of a couple of pages that have links pointing directly to the gokart domain. The idea being that Google associates all the text on a page containing out bound links with the target page.
It sounds like a great theory, but it falls flat on its face once you take a look at the two pages Michael uses as evidence. Here is one of the two pages Michael found:
http://www.nichewatch.com/amish_furniture.html
NicheWatch is a site that allows you to generate a page that tracks SERPS for phrases you would like to monitor. Since the page is generated buy conducting a query for the selected phrase, I think it’s a pretty safe to conclude that the gokart site ended up on the page because it already ranked for the phrase.
Now I’m not arguing that Google doesn’t take page content into consideration. In fact, I’d probably be ok with the someone coming to the conclusion thatthe existence of these two scraper pages helps to solidify the ranking. But saying they are responsible for the ranking? That’s truly the most absurd thing I’ve ever heard.
I mean seriously, just take a moment to look at the top 50 words pulled from the anchor text of both sites:
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1
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furniture |
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2
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crafts |
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3
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and |
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4
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amish |
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5
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go |
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6
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mini |
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7
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bikes |
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8
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karts |
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9
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gokarts |
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10
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over |
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11
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models |
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12
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180
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13
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usa |
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14
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atvs |
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15
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and |
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16
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dining |
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17
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room |
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18
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of |
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19
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oak |
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20
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cherry |
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21
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tables |
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22
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dirt |
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23
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bike |
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24
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free |
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25
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honda |
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26
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chopper |
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27
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kart |
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28
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parts |
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29
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minibike |
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30
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view |
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31
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kikker |
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32
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info |
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33
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home |
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34
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see |
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35
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bedroom |
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36
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beds |
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37
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dressers |
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38
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made |
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39
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of |
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40
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solid |
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41
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wood |
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42
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oak.. |
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43
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chests |
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44
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mission |
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45
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style |
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46
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shaker |
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47
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more |
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48
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maple |
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49
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quarter |
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50
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sawn |
And then take a look at just a small sampling of other odd search phrases the site ranks for:
amish crafts, amish dining crafts, 180 amish models, cherry oak chopper, honda cherry oak atvs, etc.
If you go a little further and actually look at the cache of each page, Google will tell you exactly where the keyword matches are coming from. I’ve dug through all of them and have yet to find any that say:
These terms only appear in the body content of scraper pages who have links pointing to this page: amish furniture
Based on that, is it really naive of me to draw the conclusion that in this particular SERP, anchor text is king?
Comments
8 Responses to “ My Naïveté ”
Got something to say?
Is he that dumb or is it linkbait - I can’t tell anymore!
Nothing to do with a PR7 site and thousands of IBLs I suppose.
I had a similar argument earlier this year. I build pages for my brothers website. He is an award winning professional, his site is purely informational non-commercial.
Content wise an outstanding resource site, we have seen nothing to touch it.
I should add, only because of the combination of his expertise and me building it for nothing, paying someone to build it would not be viable nor could anyone build one without my brother’s professional experience.
To prove that content is worthless I took a great page he wrote that was ranking nowhere (year old domain few inbound links to site etc) I replaced all the text in the body of the article with random words - just did basic on page for the keywords H1 - file extension etc.
Stuck it on my authority site which has no connection with this theme at all - bang #3 in days !
Content is king providing you already rank and people can see it.
I’m just glad he didn’t post that at SEOmoz, or I’d be taking even more flak. BTW - Nice work on ID’ing that issue.
Well, Greg, your conclusion that Google must be confusing domains hosted on the same IP address (despite the fact they don’t do this with millions of other shared-IP domains) and your argument that there were no inbound links for the page using the GO-Kart anchor text were what drew my fire.
Through the years, I have shown people in SEO forums many examples of pages where Google associates text outside the anchors with target pages. And there is technical literature that refers to this stuff.
So, yes, I’m going to call you and anyone else on your sloppy analysis. You’re perfectly welcome to call me on sloppy analysis, too. No one is perfect.
In this case, you just didn’t put all the facts together and you argued for an exceptionally unlikely cause-and-effect.
As far as rankings go, since Google is now claiming to take into consideration over 300 “mechanisms”, neither you nor I are in a position to explain any rankings. You obviously feel you are qualified to do so. I don’t feel you are.
But if you have actually been allowed to peak under the hood at Google, and can say so, now would be a good time to establish a bona fide credential on Google rankings.
I never said this was an example of Google screwing up with virtual hosting. This isn’t a case of two unique sites being hosted on the same IP. It’s a case of two unique domains resolving to the same site.
I never said there wasn’t. All I’m saying is you would have to be on crack to come to the conclusion that two scraper pages were responsible for the gokart site ranking for amish phrases.
This is the part where you loose me. What exactly do you consider to be an “unlikely cause and effect?” Are you really saying that it is highly unlikely that the anchor text of the amish domain is responsible for the gokart site’s amish rankings?
Then why are we having this conversation? Cleary, I don’t know what all the 300 items are. But it doesn’t really matter because I am quite familiar with the 3 or 4 items that carry the most weight. Google can tell the word they look at 3000 items to determine rankings, and that would have absolutely zero impact on this particular case. I know it’s the anchor text causing the rankings because I’ve documented the same effect with personal and client projects dozens of times. I can also replicate the same effect with pretty much any site in a matter of days.
I have a feeling that Michael Martinez is going to find his site ranking high for some very entertaining phrases any day now
What a frightening prospect, oh my.
Greg, let’s look at what you originally posted about the Amish Furniture and GoKarts once again (I’m cutting and pasted from your previous post):
“the anchor text of the two separate domains to be combined”. Nope.
Take a look at this page:
http://www.xomreviews.com/amishfurnitureandcrafts.com
It’s linking to the old domain name, that still resolves to the IP address for the GoKartsUSA site. You get both “amish furniture” and “go karts” and related expressions on the linking page.
What’s even cuter is that if you look at the source code for http://www.amishfurnitureandcrafts.com, you’ll find the following:
font class=”horznavbar”>|
Hey Greg, its my firsy post here, i will try to come by more often from now on. As for this jackass, its very easy to see what he wants and thats links. This whole thing is linkbait Greg so don’t wait to much time with this web 2.0 Ahole.
after all that has done down these last few Algo changes, I still think that Page Rank is an important factor, and that getting links by creating link bait rocks.