SEO's 6 eternal rules

A while back I wrote an article about SEO's rules and wanted to share the highlights. I believe while other criteria may change, the following are here to stay, so one is advised to follow them:

Broadly speaking search engines/crawlers:

1. Think logically: Don't try to outsmart search engines/crawlers.
   
2. Punish dishonesty: Crawlers are raised with 'honesty is best policy' attitude.
   
3. Value good content: Content is the king, don't treat it like a slave.
   
4. Are directed by humans: Sometimes a real person could crawl your site.
   
5. Value good design: Bad design = bad ranking.
   
6. Look for credibility: Yes, crawlers can uncover and punish fakes/lies.

 

How does Googlebot decide what is and isn't 'good' content?

 

A few limited people know exactly how this thing works, Google is a billion dollar company and the #1 SE thanks to the quality of the results it brings I don't see them just spilling it out, but just make a real site with real content, that is SE friendly, and let Google do what they do the best!

 

I'm jut saying, that an algorithm that can decide 'good' content would be a wonderful thing. Publishing companies could use it to reject bad books

Of course such a thing doesn't actually exist. Google doesn't decide good and bad content, it judges the strength of links and uses those to gauge how 'good' a page is. Theoreticallty that page could be completely blank.

 

1. Think logically: Don't try to outsmart search engines/crawlers.
   
   As SEO's, are we not trying to do this everyday.
   
2. Punish dishonesty: Crawlers are raised with 'honesty is best policy' attitude.
   
   You are kidding right !.
   
3. Value good content: Content is the king, don't treat it like a slave.
   
   Good content alone will not get you to the top of the search engines. Good content will help build natural links but if you are in a competitive niche then you can only get so far with good content.
   
4. Are directed by humans: Sometimes a real person could crawl your site.
   
   Agreed. Always be prepared for a manual review
   
   
5. Value good design: Bad design = bad ranking.
   
   If by Good design you mean good onpage optimization then yes. If you mean a pretty design then you are wrong.
   
   

 

Even though content is king, most of what is written today is worthless. Everyone is after links to improve their site but the ratio of time for link building vs. content building is 83% and 17%. Or copy & paste then modify it.

 

How did you think Google knows about keyword stuffing and hidden links? Well, crawlers have been 'raised' with the attitude that such acts are dishonest and wrong and the doers must be punished, i.e. banned. The morale of this rule is that if one does something dishonest, crawlers will punish it. Being banned by Adsense is a similar story.

-By good design I mean optimization and not using some fancy software such as Flash and Photoshop.

 

I agreed to Value Quality content, Content is the king!

 

one way google does is they know how many people click on something and stay vs. click back to click another result, that valuable data

 

Any source for that? have you tested it?

 

This is the bounce rate. It can be tested roughly by seeng how many searches on the same word have been done from the same IP. If there are many than this means that the results are not good and they must change them.

Do I make sense?

 

I meant tested in terms of seeing if it's applied to the ranking algorithm. Personally I ahve never seen any evidence that points to it.

 

I agree with u about not using flash, but disagree on not using Photoshop - how do u think 90% of sites are designed these days?

 

i actually got to know something good here..
can some one give me good details on this...
anyways nice posts..