Demystifying SEO with experiments

[bartosimpsonio]

Guess who wrote an article on SEO? You guessed it!!!

No, it's not who you think it is.

Pinterest. Yup. Pinterest is doing SEO by writing about SEO...

http://engineering.pinterest.com/post/109318939139/demystifying-seo-with-experiments


Why doing SEO by writing about SEO? Because that's how all the gurus make money from SEO. By writing about SEO.

See, SEO is kinda like a faith thing. You don't really know whether what this and that guy is saying is true, so you take it on faith.

"Do X and you will rank #1" - That X can be anything. If it works, great. If it doesn't, well "search engines are unpredictable and we offer no guarantees". Sound familiar?

Well the Pinterest article brings an interesting perspective into the quest for SEO : statistically determining whether some on-page changes affect positively or negatively. None of the bullshit there will rank you, but the important thing is that it tells us that big companies are doing this kind of analysis. It's not just you : everyone's looking for a buck too.

Obviously, they're not just experimenting with on-page stuff....they just HAVE to have a black hat on their team, right? Maybe? I'd guess they do, but you'll never read a word from that person in their public blog. Ever.

The black hat is the only guy who *really* improves their rankings, and he's not talking

 

[7yearitch]

Nice find. I feel sorry for the white hat suckers who fall for the "build content people want to link to" garbage. What the gurus don't tell them is that the concept of "great content" is just as vague and unpredictable as SEO itself.

Day after day you see videos going viral on youtube that are not content rich, or useful, or smart, just some silly random stuff that a bunch of random people happen to randomly find and randomly decide to share and so many random people decided to do the same that the whole thing just randomly gained critical mass and randomly went viral.

Anyone who's really honest with themselves would use both black and white hats and just throw as much mud on the wall as possible and continue to do so until the numbers catch up.

You read success stories here on bhw and you won't ever find a set formula on how people make it. I've had articles randomly rank top 3, fb ads that randomly get penny clicks, etc and that provided the breakthrough to scale bigger.

Blackhat, Whitehat, who cares. Wear the "Workhat" and tip the odds in your favour.

 

[newlandseo]

Amusing, just shows everyone is doing their best to have SEO work them.

 

[bartosimpsonio]

Amusing, just shows everyone is doing their best to have SEO work them.

Their method of segmentation by pages is interesting. Google ranks pages, not sites. There are sitewide penalties, as there is sitewide reputation (authority, whatever), but the actual ranking is done per page basis.

 

[watsonovedades]

Nice find. I feel sorry for the white hat suckers who fall for the "build content people want to link to" garbage. What the gurus don't tell them is that the concept of "great content" is just as vague and unpredictable as SEO itself.

Day after day you see videos going viral on youtube that are not content rich, or useful, or smart, just some silly random stuff that a bunch of random people happen to randomly find and randomly decide to share and so many random people decided to do the same that the whole thing just randomly gained critical mass and randomly went viral.

Anyone who's really honest with themselves would use both black and white hats and just throw as much mud on the wall as possible and continue to do so until the numbers catch up.

You read success stories here on bhw and you won't ever find a set formula on how people make it. I've had articles randomly rank top 3, fb ads that randomly get penny clicks, etc and that provided the breakthrough to scale bigger.

Blackhat, Whitehat, who cares. Wear the "Workhat" and tip the odds in your favour.

The "Workhat"
I like that
well said