This is a good post for pointing out that SEO is a game of musical chairs for some people who don't want to leave.
Still I have to disagree about a couple of things.
First, SEO still takes an education, because educated writers create great content.
Second, Google doesn't have to implement everything in
the Information retrieval based on historical data patent , but you gotta figure they like these ideas a lot to patent them.
Here's a list of what they said they like (
The Google Patent: Information retrieval based on historical data. March 31, 2005, or, Ethical SEO Expanded) - the link also talks about what they don't like, and what they outright ban.
Quote:
Google rewards (or reserves the right to reward):
updated content (with the monkey wrench thrown in that sometimes older documents are better), especially for FAQs
- new unique content
- content that Google has successfully matched to other users' search terms
- anchor text (the text the reader sees in a link)
- links from "independent peers"
- a high and probable rate of back link growth
- updated outbound link anchor tag text
- an accelerating rate of document changes
- time-based relevancy (search for "world series champion" in 2005 yields different results than searching for "world series champion" in 2006)
- an accelerating rate of incoming links
- the trustworthiness of the site hosting the inbound link; trust is given to known entities (the government, Yahoo) and authoritative sites (outlined in yet another patent)
- an accelerating rate of document traffic
- entering a time period (e.g., "summer" or "weekends") when the document has proved more popular
- documents containing advertisements to trusted sites (e.g., Amazon)
- documents containing advertisements that receive high click-throughs
- documents with high stickiness
- documents hosted on domains registered for ten years rather than 1
- documents hosted on name servers that post quality DNS whois info
- documents hosted on name servers that host a variety of domains
- documents hosted on established name servers
- documents that slowly rise in quality ranking scores
- documents with accelerating bookmarking activity
- documents with accelerating cookie activity
- documents with accelerating cache activity
- varying anchor text in inbound links
- inbound links from high scoring sites
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Google Patent: an accelerating rate of document changes
Google Patent Implications: updated outbound link anchor tag text
Google Patent implications: High and probable rate of back link growth
Google Patent implications: Links from Independent Peers
Google Patent implications: Updated Content and Anchor Text
I just discovered that my blog is linking to a site for one of my old companies -- my own blog is SEO-decaying. 