I do not know how Neil Patel can write some of this stuff with a straight face.

[Mike Friedman]

Full article here: Neil Patel just broke the SEO Bullshit Meter.

 

 

Have you ever wondered why some sites rank high on Google when they aren’t optimized for search engines? Or even worse, when they barely have any backlinks?

 

I’ve been asked this question a lot over the last few months, so I thought I would write a blog post explaining why that happens.

 

Here’s why some sites rank high when they aren’t optimized: 

 

Reason #1: Click-Through Rate

 

Part of Google’s algorithm looks at a click-through rate. It calculates it as a percentage, reflecting the number of clicks you receive from the total number of people searching for the particular phrase you rank for.

 

The higher the percentage, the more appealing your listing is compared to the competition. And if your click-through rate is higher than everyone else’s, Google will slowly start moving you up the search engine results page, as this algorithm factor tells Google that searchers prefer your listing.

 

Looking at the click-through rate isn’t enough, however, as people could create deceptive title tags and meta descriptions to increase their results. So, Google also looks at your bounce rate.

 

It assesses the number of people who leave your page by hitting the back button to return to the search listing page. If Google sends 1,000 people to one of your web pages and each of those 1,000 people hit the back button within a few seconds, it tells Google your web page isn’t relevant.

 

A lot of the websites ranking well on Google that don’t seem to be optimized have a high click-through rate and a low bounce rate. And that helps maintain their rankings.

 

For example, if you look at this guide, you’ll see it ranks really high for the term “online marketing,” and the ranking very rarely fluctuates, as my click-through rate according to Webmaster Tools is 31%.

 

Here’s another example. This post ranks well for “best times to post on social media”. It would be hard to outrank this listing as my click-through rate is currently 52%.

 

 

If you want to see your click-through rates, log into Webmaster Tools, and click on your site profile. If you don’t have a site profile, that means you need to add your site to Webmaster Tools and wait a few days.

 

Once you are viewing your site in Webmaster Tools, click on the navigational option “search traffic,” and then click on “search queries.”

 

If you need help increasing your click-through rates, read this post as I walk you through the steps you need to take.

 

 

 

 

I am not going to even go through this point by point. The premise of the article is why some sites that seem like they should not rank highly, do in fact do so. How is CTR helping a site on page 3 get higher? Nobody is clicking on it. Nobody even knows it exists. 

 

Maybe CTR might help a site move from #5 to #4 or even #3. It is not helping sites at the back of the pack though.

 

 

Reason #2: Age

 

One of the big factors that cause some sites to rank well is their age. Most of the sites that rank high are at least a few years old.

 

Sure, most of these older sites have more backlinks and content as they have been around for longer, but not all of them.

 

What I’ve noticed is that if you take a brand new website, build tons of relevant links, and add high quality content, you still won’t get as much search traffic as older sites will.

 

There is not much you can do here other than just give it time. The older your site gets, the more search traffic you will generally receive, assuming you are continually trying to improve it.

 

 

I completely disagree with site age being a significant ranking factor. It certainly is not a big enough factor to push a site that otherwise doesn't belong on page one into the top 3.

 

Link age can certainly play a role, but not site/page age.

 

 

Reason #3: Backlinks

 

Google doesn’t just look at the sheer number of backlinks a site has—it also looks at relevancy and authority.

 

Many of these non-optimized sites that are ranking well have a few high quality backlinks pointing to the right internal pages. For example, if you have only few links—but they come from .edu and .gov extensions—your site will rank extremely well.

 

In addition to having the right backlinks, those sites also have a spot-on anchor text for these links. Most SEOs think you need rich anchor text links to rank well, but the reality is you don’t.

 

Google is able to look at the web page that is linking to you and analyze the text around the link as well as the text on the page. It helps Google determine if the link is relevant to your site and what you should potentially rank for.

 

 

I literally almost spit out my coffee when I read this one. Neil is pushing the .edu/.gov myth. WTF? This guy is supposed to be a respected member of the SEO community and he is lying to people telling them that if they get a few .edu and/or .gov links pointing at their site "your site will rank extremely well."

As far as a few quality links being more powerful than tons of weaker links, I can agree with that. I guess we just see quality much, much differently.

 

 

Reason #4: Cross-Linking

 

Even if you don’t have the best on-page SEO and a ton of backlinks, you can rank well from an overall site perspective if you cross-link your pages.

 

And it’s important not just from a navigational or breadcrumb perspective, but from an in-content perspective. If you can add in-content links throughout your site and cross-link your pages, you’ll find that they all will increase in rankings.

 

On the flip side, if you aren’t cross-linking your pages within your content, you’ll find that some of your web pages will rank extremely well, while others won’t. It’s because you are not distributing link juice and authority throughout your whole site.

 

 

Well, he got one right. One for four is not a very good percentage though.

 

 

Reason #5: Content Quality

 

Since its Panda update, Google has been able to determine content quality of websites. For example, it can determine whether a site is too thin or has duplicate content, allowing for a much better analysis of content quality than before.

 

A lot of these well-ranking older sites have extremely high quality content. You may not think so, but Google does.

 

Why?

 

Because Google doesn’t just look at the content on a site – looks at the content on one website and compares it to others within that space. So if you have higher quality content than all of your competitors, you are much more likely to outrank them in the long run.

 

 

I can certainly agree that Google is getting better and better at analyzing content quality. What I completely disagree with is that they are running a real-time analysis of your content versus every other page's content when you perform a search. That is ludicrous. 

 

There really are not degrees of Panda. There are certain signals they are looking for. Either you get caught in the Panda filter or you do not. You do not get "kind of hit by Panda." 

 

 

Reason #6: Competition

 

The beautiful part about ranking for certain keywords is that they are low in competition. And some of these low competitive terms don’t get searched often.

 

From what I’ve seen, the results pages for these low competition key phrases aren’t updated by Google as often as some of the more competitive terms are.Why? Because more people are viewing the competitive terms.

 

If you were Google, wouldn’t you focus your resources on ensuring that popular terms and results pages are updated more frequently than phrases that aren’t searched for very often.

 

 

Holy shit. I mean really, wtf? It is not like Google is picking and choosing which phrases to update when. It is an automated algorithm. How does he not understand this? I do not even know what to say at this point about how foolish this sounds. I'm sure newbs are eating it up though, and apparently that is all he cares about.

 

 

Reason #7: Growth Rate

 

What should you do if you want to rank really high for a keyword? Build a ton of relevant backlinks and write a lot of high quality content, right?

 

Although that’s true, what happens is a lot of webmasters grow their link count a bit too fast…so fast that it seems unnatural. And chances are it is.

 

Google is smart enough to know this as it has data on a lot of sites within your space. For this reason, you see a lot of older sites ranking well as they are growing at a “natural” pace versus one that seems manufactured.

 

 

Link velocity? Really? You are going to push that myth too?

 

Google has no freaking clue what I am doing as far as offline activity to generate buzz. I might be running TV ads and radio spots 24/7, which will generate a lot of links "naturally" at a much faster pace than someone who is not running those ads. 

 

 

I would expect to see this posted at Warrior Forum or Digital Point by someone fairly new to internet marketing. If you took Neil's name off of the post, it would be laughed at by most of the community.

[yukon]

I can prove age means nothing for a domain, look at any old domain without a decent backlink profile, they won't rank for anything competitive. He's confusing strong established backlink profiles with the age of a domain which are two totally different things.

 

A new site can go viral & accomplish authority in a short amount of time, no old domain needed, just a bunch of strong backlinks all indexed. Imagine If a celebrity started a new domain today, that site would be a powerhouse in less than 6 months because of a ton of strong backlinks.

[Mike Friedman]

The GOV/EDU links crap really shocked me. Could not believe that he actually said that. I mean he often spews some nonsense or things that are pretty debatable, but that is just total horse crap. That is a sure sign when someone has crossed the line from trying to provide content they know their followers want to hear (white hat content marketing type of stuff) to just blatant lying and completely leading people astray. 

[yukon]

The GOV/EDU links crap really shocked me. Could not believe that he actually said that. I mean he often spews some nonsense or things that are pretty debatable, but that is just total horse crap. That is a sure sign when someone has crossed the line from trying to provide content they know their followers want to hear (white hat content marketing type of stuff) to just blatant lying and completely leading people astray. 

 

I expect junk like that from the guy because I've never seen him post anything worthwhile. He targets newbies that don't know any better.

[wedreamseo]

The edu/gov part is laughable, it seems Neil is too busy to proofread the content he gets delivered before publishing.

 

As for link velocity, if you build let's say 40 PBN links in one day, at a somewhat crappy PBN, it doens't work out very well, so he has some point there.

 

The rest has to be taken with a grain of salt, for example competition, nowadays it does take much longer to see competitive search terms showing up, for example only in the top 500 and it takes so much longer for more competitive keywords to show up on page one (no matter how much juice you pump at it).

[wedreamseo]

What about cross linking from pages with no inbound links? You think that really helps?

[deezn]

What about cross linking from pages with no inbound links? You think that really helps?

Obviously the linking has to come from a page with juice. There might not be any external links but internal may be there.

[wedreamseo]

Obviously the linking has to come from a page with juice. There might not be any external links but internal may be there.

 

I suppose it might help a little. I did some internal linking a long while ago for one of my sites and I didn't see any increase in traffic or rankings, most of the links were build to the homepage but the juice spreads from there to other pages of course.

[Mike Friedman]

I have launched new websites with no external links, just internal links. With some good site structure and relevance, I have seen them hit the top 30 or so in some decently competitive spaces. 

 

Of course, there are always some external links from scraper sites and those sort of things.

[wedreamseo]

I have launched new websites with no external links, just internal links. With some good site structure and relevance, I have seen them hit the top 30 or so in some decently competitive spaces. 

 

Of course, there are always some external links from scraper sites and those sort of things.

 

Ok, are you aggressive with your internal link anchors?

 

Hardest part is content planning, to avoid rewriting pieces of content to be able to link with relevant anchors. So actually each time you should outsource a piece of content you should already have a plan where to link to and provide the writers a number of keywords to include in the article.

[Mike Friedman]

I'm not too aggressive with the anchors. Everything is tightly silo'd though. The whole site is planned in detail before a single piece of content is written.

[Mike Friedman]

By the way, when you go to the page where that article is posted on, it is pretty much the exact opposite of what you would want to do if white hat SEO is your main focus. If that is your primary plan, you want something super user friendly to try to attract links, right?

 

Now I know it will attract links because it has Neil's name attached to it and it is on SEJ.

 

But just look at it. Ads everywhere. The only bit of content that is really above the fold is the title of the article.

 

It loads slow, and then right away you get slammed with an annoying pop-up.

 

There is your White Hat Jesus.

[wedreamseo]

I'm not too aggressive with the anchors. Everything is tightly silo'd though. The whole site is planned in detail before a single piece of content is written.

 

Ok, I just gave one site another try again with a silo concept, quite tight now and also applied internal linking between the content in the silo, let's see what happens.

 

Yes his site is full of ads, but he already has an awful lot of links so probably not his top priortiy anymore, I bet that's not how he started.

 

I contacted Neil in the past btw, when he said to have an opportunity to work with him, but my budget was too small for him, I think it was 5k/month or something, then he send my inquiry to an SEO company that belonged to a family member or something? Asked them what they could do for me and it was all very vague so obvious never continued.

[JohnHemmer]

Interesting to see someone call out Neil like this. Kind of refreshing actually. I have long thought that his advice was questionable at best. Anywhere else outside of a more black hat forum, this would never happen.

 

[seofantastic]

Love the way you break it down Mike :-)