Another problem is that. SEO of the state of the th you’re test. The th you’re test may not constant. For example you throw up some more links and your ranks rise but the rise could due to other factors such as a new engagement algorithm. That Google implement in the middle of your test you just didn’t know about it. It us to a lot easier to conduct this test. Updates were periodic. Up until that point you could reasonably assume the algorithms were static so cause and effect were more obvious than they are today. Danny Sullivan gave a good overview of search history at Moz earlier in the year: That history shows why SEO test is gett harder. There are a lot more variables to isolate that there us to . The search engines have also en clever. A good way to thwart SEO black box test is to keep mov the target.
Continuously roll out code changes
And don’t tell people you’re do it. Or send people on a wild goose chase by arm-wav about a subtle code change made over here. When the real change has en made over there. That’s the state of play in 2013. However….(Rant Time 🙂 Some SEO punditry is border on the ridiculous! I’m not go to link to one particular article I’ve seen recently as ironically. That would mean reward them for spread FUD. Also call out people isn’t really the point. Suffice to say the advice was about specifics such as how many links you can “safely” get from one type of site that sort of th…. The problem comes when we can easily find evidence to the contrary. In this case a quick look through the SERPs and you’ll find evidence of top rank sites that have more than X links from Site Type Y so this.
Suggests what Perhaps these sites
are “unsafe” whatever that means. A lot of SEO punditry is well mean and often a reword of Google’s official recommendations but can lead people up the garden path if evidence in the wild suggests otherwise. If one term defin SEO in 2013 it is surely “link paranoia”. What’s Happen In The Wild When it comes to what actually works there are few hard and fast rules regard links. Look at the backlink profiles for top rank sites across various categories and you’ll see one th that is constant Noth is constant. Some ALB directory sites have links com from obviously automat campaigns and it seemly doesn’t affect their ranks. Other sites have crible link patterns and rank nowhere. What counts What doesn’t? What other factors are in play? We can only really get a tter picture by ask questions.