People tell me all the time that SEO is pointless today because the Google algorithm is so intelligent that nobody can get around it. I usually tell them that I don’t fight against the Google algorithm anymore. I tell them that I simply communicate with Google better than other websites by: instilling quality SEO practices into the HTML of the site, having a strong marketing plan to obtain some buzz (which creates links), making sure there is a social media strategy (as I believe social plays a larger role in SEO than most people give it credit) and writing quality, resourceful, information from scratch to be a good destination for the visitors.
Since 2005, I’ve kept my nose clean. I tossed away the methods of ‘black hat’ and bleached my hat to be a heavenly white glow. But . . . over the past year my hat’s become a bit more dingy. Since February 2011, I have become a bit well known for Google Suggest manipulation (thanks to the presentation I gave at SES Accelerator in San Diego this past February). So, I have been getting quite a few questions from a wide spectrum of people about how Google Suggestion manipulation works. I refer them mainly to my Google Suggest Manipulation presentation on my SEO presentations page and walk them through it quickly.
Often times they don’t want to deal with doing it themselves though and they hire me to help them out. This got me into some hot water with Matt Cutts a couple of times. So, I’ve been a lot slyer about how I do it now. I’m trying not to irritate people at Google. I like them. And, truth be told, I need them. But when it comes to Google Suggest Manipulation, I feel I am still doing something good for the world because I am getting rid of negative Google Suggest entries versus putting negative ones in.
Usually I work on reputation management. Usually I am getting rid of words like ‘scam’, ‘cult’, ‘dui’, ‘rip off’ and similar words after client’s company names or executive names. I’ve been called out on it a few times on Twitter and even had a chat with the director of Amazon Mechanical Turk where they threatened to delete my account completely if I continued to use their service for manipulating Google Suggest (a noteworthy threat but one I would’ve overridden with my contacts at the executive level at Amazon). I have since figured out a better and simpler solution than Amazon Mechanical Turk (which I’m not sharing).
The other day I was showing a prospective client this whole process and I was using ‘mesothelioma’ as the example (as usual). I noticed that some of the Suggests had changed (can’t specifically recall what it was before). This made me curious so I did the following research.
First off I started with a Google Suggested search of ‘mesothelioma symptoms‘. The exact match domain name of “MesotheliomaSymptoms.com” came up and I clicked on the site and found it to be a pretty decent site at first. It has some resourceful information. The site was well designed. The site had a few really nice info graphs even. I was, frankly, impressed. I skimmed the site for a bit and I could tell it had some serious SEO work done on it. Most of the major anchor text was linked to a specific page. The code was pretty clean. The writing style was powerful but it was using what one would assume was the top searched phrases for such a competitive area of the Internet.
I scrolled to the bottom to see, what I would expected to be, a link to a bunch of other sites that the law firm or other type of company owned (I have some experience in the personal injury attorney space and this is common in that industry). But…it wasn’t there. No link at least. There was just a law firm’s logo. Plus, it was a logo that didn’t even link to the law firm’s site. Now I knew it was one of the better SEOs running this site. Why? Because if you put a link to the same parent company in the footer of all your pages it’s much simpler for a search engine to discover that all of the sites are related to one another and thus they’ll minimize the link value between the multiple sites. This SEO didn’t do that. They put the name of the company in the image. They didn’t link the image. The user then MIGHT search for the company name and do so right after searching for the common keyphrase (this case ‘mesothelioma symptoms’). Google will make this correlation and it will help the company to be associated with the common keyphrase or ‘head term’.
The next thing I checked was the disclaimer. I copied and pasted a portion of their disclaimer and did a Google search for it. In detail, I wrapped the few sentences in double quotes and came up with this set of results for the mesothelioma disclaimer. Next, I took the three different domains that I found and dropped them into SEOmoz’ Open Site Explorer to check out their link structure. What came up?
Here is the video of the link structure for ‘mesothelioma treatment dot net’. You’ll notice that the link structure was slightly varied but any time you have a high valued keyphrase/anchor text above the URL of the domain you most likely have a link buying situation on your hands (but not always). I am not saying whether they are or are not buying links. I am just stating that if I were doing their SEO and the client did want to buy links I’d back off a bit on the exact match anchor text and just let people link to you however they wish to link to you. It might help them to move from their 3rd position in Google for ‘mesothelioma treatment‘ to 1st position. Lots of companies have been busted easily by being TOO targeted on their anchor text. You don’t need a ton of targeted anchor text links. Try to keep them under the number of URL/domain/company links you have coming to your site. It’ll make it tougher for search engines to realize you are buying links. 
I moved on to the link structure for the ‘mesothelioma symptoms dot com’ site and that link structure can be seen in this link structure video. In this particular case they also have a lot of very ‘juicy’ anchor text. That MIGHT be natural but, again, it seems kind of strange. Even more strange is how well they managed to get .gov and .edu links to their site. They do have some decent content though so perhaps it is just government and students doing some quick searches and finding a link to serve the purpose of helping out their readers as quickly as possible and moving on. The inbound link from an Asian Language UPS site was REALLY odd though. Hmmm. If I were their SEO, I’d avoid doing things like that for sure and I’d probably be more cautious about having SO many government and college links to my mesothelioma site.
I then took a peek at ‘mesothelioma prognosis dot org’ and their link structure. What I found odd about this one was all of the .edu links they managed to acquire and how they had multiple links to their different domain names from the same page. It seems unlikely (but not impossible) that the creators of the website would naturally link that way. Plus some of the related links on the pages just ‘felt’ like links that would be sponsored but, again, MAYBE they weren’t. Again, if they are buying links (which they may not be) then I would be a little less aggressive in doing so especially with ALL your different 
domains on the same page. It was a little bit of this sniffing around that I found one more site that was owned/sponsored by the same law firm.
This last site had the worst link structure of any of them and it may show a bit of the process the SEO is putting in place to get these exact match domains to rank well. This site was mesotheliomalawsuit.org. I link to this domain because it’s rather hilarious that it is JUST a web form. While the other sites have quite a bit of content created for them this site has NONE. Just a web form. So I did an SEOmoz Open Site Explorer (a great SEO tool, btw) on this domain too and found . . . this pretty spammy link structure. I mean . . . really spammy. Crazy high number of links for the site just being a web form. Plus the perfect anchor text is really suspicious. Layer on to that all the directories and the fact there is an SEO executive domain name linking to them?! Whoa. The craziest thing though is that the site is actually ranking! Yes. Ranking with this really spammy looking link profile with just a web form. Wow! My guess is that this domain is early in ‘the process’ and that once it starts to get some natural links to it then they will start to remove some of the spammy links to their domain. If they aren’t buying links then they’ll do DMCA take down requests (though it’s really not the way that’s supposed to work), send some emails, drop comments in forums, blog comments, etc. to get it fixed. If they are buying links (which again, they may not be but. . .) then they will just back off their link buying spend in mass and be more strategic. Most likely it will be with anchor text and the .gov and .edu sites as reflected in the other domains.
But wait . . . wasn’t Panda 3 (or is it 4, or is it 5, hell I lose track) supposedly so amazing that things like this couldn’t possibly be happening still? Isn’t Google so smart that SEOs can’t possibly be effective anymore. I mean really, SEO is just a scam anyway, right? SEOs don’t do any real work. It would naturally occur anyway, right?
This is just what I managed to find in about 15 mins. Sure, it took a longer to write this post, record the results of the link structure, verify a few things, etc., but it took me about 15 mins to do the above research and question what tactics MIGHT be at play on this particular set of domains.
The question I ask the audience is . . .
Is Google’s algorithm really that intelligent or is it just perceived to be intelligent?
