SEO Without Borders

I’ve given this lecture many times and those that know me know I usually try to define underlying principals with real-life examples which, if well understood, allow us to focus more on our site and less on all the ways in which search engines use to determine how well our pages measure up (let them worry about that).

In a previous post I discussed “Being Relevant” http://bit.ly/7xg12O – a huge Search Engine Factor – and what it means to be relevant from a marketing standpoint. Today I will discuss what I call, “Proof by Association” which is an even more important factor for search.

I.e. How Search Engines, mainly Google, work in terms of ranking pages and pushing you up the SERPs in a very powerful way.

A quick bit of SE history:

Google originated in 1996 as a research project by two Stanford University students, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. The company moved to Palo Alto, California in 1999 and joined the growing community of high-tech industries in the Silicon Valley.

Prior to the work of Page and Brin, search engines depended, more or less, on the number of times a keyword appeared on a web page in order to determine its relevancy. One problem with this model was that pages with no real content could be favored if they simply used the keyword repeatedly. [After relating web pages to "book citations',  where the book that was cited the most by other books carried the most credibility, as can be seen in an Amazon.com book comparison] The Google innovation was to compare the way web sites related to each other. This was considered a better way to get good search results since it relied on some authoritative valuing of web pages.

Google’s crawlers examine the links to and from a site in order to gauge the importance of a site; the more times sites A, B, and C link to site D, the higher site D’s ranking and the higher it will be placed in search results pages for its keywords. Google’s vastly improved ranking method and its clean, uncluttered pages were an immediate hit with Internet users.

This was the advent of terms like, link popularity, authority, link anchor text, link juice, backlinks, external linking, internal linking, off-page SEO etc. All this relates to one thing: Proof By Association.

I give the real-world analogy and ask people unfamiliar with the art of SEO, “If I introduce myself as top-notch, knowledgeable, reliable and trustworthy about a topic, say SEO or whatever, that carries a certain ‘weight’. That weight is based on how well you know me, trust me and what “I say” is true about me.

But if someone of “authority”, say the “President of the United States” or the “WORLD FEDERATION OF SEO EXPERTS, GURUs, & ONLINE NINJAs” says to you, Lawrence Touitou is “a TOP SEO”, the “premiere authority on SEO implementation” (or whatever), and we really think it would be worth your time to listen to him, it typically carries much more weight!

And that’s what Google has done. It uses the ‘authority’ inherent in other  websites that point to yours to determine the “authority” of your website vs. competitors for the same keyword phrase. We do this ALL the time, knowingly or unknowingly to determine credibility.

So going back to the history lesson:

One problem with this model was that pages with no real content could be favored if they simply used the keyword repeatedly.

…which I think is one that most of us SEO’s know because we were all doing this back in the day – keyword stuffing – ;)

We see here that search engines needed to get smarter and Google did. So even if a page ’seems relevant’, Google, responding to our needs as information consumers to find ‘credible information’ said, “Prove it!”

And that proof comes from the link ‘associations’ that are pointing to your page.

That is, Search Engines, namely Google are looking for ways to prove that your page is about what it says it’s about because people can manipulate the page content to make it “seem” like it’s about what you say.

Links to your page, i.e. backlinks are the “way” and what gives your page proof by association. And when weighing out ranking “factors” of a page – which number over 200 in Google’s algo – “Proof by Association’ or “OFF-PAGE” factors are typically given a weight of 70% while all “ON-PAGE” factors are given 30%.

(We still use the “Click Here” / Adobe Acrobat Reader example to illustrate this: If you type “click here” in Google, you’ll come to a result and page that ranks at the No. 1 spot that doesn’t contain the words, “Click Here” anywhere on the page. The page is for Adobe Acrobat Reader Download which is linked to by more pages on the internet using the link anchor text, “Click Here” than any other page -  a prime example of proof not based on the relevance of the page, but by association of the other pages linking to it. Cool, huh?)

Most companies focus on the 30%, while the cash cow is in the 70. Just like in real-life, it’s all about who you know…

(We’ll be discussing more about what you need to do to take advantage of this 70% in future posts!)

Written by Lawrence Touitou-




Lawrence Touitou brings you the Best SEO, tips and advice on his SEO blog: SEOWithoutBorders.org - a collection of some of the Top SEO best practices from the most prominent SEOs in the industry.