“The only “closed” session was “Give it Up!” where the panel told their inside secrets. The attendees and panelists swore an oath to stay silent or to have their souls doomed to the Google Sandbox if any of the information was revealed for the next 30 days. That included agreement by Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft Live Search. The search engine giants swore to not “fix” any loopholes that were divulged. And, some of the tactics revealed where borderline black hat SEO techniques. Fortunately, there were some solid, clean white hat SEO tips divulged as well.”

Is this totally true? I would like to know please. Thanks.

Whether misspellings matter depends on your keyword. For me, it is a matter of typos. People frequently mistype my city’s name. It is not a dictionary word. It’s a proper noun. It’s not that people are illiterate, but the word is just easy to mistype. (And it’s always mistyped the same way.)

People need to just look at their analytics and decide if misspellings matter to their specific situation.

If you optimize your site for people, and people misspell your target keyword…

I’m in a position now where all around me are doing one or more of these; buying links, using css to re-order their pages so Googlebot has a different idea of what the page is about than a user, hiding links in noscript areas etc etc. I’ve reported a few of these things but I’ve never seen any action. So I’m now in a dilemma. If the only way to compete is to go grey should I do it. I know that even if I’m reported by a competitor Google won’t do anything about it so there’s no risk.

Occasionally a site will rise near or above me and I think how the heck have they suddenly done that after languishing on page 2 for 3 years. Over to Y site-explorer and sure enough there are thousands of links with the same or almost exactly the same anchor text on every page of a few off topic US blogs and forums even though the product is very UK specific. And this just pushes me nearer to following suit.

Oh and I should say that the UK geo filter even adds to the rewards that Google gives to these slightly dodgy practices.

The point is that Google is causing its own problems as webmasters react to the reality of what they see every day.

I don’t envy you your job.

Cheers

Phil

Let’s be fair, we – people with sites and blogs – always would like to get more traffic from Google. And it is only Google that can stop us from doing really bad thing.

Let me give an example. I purchased 3rd party solution that works with YouTube videos and embeds them into a site. Everything was great for a while (traffic and money), but then the site got kicked off from Google index. And then it turned out (when I nailed the vendor) that around 9 from 10 THEIR sites with this solution also get kicked off.

So, evidently somewhere with this solution I crossed the line with Google and they did what they should – deindexed me. But there are no strict rules about what to do and not to do with Google, just general guidelines. And I understand why there are no strict rules – because this will give away Google algo.

This huge passage was aimed at one thing. Sometimes, even after we read the Google webmasters’ guidelines, we do not know if doing this or that will be a black hat. That is why it is absolutely ok to talk about black hat SEO stuff, discuss it, say what works and what not. And you – Google – just need to stop us from crossing the line.

Basically, this is what you do and I hope keep doing, without ruining the general idea of making the Web a better place.

Cat & mouse games with Google have about the same potential as a Moth flying around a light globe.

Optimize pages/sites for humans and the Google algo guessing games are simply not needed.

Good luck with your “tricks”

But, let me be a little direct.

There is not always an exception to every rule. That my friend, IS a myth. If there are exceptions, it is no longer a rule. That rule is now, at most, part of a larger, more nuanced rule.

Blackhats have a knack for discovering that nuance and exploiting it for their own good. Whitehats can learn from that exploitation and, instead, use more subtle techniques to take advantage of blackhat discovered nuances.

Or, of course, you could just assume that there is no nuance. Paid links are bad. Mispellings don’t work. Sitemaps are good, and anything that works better is black hat, unethical, and not REAL ROI.

The truth is, the guys who are making the REAL ROI are not you, who believes in and uses white-hat, not me who must use white-hat, but the blackhatters which continue to churn and burn sites into oblivious.

And, unfortunately, you greatly underestimate the value of 2 illiterate visitors per day. If I do that ever work day for a year, that is 400+ new visitors per day. Multiply that by 365 and a 2.5% conversion rate on a product which brings you a profit of $10 per sale and you have just made a nice $36,500. That is a decent salary on mispellings alone.

LOL! While you are off chasing shadows, I’ll be chasing a REAL ROI You cleary have your head in the clouds…………..or somewhere a lot darker

I was curious what would happen to the rankings of my post that I titled “Matt Cutts Take On Fabricated Link Bait video”.

The YouTube video of your session links back to my original blog post.

YouTube now ranks #1 for “Matt Cutts Take On Fabricated Link Bait video”.
Sphinn ranks #2
RentVine ranks #3

It appears Google favors link juice over the original source.

First off, to prove you wrong immediately, look at the mispelling of Denigrate, which I spelled as Denigrade. Google has not corrected this mispelling, thus pages with incidental use of the word Denigrade in them are ranking…

http://www.google.com/search?q=denigrade

It is not a “fallacy” of SEO, but it is not as simple as filling a page with mispellings.

First, you need to determine whether or not the mispelling is searched.
Second, you check Google / Yahoo / MSN to see if they auto-correct the mispelling.
Third, inject that word onto your page in a method that does not appear to make you look illiterate.

And, unfortunately, you greatly underestimate the value of 2 illiterate visitors per day. If I do that ever work day for a year, that is 400+ new visitors per day. Multiply that by 365 and a 2.5% conversion rate on a product which brings you a profit of $10 per sale and you have just made a nice $36,500. That is a decent salary on mispellings alone.

This is what I am talking about folks – people are believing the hype without actually doing research. They are calling things “myths”, “fallacies”, or worse when, in reality, many of these things are actually working better than ever BECAUSE there is so little competition due to the pervasiveness of unresearched rumors like the one you present above.

Please, take some time and do some experimentation – even test out some black hat methods. Stop reading Matt Cutt’s blog to get all of your knowledge and start doing some science.