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Comment by BickNowstrom | Hacker News Reader

My post was in response to the homepage copy:

> RankScience sits next to your website, making thousands of experiments to tweak your HTML in order to improve your page rankings.

This seems to me an attempt at reverse engineering the ranking algorithm. Is my interpretation correct? And if so, is this allowed / in scope of the guidelines?

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We're not reverse engineering Google's ranking algorithm, so no. : ) Good luck to anyone trying to do that! (I'd recommend against it) Yes, you're allowed to make changes to your pages.

Thanks! Though my (dated?) concern is probably not all that common, you could think of adding something like "Split-testing to improve SEO is a perfectly legitimate marketing technique" in your FAQ/technical copy.

Thanks for your feedback! That's a pretty good idea!

Correct me if I am wrong, but you are trying to determine the effect that many different tweaks have on Google's ranking. You are not explicitly trying to reverse engineer their search algorithm, but, implicitly, you are trying to build a model of their model, and to then use your implicit model to drive up rankings.

Of course, the final determination is entirely up to Google, but this seems kind of a risky game to play.

Google's algorithm is to reward high quality websites which add value to their users. Our approach to SEO is to help our customers define "high quality" in Google's ever-changing definition and serve their quality to Google's users. This is exactly what Google wants.

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