SEOMoz's Search Engine Ranking Factors 2009 | Hacker News Reader

SEOMoz's Search Engine Ranking Factors 2009

seomoz.org

16 pointsepi0Bauqu9 comments

Interesting - especially useful that 'engagement with the blogosphere' rates higher than 'great content' in the survey. Not sure how true that is in practice, but it's a consideration. I liked how they included a 'consensus/contention' metric alongside their percentage ratings.

It is a bit odd about content and blogosphere engagement.

That being said, I think that having great (or at least good) content is a part of what leads to increased engagement with the blogosphere. I don't think it's necessarily easy to separate the two cleanly. Not that there aren't other aspects to blogosphere interaction as well, of course.

If cloaking were so bad for SEO, why does crap from Expert Sex Change come up every time I do a .NET-related search?

Because Google lets big brands get away with murder. The bigger you are the easier it is to get away with paid links/spamming/cloaking/etc.

Even if it's a "big brand" only because of their less than savory SEO techniques? The only reason I know of expertsexchange.com is because of the way they show up in search results, not because their name is a household word.

They're a 'big brand' to Google because of the domain authority (registered in 96) and the hundreds of thousands of pages of unique content.

Back on topic: "cloaking" typically refers to hiding sketchy links, not hiding content or charging for it as Expert Sex Change does.

A few years back cloaking in SEO world was understood to be the process of serving different content depending on the IP address of the visitor(not to be confused with geolocation), with the explicit goal of showing keyword optimized page to search engines and the regular user getting a more user friendly page.

In my book, this is very similar to what Expert Sex Change does. Come referred by Google you get a nice answer at the bottom, come "clean" and you've got to pay for the answer. Very evil.

If you are a big guy (one infamous case was BMW Germany) you can do it, get caught and then recover from Google ban within a week. If you are a small site and get caught don't expect to do so.

Yea, there are lots of different definitions of 'cloaking' in SEO. Didn't know that Expert Sex Change did that with referrals. A lot of people did it in the past by looking at user agents.

I had some friends who would send googlebot to a clean, keyword-optimized piece of content, but the user would get sent to a page plastered in porn ads and would cookie stuff the crap out of their system.

If you have a google referrer, you just have to scroll down ten pages to see the content.

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