When it comes to SEO I like to be as transparent as possible, I think it helsp the industry to be this way. I share everything I know not to give away a competitive edge but to build trust with my audience, plus I genuinely helping. Clients don’t come to me for SEO because they could never possibly learn it or take it in house, they come to me because they simply don’t have the man hours to take care of it and also because of my track record and experience.

I remember a few of your comments from the Moz and I think were pretty much on the same wave length. We look at what is really making sites rank and then do it better

Enjoyed the article, met you on SEOMoz a couple of times. but finally decided to click on your link from the post about “4 reason why SEO Blogging sucks”.

Like you I share as much as I can as well on my blogs and to my clients, its one thing to tell a client about SEO, its another for them to try and attempt it themselves. There are a always a few cases where the clients do decide to do this, most of the time we hear back from them because their sites either been penalised by Google, or they are getting no where

Cheers mate

I really am flattered by your comments and am glad you’re getting something out of the info here.

The basics of SEO are optimise content using keywords searchers are using and get as many ‘natural’ backlinks as possible. My job is to find ways to do this ethically and effectively, if something doesn’t work, it doesn’t make it into my ‘toolbox’, I take a very pragmatic view of SEO, I see what the top ranking sites are doing and then try to do it better. Anything I learn in the process will be in this blog, even though I have been doing this for years I am always learning.

I had a bit of a debate on my hands recently over at SEO scoop where it was argued SEO’s don’t really give anything away in their blogs in fear of losing a competitive advantage. I don’t buy into that everything I do or experiment with is documented here, I don’t hold anything back.

Many thanks for the explanation and details. I’ve been a bit fuzzy on the PageRank/Local Rank differentiation and your answer cleared that up.

In trying to make myself the most efficient in building my sites I continue to search for the Grand Unification Theory of SEO so that I don’t waste time on things that will only have a minimum return on my time investment or no return at all. The age old battle of trying to avoid the time sinks.

There seem to be many different strategies and tactics. Plus trying to decipher what the Great Google really does behind the curtain. In the end I guess that’s what make SEO guys like you Rockstars Thanks again for your insights.
–Mike

Let me just make sure I have explained local rank correctly: It behaves similar to PageRank but only works for sites that are brought up for a particular search result. So a user will search “seo” all relevant sites from the index will be brought up, (this is where all links in the index will count that are pointing to a page) then out of the results that were brought up for “seo” there will be a re ranking or local rank, this looks at all the sites brought up in the results page and re ranks them in the order of the most popular. (very broad but the idea is correct.

OK first set of questions, yes a page has to be indexed in order to count, if your targeting the keyword “technology products” and the page that links to you does not show up in the search results, it will not apply to the local rank shuffle. Hope that makes sense.

It’s hard for me to answer the second part of your question, because a link from a PR6 page will carry trust and link juice, but yes not much relevance. Will a relevant PR1 link be better, thats debatable, if you had a choice between a relevant PR4 and a not so relevant PR6 I would always advise to go with the relevant one. Let me put it this way if you have 1000 links from none relevant sources, your never going to out rank a site for a keyword with 300 relevant links. Hope this is OK. The idea of the post was to show how Google decides relevance, if I knew exactly how much extra credit they gave I would be a rich man

The nofollow/dofollow is a good question and has been debated a number of times. We know through Matt Cutts that PageRank does not flow through nofollow links, hence the reason it used on paid links (which is completely acceptable), however will these no follow link pass relevancy?? I’d say no otherwise you would still buy links for relevancy and Google don’t want this. Obviously I can’t prove any of the no follow stuff it is all theory. Even with the local rank, it is a patent got back in 2003 but are they using it?? In my opinion yes as I have seen many sites ranking based on relevancy, however there is no guarantee that they are using the algorithm, transparency is not part of Google’s ethos.

Hope this helps Mike.

So then let’s assume I have a technology related site. What I understand you to say is that a Comment link from say a Personal Growth site/page with PR 6 will carry much less weight than a Comment link from a tech site/page with some similar but not exact keywords and a PR 1?

Taking that construct a little farther I would wonder how the use of NoFollow vs. DoFollow on the page/site impacts the effect or value of the link.

Thats right, I think you have to be creative with your link building trying multiple methods to get the right sort of link. You have to keep plugging away until you start to see the results, but how good is it when 3 months down the line you see your site sitting at page one on google?

Getting that type of link is a whole other story.

I have been able to get a few people with relevant blogs and posts to link to me from inside a post. But a very few. What is a tad bit easier, and not quite as good, is getting on a relevant blogs blogroll with the proper anchor text.

Writing article on high PR sites that allow a link back to your site is a good way to go. With link building you always have to keep in mind that in the end all of the work pays off.