I mean, Mike Grehan, is asking if Textbook SEO works…….  Really?

No, it doesn’t work  anymore; I’m totally board with Textbook SEO …. even if it did/does work —- don’t want to do it anymore.  Rather work on conversion rates and optimizing copy.

One of my clients is constantly after me to improve Yahoo rankings by building new pages for Yahoo and tweaking the pages according to Yahoo’s algo (which no one can figure out since the algo follows no logical pattern).  I’ve stopped trying.  I realized that much of the Yahoo rankings is affected by affiliate spam and click fraud.  I actually began to think that you needed to spend money on Yahoo in order to rank well.  I’m sure it’s not true, but sometimes I actually think that way out of frustration.

That settles it, TextBook SEO doesn’t work but there’s been a lot of discussion of late of things that do work such as submitting your pages to  Google Base.

I’m wondering what kind of information is Mike Gerhan expecting to get with he asks for feedback?

Is there really a case where someone was at 856 in the SERPs (define), then added a meta tag that rocketed the site to number 1? Is there a case where someone was at number 10, added an H1 tag, and slipped nicely into the top 5 results?

If there are such cases in commercially competitive sectors, I’d really love to hear about any examples. As far as my own experience goes, links and end-user behavior are the important, upwardly mobile components for decent ranking. So that’s where I’d rather focus my own time and attention.

Very frequently I see search engine results that not only don’t have meta tags or any of the other textbook paraphernalia mentioned above, they often don’t even contain the keywords used in the query!

I don’t think that information will be very helpful to anyone - there’s usually more than one reason why pages suddenly do better - and some of the reasons have to do with the search engine and not anything we actually do.  For example, Google Base and Big Daddy datacenter update have finally completed (to my knowledge) and without changing anything - the search results got better (as more spam was detected and dropped out of Google’s index).  That’s a factor too…it affected rankings and if it also took place while we’re trying to optimize, we might see optimization improving rankings but for the wrong reason.