Outsmarting Google

If you have a web site or a blog you will be waging a constant war against Google. In order that your site can gain readers, people have to know it exists. And in order to know it exists, people who use Google need to see it close to the top of the links returned from a search for a relevant subject.

The art of making a web site climb up to the top of search engine results is called SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and mastering this art is the subject of ‘Outsmarting Google’. According to the blurb, this book will help you: Uncover SEO myths and outdated techniques that no longer work; Leverage Google’s deep knowledge of how and why people search; Integrate five core SEO ingredients: keywords, links, meta page title, URL structure, and time; Understand what’s really involved in choosing the best keywords; Acquire links that help, and avoid links from “bad neighborhoods”; “Age” your sites to build trust and escape the dreaded Google “sandbox”; Use Google AdWords to cost-effectively complement SEO and cover your “long tail”; Convert SEO results into paying customers; Optimize for Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube; Improve performance on Bing and Yahoo! without compromising your Google ranking; Prepare for brand-new trends in personalized and real-time search .

The good news is that the book is reasonably short (just over 200 pages), divided into well-defined sections so you can either start at the beginning or just dip into the chapters that interest you and it benefits from a good index. It covers a broad range of SEO techniques, some of which may already be familiar to any moderately experienced web users (e.g. make use of social media, try to get coverage in blogs). It also covers some of the more specialist techniques of SEO such as how to create well-structured URLs so that Google is more likely to find your pages and increase their ranking. I guess, I’d have to say that this is at about the level where my own knowledge of SEO techniques reaches a plateau. But there is a lot more information in this book that is new to me and which (I hope!) may help me to win more battles to outsmart Google.

Much of the book deals with the rather arcane areas of the level of ‘trust’ which Google gives to each web site and the ‘Page Rank’ which it assigns to specific pages. The authors describe a number of tactics that can help you achieve high page ranks. These range from acquiring ‘good neighbours’ on the Internet – that is, sites that can cooperate with you to increase your Google ranking – and, just as important, how to avoid ‘bad neighbours’. There are also discussions on the importance of the age of a site – that is, why establishing an active and trusted presence on the web is important; and there are discussions of advertising, keywords, link building, domain names and much, much more besides.

In spite of its relatively short length, this book is pretty densely packed with information. Whether all of it is correct and whether the strategies used by Google have already been updated to outsmart the authors’ own ‘outsmarting’ techniques is a matter of conjecture. It is impossible to say exactly how Google ranks your web site and a great deal of the advice in this book is a mix of common sense, close observation, practical experimentation and guesswork.

Unfortunately (in my view) the writers occasionally lapse into a hard-selling style that I’d associate with the sellers of snake oil rather than level-headed consultants. The Introduction is a good example of this: “If you own any other books on search engine optimization, throw them, out.... What I am about to share with you are the real, gritty, tried-and-true tactics that have made my websites consistently show up at the top of Google for seven years and have made me a millionaire.” Call me a cynic, but in the back of my mind I seem to hear someone shouting “Roll up, roll up! Doctor SEO’s Miracle Potion will cure all diseases and give you the secret of Eternal Youth.” In short, the hard sell succeeded in putting me off the book from the very start and, thereafter, I had to fight against my negative prejudices when reading through it. The authors would have gained my trust more effectively if they had been able to adopt a calm, reasoned, businesslike tone.

There is no single conclusive test I can make to determine absolutely whether one or all of the ideas in this book have a measurable effect on the ranking of my own web sites. At best I can assume that the authors are describing useful techniques and I can try them out, measure my Page Rankings (you’ll need to install the Google Toolbar for that) and verify the number of incoming links to my site.

Out of interest, I used the Google Toolbar to check the Page Rankings of the authors’ sites: http://www.evanbailyn.com, http://evanbailyn.org, http://goodmediaco.com, http://firstpagesage.com, http://greenager.com, http://www.cartoondollemporium.com, http://entertainmentdesigner.com. The Home page of each site ranks between 0 and 4 out of 10 which is not very good. I should also say that I tested the page ranks of these sites on different days and they achieved different rankings (within the 0 to 3 range) which only adds to the mystery of Google’s ranking system. It is, of course, entirely possible that other specific pages on the sites rank much higher but, for example, the page promoting this book (http://www.evanbailyn.com/book.html) ranks 0 out of 10 which is not exactly inspiring.

I’d also add a caveat to the above: page ranking isn’t everything. For all I know, the actual incoming links to the sites number in millions. Indeed, having explained page ranks, the authors tend to dismiss them: it is specifically claimed in the book that “PageRank doesn’t matter that much any more”. They claim that PageRank is the public face of Google’s ranking but, behind the scenes, there is a hidden TrustRank that Google keeps a secret. I cannot say whether this is so. You may want to read the Amazon review by another SEO consultant, Jason L Mcdonald, who expresses some doubts about this hypothesis. At any rate, as another and more practical, test I entered “SEO” and “Search optimization” into Google. None of Evan Bailyn’s sites made it into the top twenty results returned. When I entered “Outsmarting Google”, on the other hand, his book page came right at the top. Again, a caveat – Google results vary from day to day and you may find different results f you do the same searches.

It may be some months before I can determine whether the authors’ advice has resulted in measurable benefits. For now, the most I can say is that I think at least some of their advice seems sound. I really have no idea, though, whether their ‘TrustRank’ hypothesis is correct and, as to whether putting their advice into practice will result in my sites leaping to the top of the Google rankings – well, only time will tell...