Outsmarting Google

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Hello,

I'm reading a book right now called Outsmarting Google. It's about SEO. One of the first things the author does (and he claims to be a super-bad SEOer) is debunk the idea that PR is all that important. He says that Google is catching on and re-arranging their way of ranking sites (again). He proposes another standard what he calls TrustRank and says that Googles evaluates each site to give it a TR. He's saying that any site that sells links may have a high PR, but a low TR. I'm new to all this so I don't know.

But what thing he says is that, in the first month a website has no access to rankings. And slowly over time, Google drips out the actual ranking of the site. So after 6 months, the site would have access to 50% of its rankings and not the entirety of it for up to 4 years. Does anyone know anything about this? Is it possible to rank on the first page of Google in the first few months? (aside from the most random of keywords.)

The book is published in 2011 so me thinks its fairly recent, but what I have learned is that a lot of people claim to know what's going on, but they often conflict.

Cheers

DZ
#search engine optimization #google #outsmarting
  • TrustRank was originally made public in 2004 in a paper called "Combating Web Spam with TrustRank"

    http://www.vldb.org/conf/2004/RS15P3.PDF

    Here's the abstract:

    And certainly scoring trust has evolved since then and probably includes many more factors now.

    But as for the numbers he's citing, some are clearly not true. You can certainly rank within 30 days for some keywords. And if you have Market Samurai, check out the competition data. There are often sites ranked in the top 10 that are less than a year old, even for competitive keywords.
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  • Yeah, to reiterate, trust is an important measurement, and PR is being valued less and less (in my experience). However, the numbers that he cites for "access" to rankings sounds like a massive load of BS.

    Generally speaking, the opposite occurs. New sites are given a handicap and have an easier time ranking. I tested this recently with a little side project, Netflixalternative.net a month ago, and within 12 hours it was #1 on Google for several keywords. Then it fell to the bottom of the first page about 5-7 days later for all of the same keywords (no additional linkbuilding was done at this point).
  • Well, it might be true that ranking has a time factor involved. A lot of people think backlink age is an SEO indicator. That doesn't mean you can't rank within a shortish space of time, just that you threw more SEO at it than necessary! And your ranking (by whatever criterium) continues to mature in the subsequent period. One way to look at it, at any rate.
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    Outsmarting Google

    Hello, I'm reading a book right now called Outsmarting Google. It's about SEO. One of the first things the author does (and he claims to be a super-bad SEOer) is debunk the idea that PR is all that important. He says that Google is catching on and re-arranging their way of ranking sites (again). He proposes another standard what he calls TrustRank and says that Googles evaluates each site to give it a TR. He's saying that any site that sells links may have a high PR, but a low TR. I'm new to all this so I don't know.