DISQUS

Richard Michie · 11 months ago

This makes so much sense. This is surley what the web is really about, actual content not built for engines sites. I knew this had to be right all along. Keep up the good work

Eric Borwn · 11 months ago

Thanks for this Jim...I've been wondering about all the 'write for Google' stuff. Like you, I write a blog post when I have something to say (usually a few times a week). I've been thinking about the 'do follow' issue...think I'll try it for a while to see what results I get.

Thanks again!

Derry O Donnell · 11 months ago

Great writing, great content, enough said.

Glen Richardson · 11 months ago

I love reading articles like this. Very interesting to hear your ranking has improved despite SEO advice to the contrary. I hope your readership continues to grow as a result of your human-focused approach and only writing when you have something to say! Nice1

Viorel · 11 months ago

Strongly agree !

I've always been hating to write just for the sake of exploiting a few good things Google might like at a certain point in time.

It's always better to focus on quality, and let the Google engineers do the rest.

Judith Sherven · 11 months ago

Jim - Thanks for all you do to bring in the wisdom of person-to-person marketing, rather than tactics and tricks! We applaud!

Judith & Jim
Judith Sherven & Jim Sniechowski

Marketing Specialist - Jim Con · 11 months ago

The real lesson for me has been the way the Google algorithm has evolved.

I'm also glad to see that I don't seem to have been punished for offering do-follow links. I hope more people start to offer them.

David Spinks · 11 months ago

Jim,

Great post. Good to see that you can keep your values as a blogger and still be successful by SEO standards. Keep up the good work.

Dave

Mike · 11 months ago

Hi Jim,

I agree fully. I've listened to so many people who claim to understand the Google algorithms that my head is spinning. Essentially the Google Algorithm is proprietarily and a secret so if you could crack it they would just change it anyhow.
I'd much rather spend my time writing material that real people want to read than worry about PR figures.

Take care
Mike

Eric Reid · 11 months ago

For what it's worth, most sites have "no-follow" links more to discourage link spammers. I don't think this tag has the same importance it used to, though - I've done experiments on them, and Google does seem to continue to follow them.

I do agree, though - search optimized blog posts are wretched. People who write those can even see that the rankings they get as a result of them die away very quickly, so they don't really benefit anyone.

Chris · 11 months ago

That's very interesting; so many places I've looked at tell you to do the opposite of what you're doing. But apparently your method works just as well.

I'll keep that in mind when I feel "rushed" to get a blog post published.

Thanks, and keep up the good work!

Herr S. · 11 months ago

you're damn right!

Ben Roberts · 11 months ago

Jim, I wonder if you're pagerank increase was a function of increased traffic and links and your do-follow is actually a negative for your SEO? But really, who cares if you are getting the results you want!?

Summer Fisher · 11 months ago

The only way for me to stay sane in the quest to rank higher on search engines is to continue to offer quality content and hope that this is rewarded.
I'm glad to hear this is working for you.

Milos · 11 months ago

Jim,

nicely said! Your quality will prevail over quantity of many others. Keep sharing your knowledge, insights and experience.

Many of us (besides Google) appreciate it as well. ;)

Rowell Dionicio · 11 months ago

There's proof for all bloggers that writing for SEO first does not really matter as long as you create quality content.

It's the readers that help make the blog.

Gregor · 11 months ago

You're welcome! Glad it's working out for you.

You do have a very strange relationship with Google though!

Marketing Specialist - Jim Con · 11 months ago

Ben,

You make an excellent point. It's hard to tell exactly what resulted in the PageRank increase or even if my dofollow rule's hurting.

For me, the point is exactly like you say - the 'recipe' I have used DOES seem to work overall.

Hadi Curtay · 11 months ago

Excellent article on how one should focus on writing high value content for readers and not search engines. Keep it up Jim!

nesh thompson · 11 months ago

Excellent point Jim, people forget that though the internet is a digital medium it is primarily a people driven tool. People will always want relevant and interesting information and Google will want to point people in that direction as well. Primarily focusing on SEO to the detriment of readers is ultimately self defeating.

caustic · 11 months ago

three philosophically related "professions":

SEO Professional
Witch Doctor
Subprime Mortgage Broker

Robert · 11 months ago

Indeed, isn't this what Google have been saying for ages? "Create a website for people and the search engines will act accordingly." Okay, so they still get it wrong and sadly more often than not, but Google is getting better. I wonder how long it will be before Google gets it right more often than not? The sooner the better.

After all, don't we all prefer quality over quantity?

Lori · 11 months ago

Yes, Google does seem to have incorporated into its algorithm the ability to track "natural growth" - so when posts are added in a "natural way" using words that are natural complements to the keywords (LSI) over time, you will get Google's blessings. Google also measures bounce rate, so keeping your visitors engaged as you do Jim is a winner as well.

chris kluis · 11 months ago

Jim,

Good work, but the real question is if your site grew because of the quality of content and user participation... at a slower rate because of the do-follow vs. a potentially quicker rate for the alternative.

I do think that content is king over all else, but aren't following some of Google's suggestions worth it as long as it doesn't harm the integrity of the content?

Thanks for the great info,
chris

Robert · 11 months ago

Chris

I don't see how this is not following "Google's suggestions". Actually now that I think on it, it purely is a suggestion and nothing more. I think the real point here is to protect your website from useless content, ie. SPAM. Lets face it if your comments are all relating to viagra, casinos, etc then yes you have a problem. But that really has little relation to Google. After all, what does that really offer your readers?

Kate · 11 months ago

Jim,

Thanks for the informative blog post! I still have so much to learn and your blog never fails to educate me.

Thanks!

Ian Pollard · 11 months ago

As someone who used to be obsessed with SEO for sales purposes and is now a novice blogger, attempting to write quality articles, I completely agree with what you suggest! It makes complete sense to offer value in anything you wish to share, even if it is overtly sales-orientated. If there is no customer value in your sales pitch, then surely the quality of what you offer will not be communicated effectively and your conversion will suffer. So, whatever you are trying to communicate, quality should always take precedence.

Lee · 11 months ago

Writing for Google only works if your target is Google, otherwise write for your audience. They will find you!

Jessie Heekin · 11 months ago

That is great to hear. I am about to start another blog and it is has been long in the making. I broadcast to Twitter, imploring: must I do SEO or will quality content be rewarded? Now I see my answer, loud and clear!

Virginia@cars4causes · 11 months ago

Jim,
I am happy to see that your grand experiment was a triumph for you both as a professional and as a ground breaking forward-thinker.
We need more people like you willing to take risks and push the status quo with fresh out-of-the-box ideas. Keep 'em coming!
Cheers!

Suzanne Franco ~ Blogging Idol · 11 months ago

What an awesome post! I completely agree and every point. I don't post as often as I'd like but refuse to post just to post, I'm also do-follow despite being told not to do so, and I write for my peeps. I've seen great success with my blog so I'm not planning on changing a thing. LOL. Thanks for confirming my thoughts ... it's peace of mind and very helpful. *SmiLes* Suzanne

P.S. I was hoping to go from PR3 to PR4 this round ... didn't happen ... but I did have some nice increase on my pages and posts so I happy with that! ;)

René Silva · 11 months ago

Well said, "The real lesson for me has been the way the Google algorithm has evolved", maybe some old SEO techniques are already dead and so many people haven't noticed yet. I love reading your blog btw. Thanks!

Robert · 11 months ago

@Suzanne: I think if anything that goes to prove that the quality is in individual pieces and not just the home/landing page of any site. If anything it has shed a positive light on the Google Toolbar PR (which I have long thought to be utterly pointless).

Matt Mernagh · 11 months ago

i stared and continue to add what i call 'google words' to my articles. my friends say, 'you don't use those words' and i explain people who do searches do. it's all in how u use the words to enhance your writing. though this idea of contributing every day to your own site is nuts. during the holiday i wasn't as regular. google didn't effect me at all either.

Business Minder · 11 months ago

Congratulations Jim.
Giving and being generous do pay off in the long run :)
Keep it up! Wishing you the best in the new year.

Successful Home Business · 11 months ago

I certainly agree that good content is important. I have seen a lot of site that rank high that are not really about content as much as SEO optimization.

Keeping those visitors is about providing good quality content. The great question is how does one do both?

My question for you Jim is how do you create an SEO friendly blog as your base to then put your good content on?

To Success,

Joseph Parton

Towlie · 11 months ago

I like the blog, too many blogs and splogs are written for google and make very little sense to the surfer who it is supposedly written for !

Xbox · 11 months ago

The way it should be. SEO is surely a dying industry is it not? I mean the better google gets at deciding what actually is quality content, the less able we will be to 'fool' it. Which is exactly what we're trying to do with SEO.

Robert · 11 months ago

@Xbox... Um... no :) SEO will be around for as long as companies fail to do the basics in web development.

Consider the greatest football team alive. You still need a coach to guide them. SEO is that coach for great content.

Bambi Blue · 11 months ago

Great post!

I've always wondered what really goes on behind the scenes in Google's popularity contest that is page ranking.

SEO's certainly good (great maybe?) practice and should definitely be kept up, but quality content will always win over properly optimized text. :)

Sally Ormond · 11 months ago

This is wonderful! I have been merrily writing blog posts on copywriting on my blog (www.freelancecopywritersblog.com) centered on the reader only to be moaned at by 'people' because I am not maximising my SEO. I'm getting some traffic, not a lot admittedly, but some.

My whole reason for starting the blog was sharing my knowledge and that is what I am going to continue to do.

So thanks for this post :-)

Donald Forrester · 11 months ago

Google doesn't penalize *you* for outbound links; however, it does water down, via a mystic arcane formulae, the pagerank you pass on to those links.

So if you link to yourself then those links get hit too. That includes menu, breadcrumb, and indexing links. The good news is that these links are already so watered down due to other factors (whois ownership, in-domain boolean, etc.) that it really doesn't matter.

If somebody already said this then apologies ^_^ I skimmed the comments.

Robert · 11 months ago

@ Bambi Blue: I would argue that quality content will always win over property optimised text. Mostly because if the search engines can't find it, it doesn't matter how good it is. Right now Google still can't figure out what is real quality and what simply is popular.

That said quality content that's been optimised will always win ;) *we hope*

RocknRolli · 11 months ago

Regarding the nofollow of links there´s grave misconception: nofollow links do not drain your linkjuice as long as you write as you do: for the readers. The drain of link juice stems from linkfarms that SE´s try to devalue. Offering quality content usually doesn´t come with dozens of links, but only when necessary.

Robert · 11 months ago

@ Donald Forrester: To the most degree I agree. However I would argue that by linking to a few dodgy sites you could be placing links to your own site in the same category. As all links from your site are blanketed with the same trust aspect. This could end with a flagging of sorts.

However... yes, any link strength is diluted by more links. Internal and external.

Denise Swanson · 11 months ago

This is interesting - my Page Rank has just gone down to 3 from 4 and I had thought it was due to not posting regularly over the past couple of months although traffic is up. I have always tried to write for readers rather than Google

Saurav Verma · 11 months ago

What is the ultimate aim of any search engines - to be able to assess web pages as a human would do. So in essence if you write for humans, it is bound to fair well with search engines. That's what the want at the end of the day. Websites designed and written for humans not search engines.

In the long, when search engines are able to replicate human behavior to a certain degree, your content would do even better.

Michael Hafner · 11 months ago

...well after all - its not bad to have some readers...

but I dont like that search engine terror either

Donald Forrester · 11 months ago

@Robert: The influence that outbound links have on Google's trust rating of your page is... tricky. But for the most part, it's not a factor; there are too many spammers out there commenting, too many websites that go through ownership changes, and too many other factors for Google to hit a page too hard for low-trust links. However, in combination with other trust factors--invisible text, text using flagged keywords like adult- or warez-related words, and mismatches between in bound links and page content, it is a factor. But I wouldn't really worry about it; what I said was generally true for most cases.

The exceptions to the rule will know why.

Robert · 11 months ago

@ Donald: Once again, agreed. Flagging one checkpoint won't get you banned or penalized, but a few coupled together could do harm. But a few bad links won't do too much damage, if any. I said as much on the first "dofollow" post a little while back and still maintain that. I think the whole fear of following links is unhealthy and bad for the net as a whole. If the search engines today can't figure out the good from the bad then they simply need to change.

frmrDJ · 11 months ago

What if I left a comment for the sole purpose of taking away some of your readership? ;-) Oh, yeah, I forgot all about the "SEO friendly and well written" part...perhaps someday.

Judy Conway · 11 months ago

Thanks Jim. Great information. I am new to blogging and it is always good to learn how the system works.

I hate to read articles where you know that people have only researched "highest rankings" on words and plugged them for that purpose.

I think it is wonderful that you choose to write for people and not just Google. (Sorry Google!)

Keep up the great work.

Judy

Jodith · 11 months ago

I have to admit, I do only minimal SEO work on my blog, and I get very targetted search engine traffic. I get very little traffic from search engines that isn't directly targeted at my content. At the moment, I'm getting 10-15% of my traffic from search engines, but that's mainly because I've been using Entrecard. If I don't include those stats, it's a much larger percentage of my overall traffic.

So I have to agree, write good content and the readers will come.

Mike Dunham · 11 months ago

I couldn't agree more. I'm quite tired of the "magic SEO bullet" folks who peddle their ideas at the expense of simple quality content.

There are two things that work in blogging and always have - links to relevant authorities and links back from other converstations. This is the basis of social media - "conversations" across the net.

Much of SEO optimization is an arms war for a limited number of top keywords and it is a no sum game. As fast as you work your way up, the competition does the same. In the end the return on the time invested becomes very low.

Google has one part of rank that is largely ignored - bounce. Getting readers isn't enough - do they actually go further than the first page they hit? do they subscribe to a feed? do they look at latest content? Much more valuable in the long run.

Kim · 11 months ago

Okay, now I have to read on and find what the strange relationship is.

Nice post; still confused on PR. Do bots visit higher PR sites more often?

Elsie Hagley · 11 months ago

That is not true about posting everyday to stay at the top of google as I have had a website at the top of for 3 years now and I have not added any new content for sometime now. Keywords my beautiful country

Douglas L. Perry · 11 months ago

I'm with you Jim. I write with no regard for SEO. I try to concentrate on writing funny, interesting content rather than giving in to the temptation of shock statements to simply generate traffic.

Julie N · 11 months ago

This is why I struggle so much with my blog. Providing quality content is very important to me, but I had read and been told the same as everyone else, focus mainly on SEO. This brings new light and focus to my blogging endeavors. Thank you!

Samantha McDuffee · 11 months ago

I think that a lot of the bloggers that write for SEO only may see those hits from Google, but they wont receive the amount of subscriptions and retention that a human-focused, relevant like yours receives.

David Tinjum · 11 months ago

Thanks for the real world experience. I'm just getting started and am relieved to know I can just focus on good content and not spend time learning SEO tricks.

Jordan Pearce · 11 months ago

This is good news and sort of contradicts what SEO's are led to believe. You don't SEO necessarily, provide dofollow and defy the giant G. It pays to be a rule breaker.

Nice work. :)

SEO's need to be flexible because the rules are not firm nor will they ever be.

Ezra Sandoval · 11 months ago

This is great real world information. I have recently been focusing on SEO and writing content that was Google "friendly". It's nice to know that I can focus on content instead of using keywords over and over again.

Great read.

Robert · 11 months ago

@ Douglas L. Perry: don't confuse hype marketing with simple SEO. If nobody can find your website... what use is the content?

@Samantha McDuffee: I would be interested in running a good study on that one. Then again, I guess some would say that a conversion rates of 1% of 1,000,000 is better than a conversion rate of 10% of 1,000. It's all really about your goals.

@ Julie N: I'm not sure how you can aim your blog purely at SEO? Any SEO worth their salt will point out that a website with no quality while ranking well still won't provide desired results. However I do maintain that quality content optimised properly will rank well and will convert too.

Robert · 11 months ago

@ Kim: Big problem I have with PR is PR. Can anyone really define PR as we know it? As far as I know it's just a number that my "SEO Quake" plug-in gives me. In my experience that particular number has little effect on the crawl rate.

RocknRolli · 11 months ago

@Mike Dunham: I agree. But the difficulty here is that the structure of websites would change big time, since we would have to avoid building good pages that just cover an issue on one single webpage. Here the circle closes: If the bounce rate would be taken into calculation for rankings, SEO´s again would come up and change the content in the way descibed above. Uaaaah...

RocknRolli · 11 months ago

@Kim+Robert: Please don´t overestimate the significance of PR. Since its purpose is to give an idea of which quality your inbound links are, crawlers are likely to visit more often sites with high PR because they´re linked pretty good.
My special interest website has a PR of 1 and still the G**glebot visits every day.

Robert · 11 months ago

@ RocknRolli: If you go back to my comment you'll see that I do state that the PR has little effect on crawl rate. I can pretty much guarantee however that the real PR (that which Google calculates and NEVER shares) is quite valuable for deep indexing. If your homepage has a high Google PR (not to be confused with the Toolbar PR) then it is more likely that the deeper pages of your website will be indexed. This is particularly valuable for very large sites.

RocknRolli · 11 months ago

@Robert: Sorry, I didn´t mean to teach a lesson. I just wanted to share some information. Your statement is absolutely correct.

Robert · 11 months ago

@ RocknRolli: :) no worries, just that Toolbar PR is a pet hate for me. I loathe it! I would attribute it to being possibly THE reason for the current sold link/nofollow link fiasco that we now see.

Winston Lawrence · 11 months ago

Jim, this blog post is right on the money. Blogs that are written for SEO traffic either tend to be glorified "Landing pages" for products or simply regurgitate basic information with a changing set of google-friendly keywords. Blogs that are written for people tend to engage the audience and given the medium may even include pictures and other media that Google doesn't "track" well but which a human audience appreciates.

LoneWolf · 11 months ago

There are lots of tools/plugins for WordPress to help make SEO more automatic. I currently use one to make and upload xml sitemaps when I add a post and I've added breadcrumbs to one of my sites (still need to integrate it into the others). There is also a plugin which plays with the titles to make sure your title comes first, before the category, etc.

With these kind of tools you can focus on just writing good quality content and let the tools do some optimizing for you. Your readers will eventually (hopefully) do the rest via Twitter, Digg, Delicious or even email or just talking 8=)

Successful Home Business · 11 months ago

@LoneWolf; care to offer some more specifics on those plugin tool?

@JimConnolly; could you offer some tips on setting up a base SEO blog to build your content on?

As far as PR, it seems to be that a good amount of targeted traffic to your site is the most important thing at the end of the day rather than PR?

To Success,

Joseph Parton

LoneWolf · 11 months ago

@Joseph Parton

The XML Sitemap Plugin is by Arne Brachhold and you can find it at http://www.arnebrachhold.de/projects/wordpress-...

Joost de Valk has a number of plugins as well. I use Yoast Breadcrumbs and Yoast Sociable currently. He also has some good SEO articles. Check out http://yoast.com/wordpress/ to see what he has. It appears he has a new plugin for Tweetbacks for those of us on Twitter.

I hope that helps.

Successful Home Business · 11 months ago

Thanks LoneWolf. I will look into it. Hopefully, Jim will have some further comments as well.

Lisa · 11 months ago

I, for one, am tired of worrying so much about frequency of posting,do-follow versus no-follow - all the things we're "told" count with Google. I'm glad to see what your experiment proves, that if you provide quality content, Google will recognize it, and send you traffic.

greg cryns · 11 months ago

Ditto on Lucy above. So many games are played about Google. Should we do this? Should we do that?

Let's just write good copy for our audiences. Period.

Most of what we think Google wants is questionable anyway.

Russ · 11 months ago

Google SEO boggles my mind. Quality content is always key, but I still can't seem to get it just right...no matter how many people link to the site. Glad to see that your content is doing so well.

Bruce Elkin · 11 months ago

Very refreshing info, and advice. Thanks.
I sometimes put things up on HubPages, but find much of what I read there to be "keyword rich" drivel. I've been trying to write good, meaningful content and have slowly been rewarded with more Google traffic -- without dumbing down what I write to accomodate keywords. Much appreciated!

http://hubpages.com/profile/Bruce+Elkin

OfficeSupplyGeek · 11 months ago

I was surprised to end up with a Google PR of 3 after only about 6 weeks of blogging on my site. I had very few links, but just wrote some very detailed posts about the specific niche that my blog is focused on.

I dont get tons of google referrals, but I think that I get a fair amount that is reflective of the volume of people searching for the type of info I provide.

Thanks for this article and all of the other info provided here and through your Tweets. I find much of it very useful.

Ron McFarland · 11 months ago

Do you know a good resource guide that explains the rules for duplicate content?

Is a blog post that has videos from YouTube or Blip penalized?

Or if something is reposted with only a couple of sentences introducing why it is there, is that a negative?

Appreciate the feedback.

Ron McFarland

John Waller · 11 months ago

Excellent post and very good site. I have been struggling with what to do with the "no follow" tags on the site I am currently developing. I'd say if your site has PagePank of 4 after 4 months of blogging, allowing Google to follow is not doing too much harm.

I have subscribed to your RSS feed and look forward to many more insightful postings.

Justin Parks · 11 months ago

I think the SEO guys who advised you about the quality content deserve a drink and the other who mentions that do follow will harm your blog

... well...

they are possibly a little behind an being cautious about the leakage of "link juice" but in my opinion your 100% correct with Do Follow and long may it continue, after all you get out what you put in.

Marketing Specialist - Jim Con · 11 months ago

Justin,

I agree. One of the main reasons people have been so kind in recommending this blog and linking to it, is that they know I'm trying hard to make it a valuable resource.

You make a lot of sense - thanks!

Mokokoma Mokhonoana · 10 months ago

Most people are killing their website's content trying to impress Google.

Words are written to be read NOT crawled (search engines).

Bloggers will link back to your site because of well written content NOT because your site is well 'crawled'.

So prioritize the 'readers' not 'crawlers'!

Good read!

Ghostwriter · 10 months ago

Hi Jim,

Excellent blog post and very well said. As a writer myself my primary focus when writing blog posts is my readers and how my words can help them. My blog has a PR of 0 at the moment but I'm really not worried. I have traffic and regular readers so that is all that matters to me. I am hoping to get recognised by Google at some stage though.

Amanda

Andy · 10 months ago

I'm not sure what's worse - blogs written for Google, or blogs written by big corporations because their PR agency told them to...

Marketing Specialist - Jim Con · 10 months ago

Andy,

All BIG companies blog in order to profit their business; usually with the PR company writing the blog for them. At least with a small business (like mine) you get content written by the actual company - in my case, me.

official souvenirs · 9 months ago

does it realy matter wether you use nofollow or dofollow,i mean in the eyes of google because they send traffic no matter wich tag you are useing and ive seen loads of dofollow blogs pop up now,everyone seems to be heading in the way of dofollow

Marketing Specialist - Jim Con · 9 months ago

You make a really good point.

The challenge we all face as website or blog owners, is that no one (other than Google) actually knows what Google does in order to allocate rankings.

Start an Online Business · 7 months ago

Content is King when it comes to Google but a few "quality" links don't hurt - Quality = topic related sites even if they have a lower page rank are valuable