Comments on: Warning – "Advanced" SEO Technique DOES NOT WORK

By: Dave Davis

Dave Davis — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 20:46:04 +0000

Good stuff guys. This was definitely the “signup” converter for us.
You should push more of these types of these.

By: Leslie Rohde

Leslie Rohde — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 15:35:00 +0000

The Google video you reference deals specifically with PPC rather than organic, but indeed finding synonyms and related words is an important aspect of traffic development for both paid and non-paid search. No argument there. The thrust of my video was instead to point out that to rank for a particular phrase requires that you identify it and create specific linking and content around it as synonyms do not help each other rank. A aspect that is true of Google’s paid search program as well.

By: Leslie Rohde

Leslie Rohde — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 14:41:21 +0000

Your example search triggers what I believe is a primitive co-occurrence lookup that backtracks from the search results for the ~ term to other words in the inverted index that reference the same documents. However, rather than showing the viability of this approach, the results demonstrate pretty clearly why this is not a good idea. Why? Because despite the clear contextual cue from the search not one of the top 10 results is about Mazda at all! Let’s go through these and see why.

Because there is a model of car called the Protege, that is a word that is selected. Great, except that the results for Protege are dominated by a piece of Java software and the definition of the word itself so none of the Mazda Protege results are shown.

Similarly, the Mazda 626 does not show, but area code 626 and hotel 626 do — presumably owing to far stronger ranking power than Mazda’s page.

Rounding out the top 10 is the Mazda tag line zoom-zoom-zoom … except it’s not really. Z2 is a motorcycle and zoozoom is a band.

Page 2 of the results is no better, with the only Mazda page a video of an RX7.

This is a fine demonstration of why co-occurrence techniques do not work for a wide-open corpus. Words simply mean far too many different things for a search phrase of reasonable length to provide the context required to disambiguate the various meanings.

Thanks for your question Claude and this fine example.

By: Roy

Roy — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 23:26:14 +0000

OK, Andy, you did it, great info, but that terrible you really hate to see, “to be continued” or “straight ahead” or “more after this” or “stand on your head count to 10 until your blood pressure goes down” type endings well is like that finger nails being dragged across the chalk board. Need I say more? :>))

By: Jeromy

Jeromy — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 22:19:45 +0000

Wow! That is some Cool info!

I admit this whole SEO business seems quite complicated. I look forward to the release of Stomper2.

Cheers!

Jeromy (AKA Hillbilly)