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Mike Grehan Wants You!

Mike Grehan Wants You!

With the vibrant world of bookmarking, user behavior tracking, site popularity measurement and the growing amount of linking opportunities on the web, is old school content oriented SEO still relevant?

Andy Beal recalls a dinner conversation with Mike Grehan about Mike’s new ClickZ article Does Textbook SEO Really Work Anymore?

In an industry which sometimes puts a bit too much emphasis on long tail or mass content (although a holistic ally balanced SEO strategy is proven and recommended), sometimes the meaning of content and its value is in the eye of the beholder.

Grehan writes :

Content is certainly critical to achieving the much needed linkage data to surround pages for ranking purposes. But content can come in many shapes and forms. Search a major search engine for “foreign currency exchange,” “currency converter,” and other foreign-currency-related searches. You’ll always see XE.com in the top results. It’s one page with a banner ad, a tool, and a little bit of instructional text. It ranks for so many popular searches and has done so for years… no changes or tweaks required. It’s only a single page. Is that content? I think so!

And back on Marketing Pilgrim, Andy pipes up “There’s enough evidence to support Mike’s theory – if you have a great site with quality inbound links, you can be #1 on Google without changing any “content” (as proved by “miserable failure”). I’ve also seen enough evidence that proves a site can languish outside of the Top 50 then rocket to #1 with some changes to on-page content and no changes to links (although, changing a keyword in the meta-tag is not going to be enough)

So, does old school content based SEO still work? Or is the world of Google, MSN, and Yahoo rankings now ruled by site age, linkbaiting and those 2.0 oriented theories like non-linked citations, bookmarks, average time spent on site and other measurement variables of quality?

Old school or 2.0? Flava Flav or RandFish? Please take the time to lend Mr. Grehan your opinion.

Category SEO
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SEJ STAFF Loren Baker Founder at Foundation Digital

Loren Baker is the Founder of SEJ, an Advisor at Alpha Brand Media and runs Foundation Digital, a digital marketing ...

Mike Grehan Wants You!

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