Best White Hat Google Trick Ever! 05/25/11

Google hates being told what to do

Normally I would never share a tip like this. I’m making an exception for this one, because it actually takes a bit of time and planning to execute. Given that, I don’t believe a lot of SEO’s out there will actually go away and test it. For the small few that will, thank me later!
What you will see below will effectively change the way you think and carry out SEO.

So what’s the Trick?

I have recently found a great way for Google to competitively rank your content, without adding your keyword in the title or content or even building external anchor links, sounds crazy right? Keep reading if you have got a few minutes…

Background- The Google Mentality

We all spend our time telling Google where to find things, we almost treat Google like a 90 year old pensioner who has a bad memory. We do this through titles, content, tags, anchor, links etc. As Google is becoming more intelligent, it no longer needs to hear us nagging, jumping up and down pointing to our content, which undoubtedly is always the “the best website” of the pack.
Anyone practising modern day SEO knows half of the actions we do on page, are driven by acute paranoia. I guess it helps us sleep better at night. 95% of the top ranking sites across the globe don’t meet even basic “old school SEO” requirements. Googles reliance on Social media is a prime example of how it’s changing and now becoming more independent in the way it chooses rank.
Armed with this new way of thinking , I decided to see if I could lead Google down a path, I never directly asked it to go down. After all, intelligent people make their own decisions, they don’t need someone telling them what to do. But as we also all know, most intelligent people are equally easy to manipulate, especially if they think they are in the driving seat.

Random Initial Test

Slightly unrelated, but stick with me on this one. Generally, when SEO’s aim to rank longtail pages, they build links to the specific page. Works right? But have you ever noticed in tough industries it’s really hard to get position 1?
We can sit here and argue the facts, maybe it’s due the type of links and variation of anchor? Been there had that conversation zzz.
Lets imagine we have a website selling shoes. We sell red, blue , green shoes and even clown shoes. Each product has a dedicated page. Our target is to optimise the clown shoes page.
If we start link building to the page directly, we will see some results, but never top ranking results. Notice most of your competitors who rank top, rarely have a lot of links on their longtail pages, yet manage to domainate SERP.
By building tons of links to the specific page, we are basically telling Google what to think. Google doesn’t always appreciate your advice.
So what we do instead is we build anchor to the homepage, where there will be an internal link to the CLOWN SHOES page. This way, you’re letting Google make up its own mind up. Chances are,  it will credit the Clown Shoes page with a high rank. Once you got this, only THEN build to the long tail page. You will rocket on SERP I assure you.  It was Googles decision in the first place. When you start building links to the specific page,  why would it then turn around and disagree with you? After all Google choose the page initially not you.
By now, if you haven’t fallen asleep hold in there. Hopefully now you understand, Google can be a bit of brat, so you got to kind of let it makes it’s own mind up, or at least let it believe it is 

The Daddy Of All Tricks

First thing I will say here is Google Wonder Wheel. If you haven’t seen it already, then I suggest you quickly familiarise yourself with it.
Many have posted it’s a great tool to use when building anchor for specific terms. Some SEO’s use this method and have had some good results, yet we suspect it’s purely down to the variation of anchor, and nothing to do with the “magic” associated keywords.

Monday morning

I turned on my laptop Monday morning to find my analytics account showing a massive spike in traffic, it was all from one keyword. I won’t go into the keyword, nor show you the site. Not because I’m being cagey, but because it’s not mine to talk about!
The keyword was something I’d consider as a killer keyword (high volume of traffic) What puzzled me was, how it was ranking?
Having taken a closer look,  I noticed the key term or anything close didn’t appear in the title, meta, content, even internal & external anchor. I checked everything with a fine tooth comb and found nothing.

My discovery

I refused to let this go, therefore spend the next 2 weeks digging for an answer. On the 14th day I found it. The answer was “Google wonder Wheel”
My  example:
Keyword was Clown Shoes
If we put this term into the Google Wonder Wheel it shows the associated words as clown shoes costumes, ebay, make clown shoes, clown shoes pair……
By pure fluke, the internal pages of my site, happen to cover over 80% of the terms on the wheel.  Some had internal anchor, others didn’t. Another point is, they were not copied word for word. For example, “Ebay” may have been a page about, “how to buy shoes on ebay”. This was about as natural as you can get. No pointers to Google, no spammy H tags, no spammy anchor text, no links, just pure quality,  relevant content.
Google made the decision my page was awesome, not based on indicators which are commonly associated with SEO, but by the content associated with my page.

I have since applied this method to over 12 other sites and seen some killer results.
Remember, the trick is to set-up the path, and let Google make the ultimate decision (with a little light persuasion in the background)

I will hopefully get the okay to show you this site, so will keep you posted.
To keep up to date with any new developments. Follow me on twitter www.twitter.com/ravindsandhu

Look forward your feedback

Rav

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This post was written by

Rav Sandhu – who has written 26 posts on Big Hit Media- SEO Blog.

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