One time I got an email from a “SEO expert” telling me that my site was doing so poorly in search engines because one of my pages had a few validation errors and that I needed to hire an “expert” like him to “optimize” my site so it would rank better. Here are the facts:
The site ranked in the top 10 for phrases like “free wordpress themes” and “wordpress themes” which are pretty sought after keywords in that niche.
The site averaged about 30,000 total visits per month from search engines (mostly Google) for other various long tail keywords.
The site had about 400,000 incoming links from various websites, quality content, and a good reputation within its niche.
The XHTML validation errors were because of a YouTube video I embedded. The default code YouTube provided caused a few errors in validation.
Anyone with half a brain when it comes to SEO will know that a strong link profile, quality content, and a solid reputation will trump a few validation errors on a page (with the exception of a few edge cases).
Matt Cutts recently announced that toolbar PageRanks were to be updated. I honestly don’t get what the big deal is with PageRank. Webmasters go absolutely crazy over it.
There is a big difference between toolbar PageRank and “internal” PageRank. Toolbar PageRank is public data, updated once every few months or so. Internal PageRank, used by Google themselves, is constantly updated. This is a floating point number (such as 5.234234). Mere mortals like me can’t see that.
A number from 0 (the worst) to 10 (godly) is assigned to a page according to the quantity and quality of links pointing to that page.
It’s just one of many factors that go into ranking pages in Google. Shouldn’t webmasters be more concerned about the daily fluctuations of Google’s search results than a (mostly) meaningless number that’s pushed out every 3-4 months?
To those of you who don’t know Matt Cutts – he’s the head of Google’s Webspam team. I found this video of an interview with him, which I’ll embed below.
It goes over link building, social media, onsite SEO, and some common misconceptions – like having to pay Google to be listed in the results (which isn’t true).
I'm a freelance web developer and blogger running a site called Theme Lab.
