The point of this post wasn’t to offer a free SEO course but to prove domain authority can be trumped by relevance signals.

I think free courses are great, because often it can show clients the complexities of seo and make them more willing to pay…perhaps!

Ok yeah the title is “Free SEO Course” lol but you’re straying off topic Mich. You’re right that sometimes people blow stuff out of proportion and content is key, and there are people out there overcharging for information they can get their hands on for free. And you’re right: some of the top SEOs talk a good game but they don’t have any experience managing a long term, successful SEO campaign.

But there is SEO worth your money; its just hard to find.

All the big time seos suck, simple. They are slow and out of date. They take weeks and months to do what i do in days. The best free seo course you can take is just getting in there and doing it. Real natural content can and does rank without links in minutes if you have half a brain.

Hate to be such a stinker but….
ITS NOT RIGHT TO OVERCHARGE FOR SIMPLE BRAINDEAD SEO

Peace Dude

Mich in the Web

I do have a TBPR 4 page pointing right at Red’s post with no other links on the page except a copyright link (which I just removed).

“Odd because I doubt I have many backlinks pointing at that post”

You read my mind. But you have a couple more links than you think:) (for one, if you look at the top of this post, you’ll notice a new link I added last night, though I doubt its picked up yet; this page’s cache is still a few days old)

Because the phrase “free seo course” isn’t ultra competitive, keywords in TITLE is probably enough to get on page one/two, but from there, even relevant anchor text pointing at this post isn’t having an overwhelming effect in breaking into the top 5.

So relevance isn’t always enough.

V7n is slowly losing ground for “seo course.” Authority score hasn’t changed, relevance hasn’t changed. We do know his post has less PageRank than it started with.

Then again, freeseocourse.com which ranks #1 for “free seo course” is ranking with TBPR 2 and a bagful of anchor text from low quality directory pages.

Moral of the story?

There are more than one way to skin a cat. If you look like Brad Pitt, you could be broke and still pick up chicks. But you can still score even if you look like Shrek if you got a winning personality and a steady income.

Lol, ok, but I bet if you changed your post title to “Expensive SEO seminar” its ranking is going to tank :)

>>But does domain strength and “trust” automatically translate to higher rankings? We’ll see.

I don’t think it does. But it certainly helps. A lot :)

Nice job on ranking #3 for “free SEO course” lol. I’ll have to wait a few days (weeks?) to get indexed, but so far, on Google Blogsearch with results sorted by relevance, I’m #2 for “seo course training”, 7th for “seo course”, 1st for “expert seo course”, and 3rd for “free seo course.” Not that Google blogsearch ranking means shit, but whatev :D With all this OOP going on this page I may get smacked with a 950 penalty, who knows.

What Mike Grehan described in his “rich gets richer” piece is the result of PageRank based ranking:

“Since PageRank is query-independent it cannot by itself distinguish between pages that are authoritative in general and pages that are authoritative on the query topic. In particular a web-site that is authoritative in general may contain a page that matches a certain query but is not an authority on the topic of the query.”

http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~georgem/hilltop/

That’s how a “Britney Spears Naked” page on v7n ranks high even though v7n blog has nada to do with Britney Spears.

Authority, according to the Hilltop paper, was thought up to counteract that problem, by calculating authority scores that are query-specific.

So, according to the Hilltop paper, a site like v7n that may be scoring high for “dooors” or “rackforce reviews” won’t automatically score high for “seo course” just because the site is popular. If “expert” pages (e.g. Search Engine Land’s Search Cap, for example, which IMO qualifies as a page that’s “objective and diverse”, and “point to numerous non-affiliated pages on the subject”) link to v7n using “seo course” in the anchor text, then v7n may gain an authority score for “seo course.”

I agree with the gist of your post, that a strong domain has an edge when it comes to getting crawled quicker, deeper, and more often. It also means that internal link juice transfers more weight, and the site gains organic links quicker. An IBL from a site that already gained Google’s trust, even if the link is on a low TBPR page, also means alot more than a higher TBPR link from a site with a low trust score.

But does domain strength and “trust” automatically translate to higher rankings? We’ll see.

My main point is that if I had published that course on a new domain, I would not be ranking well, and certainly not within a few days.

The established level of trust, both with Google and with the community in the form of inbound linking from other trusted domains, is responsible for the pages rank.

The content is a small part of the equation. It just needs to be on topic. The page isn’t optimised in a conventional sense (i.e. specific keyword density and placement) because it simply doesn’t need to be.

NOTE: Edited to remove keywords from the link text.