Interview of Tedster from WebmasterWorld
If you have been in the SEO field for any serious length of time you have probably come across (and benefited from) some of Tedster's work - either directly, or indirectly from others who have repackaged his contributions as their own. He is perhaps a bit modest, but there are few people in the industry as universally well respected as he is. I have been meaning to interview him for a while now, and he is going to be speaking at Pubcon South on April 14th in Dallas, so I figured now was as good a time as any :)
How long have you been an SEO
I started building websites in 1995 and the word SEO hadn't been invented. I came from a background in retail marketing, rather than technology or graphic design. So my orientation wasn't just "have I have built a good site?", but also "are enough people finding my site?"
The best method for bringing in traffic seemed to be the search engines, so I began discussing this kind of marketing with other people I found who had the same focus. Ah, the good old days, right? We were so basic and innocently focused, you know?
If you could list a few key documents that helped you develop your understanding of search, which would be the most important ones?
Major watersheds for me
Is PageRank still crucial? Or have other things replaced it in terms of importance?
What PageRank is measuring (or attempting to measure) is still very critical — both the quality and number of other web pages that link to the given page. We don't need to worship those public PR numbers, but we definitely do need quality back-links (and quality internal linking) to rank well on competitive queries.
There appears to be something parallel to PR that is emerging from social media — some metric that uses the model of influencers or thought leaders. But even with that in the mix, ranking would still depend on links, but they would be modified a bit by "followers", "friends", since many social sites are cautious with do-follow links.
Lets play
I have got a penalty - SEO edition. Position 6, -30, 999, etc. Are these just bogus excuses from poor SEOs who have no job calling themselves SEOs, or are they legitimate filters & penalties?
If the page never ranked well, then yes - it could well be a bogus excuse by someone whose only claim to being an SEO is that they read an e-book and bought some rank tracking software. However, Google definitely has used very obvious numeric demotions for pages that used to rank at the top.
The original -30 penalty is an example that nailed even domain name "navigational" searches. It affected some sites that did very aggressive link and 301 redirect manipulation.
What was originally called the -950 (end of results) penalty, while never an exact number, most definitely sent some very well ranked pages down into the very deep pages. Those websites were often optimized by very solid SEO people, but then Google came along and decided that the methods were no longer OK.