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Comment by matthewking | Hacker News Reader

White hat SEO is the practice of making sure sites are well structured and well covered by related sites.

Like making sure a book has a contents, index and the pages in the right order, a title that is going to look attractive, and a description that will make readers want to know more.

That part will never change no matter what search engines do, because people always make sites that aren't put together properly.

Good SEO's also look at converting the visitors that originate from search engines, nobody is going to change that either.

I think this article means to say 'The end of the recent black hat techniques in SEO' - as we all know, those breaking the rules always find new ways.

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I will give you a page that breaks every SEO rule in the book but that is ranked very high for one of the most important search terms currently on the collective worlds mind.

The search term is “global dimming” and the result I am referring to which absolutely has ZERO SEO, is this:

http://www.documentary-film.net/search/sample.php

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=global+dimming&...

It is now up to others to disprove my claims, that: 1) General White hat SEO is no longer relevant 2) That you cannot game Google with any form of SEO on a new domain.

Enjoy the doc btw.

From first look, that term has very little competition and so would not be difficult to rank for.

You have links to the site (4005 of them) http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/advsearch;_ylt=ArrNxOma...

And the page has the main keyword in the title.

You rank 3rd on the page.

That doesn't look anything out of the ordinary for SEO :)

Nothing out of the ordinary!

Not a single word on that page! No meta tags, no text, nothing but a 2 word title. That is out of the ordinary.

If you think that is an easy term to rank for, your mistaken, the next result down is PBS.

There's only 220,000 competition. The main factors (yes before, and after all these latest updates) are title tag, and links - both of which you have.

Since its a low competition keyword, you don't need everything to rank. But saying that, you have 4000~ incoming links, which is pretty high.

220K competition sure sounds like a lot to me.

So you agree then that white hat SEO, I.e. meta tags, H1 text, page text, page layout, content on the page, keyword density, validation, is all absolutely pointless. My point entirely!

Most keywords that actually generate traffic have much more results returned, usually 1 million plus, 5 million is pretty normal.

Keywords that generate traffic can also be marked by the amount of PPC ads that appear for the keyword, people paying money don't go after stuff that doesn't generate clicks, or even impressions.

What you've listed there as white hat SEO is just the on-site SEO side of it.

Are you the author of the article? or just submitted it?

I've just noticed, you're actually position 3, on page 2 (not 1).

That puts it even more into perspective.

Quality links can mean more that most on-site SEO for many keywords.

I am proud to have the #3 or #4 site for manbearpig and man bear pig related information.

http://www.google.com/search?q=manbearpig

Honestly it's a little sad just how much of our traffic is manbearpig related.

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