Once again I thought about SEO.  Everyday I drive about 10 mph over the speed limit.  I know there are state troopers out there, or local police.  I see them sometimes sitting and shooting radar of course.  Yet, I still exceed the speed limit.  Maybe because I know of all the cars out there the odds are in my favor of not getting caught.  And even if I do zoom by a cop at 80 mph, maybe he isn’t really paying attention or doesn’t really care.  Maybe he’s a liberal and happy I’m driving a Prius so he lets me fly by….who knows.  And just as an aside, I drive a Prius because I don’t want to spend money on gas.  It’s nice that I’m saving the environment and all, but (despite a few social liberal tendencies) I’m no bleeding heart, the government must and will save us liberal I can assure you.  But today, seeing the state trooper car driving next to me I slowed down and stayed right at the speed limit.  So if the highway were search engine optimization, like it was yesterday, then the trooper is Matt Cutts.  If you don’t know who Matt Cutts is you have really stumbled onto the wrong blog.  Or you just really enjoy my ever so clever blurbs.

So do we speed (buy a link, stuff a keyword, etc…) even though we know the police (Google, Matt Cutts) are out there but since we don’t see them watching us we flirt with the white hat/gray hat/black hat line?  But as soon as we know we’re being watched (have a state trooper driving next to you) do you make darn sure you’re following every Google best practice?  

I may discuss in closed door meetings internally some “risky” techniques but I’m sure not going to stand up at an SEO conference session that Matt Cutts is sitting in and say “I’ve found a way to get one over on Google by doing this….”

Purple Widget - Ranked 4th on Google

Sorry about the small image – still learning WordPress.  Click to view bigger!

Although Google is king, lets see how we’re doing elsewhere in just one weeks time:

Live.com – Not in top 50 – but that would be because we aren’t yet indexed by MSN Live Search

Yahoo! – Also not yet indexed.

It won’t be long, I need to create accounts on each sites equivelant to Google Webmaster Tools and make sure they know about us.  I may wait to do this in the interest of seeing how long it takes to appear without this step.

No resting on our # 4 ranking!  We’ll continue to work to not only maintain the ranking but to move up a bit.  I will likely lay low for a while on doing much in the interest of seeing what happens and explore a common scenario that sites report – spiking early with a ranking but them falling down significantly before working slowly back up to again rank high.  We’ll watch for a while and see what happens.

So in less than a week, purplewidget.com goes from nothing more than a recently registered domain name to the #4 search result on the #1 (by far) search engine.  Focused content specific to the targeted keyword is all it took.  The domain name doesn’t hurt either….I’ll explore that more in the future.  But what will it take to move up 3 more spots – and stay there?  We’ll find out in due time.  So that’s the good news – the bad news remains that the search term ‘purple widget’ provides no real value or traffic – but that’s my point.

http://www.google.com/search?q=site:www.purplewidget.com&hl=en

It shows all 16 pages that existed (before this post created a new page).

Of course we don’t rank in the Top 30 for the search term purple widget just yet – in fact we’re not in the Top 500 results, but it should be noted that my personal blog that links to this site is the # 24 result on Google right now for purple widget…this post just went up yesterday.

I believe we are seeing 2 things demonstrated here.  First, blogs are well liked by Google.  My personal blog carries little authority and is not updated too often.  Yet, only a day after a new article shows up about purple widgets it is not only indexed but a Top 30 result for that term.  My personal blog has been around several months – a very short time in terms of websites in the history of time – but it’s not brand new is my point.  Of course – just a reminder, as is largely the point of this SEO experiment, the term purple widget offers little value as a search term due to it’s excessively low search volume therefore it has little competition.  Secondly, we are seeing evidence that an element of ’sandboxing’ is at play here.  Scotts2Cents.com is a relatively new and small site with low authority but it has been around 8 months.  And although indexed and clearly more content rich about purple widgets than my personal blog this site is not a Top 500 search result.  This is not surprising but an interesting note.