Search Engine Optimzation has become the latest Cool Thang on the World Wide Web.  Blogging is boring.  Now, if you want to be cool, you have to know the difference between an Inbound Link and an Outbound Link.  More importantly, you need to find a forum where you can become a guru-in-residence by repeating all the intelligent-sounding advice that older gurus-in-residence gave you.

If you pay close attention to what the resident gurus write, you'll become a fully qualified SEO parrot in about six months.  It takes about that long to indoctrinate people into the Holy Mantra of Build-More-Links.  Ah, if life were only so simple.  Just get a lot of sites to link to your site, and your traffic will boom.

There was a very brief time frame, from about 2000 to 2002, where that pretty much was all you needed to do to get a good ranking in search results.  I know.  I was there, advising all the gurus-to-be, whose proteges have since advised today's gurus-in-residence, to build more links.  All you needed was a good title tag, a proper H1 header tag, and a few more links than the next guy.

The search engines would do all the work for you.  But it is precisely for that reason that link building has become increasingly less productive.  As more and more people pile onto the Internet, hoping to make millions or simply to replace lost income, they gravitate toward search engine optimization.  Some turn to SEO tactics to boost their own sites' performance.  But many people make a career out of it.

Nowadays, there are experts who will sell you ebooks filled with the safe, sage advice of yesteryear.  Build more links! they cry.  Reciprocate links with everyone under the sun.  And so their ebook customers go out and trade links and come back to the forums and say, "I have been exchanging links with people, but my site isn't ranking.  Why?"

Well, it's not just about links.  Some SEO gurus have almost caught on to that.  You see, a few years ago, when Google first became the dominant search engine, they launched a marketing tool -- their browser add-on, the Google toolbar.  That little gizmo would very conveniently tell you the relative importance of any page you were visiting.  "This page is ranked 10/10" it would say of a site like Yahoo!.  Visit your own page, you saw a disappointing 1/10 if you had achieved anything, or maybe a 2/10.

I, along with a few other old-timers in the SEO field, wondered if getting links from sites with higher Toolbar PageRank would help boost our Toolbar PageRank.  I quietly discussed the idea with a few people behind the scenes and they told me, yes, we traded links with a few high PR sites and our Toolbar PR increased.  So did our search engine referrals.

Now, that got my attention.  Of course, when I checked my primary domain's Toolbar PageRank, it was hovering around 5/10 and 6/10.  It depended on the page.  Only on a few rare days have I seen any page on my domain hit 7/10, and that didn't last long.  So, trading links with higher PageRank sites wasn't much of an option for me.  I already had links from Yahoo! and some other 10/10 and 9/10 sites.

Still, I confidently set out to see if I could influence other sites' Toolbar PageRank and search results.  Amazingly enough, it worked.  I linked to a few sites that I had created (and virtually no one else knew about) and they magically appeared in the search results with PageRank of about 2/10.

And that was good for about six months.  Then Google changed things.  Unfortunately, the SEO communities missed the memo, and to this day you'll find people in the forums lecturing on the value of PageRank (many SEOs now understand that the Toolbar is not reporting accurate data, and that Toolbar PageRank itself does not directly correlate to high rankings in search results).

Google has become more like a directory over the past couple of years.  That is, with a typical human-edited directory, you normally only had four elements to work with to get your listing to the top of the query results: the title you submitted, the description you submitted, the URL you submitted, and the category where your site was placed.  For years, these elements were crucial to Yahoo! success, and for years people complained about not being listed first in the Yahoo! directory pages (hint: there was no correlation between location on directory page and position in query results).

It seems that, no matter how sensible good advice may be, people will ignore it if they see yet more people ignoring it.  By the time we old-timers got people to understand that it was all about titles, descriptions, URLs, and categories, it was too late.  Google and Yahoo! ended their relationship and went their separate ways.  Yahoo! decided to become more of a search engine.

But a funny thing happened to Google.  As I said, they became more like a directory.  They started paying closer attention to things like title tags, descriptions (meta tags), and URLs.  Why?  Because they had to.  Their link popularity system was full of holes, and the SEO community pounced on those vulnerabilities like a cat leaping for dying prey.

The problem is that too many people once again didn't pay attention to what was happening.  Google changes the way its search engine works about once a year, sometimes twice a year.  When that happens, thousands of Webmasters panic -- you see the effects in the various SEO forums where they bemoan the fates of their 4-million-page-view-per month sites that now get "only a fraction of that".  You know, in real life, most Web sites will never see 4 million page views at all, let alone that many per month.

Back in the days when I used to talk about "quality" on Web sites, I advised people to get "quality links".  What's a "quality link"? they would ask.  My reply was something like, "A link from a quality site.  And a quality site is a site with a lot of content."  So, for a while, content became king.  I was one of the people to propose the creation of Content Doorway Pages (now they are called Landing Pages because, apparently, people don't want to call their pages doorways).

Content made the links more valuable for a number of reasons, most of which were never shared with me by the search engines.  But it was obvious that the more human-readable, indexable text you added to a page, the more natural the page seemed.  Problem was, the earliest search engines used document indexing methodologies which favored abstracts -- abbreviated versions of longer content documents.  Hence, doorway pages tended to be very short documents with very little text.

A Content Doorway Page used some of the feature of a doorway page while providing more content.  There was a tradeoff: you received less traffic but were less likely to be filtered out by the search engines.  One of the distinctions of the Content Doorway pages was that other pages on a site linked to them -- hence, they were intended to lead people deeper into the sites, but looked like natural, well-linked pages.

To a certain extent, Content Doorways (I mean, Landing Pages) still work and should always work because they provide relevant, meaningful content.  But their chief purpose is still to bring in traffic from search engine.  Now, Content Doorways can serve another purpose.  They can become link hubs.

Back before search engine optimizers (and search engine designers) stole my terminology, I spoke of pages which have "authority".  To me, a page was authoritative because it contained many links on a similar topic to off-site pages.  For example, any directory page on Yahoo! or the Open Direcory Project would be an Authority Page.  However, they are now called Hub Pages, and it's good to be a Hub Page, because your outbound links are trusted to be fair and impartial.
What are now called "Authority Pages" are actually Link Popular Pages.  They are deemed to be authoritative because many other pages link to them (which is a silly idea, considering that every person who creates a new Web site goes out, grabs a few links they THINK people will be interested in, and puts them on their page).  People don't look at the quality of content -- most of the time, they don't even bother to look at the content.  They know, "Oh, I need to put a link to Yahoo! on here."  Hence, Yahoo! gets a lot of links.

Do you know WHY people link to Yahoo!?  They do that because, in the old days, if you wanted people to find good Web sites, you linked to other sites.  Yahoo! started out as a set of personal bookmarks.  When it achieved a few hundred listings, people began to link to the site.  As more people linked to Yahoo!, more people began submitting sites to it, and as Yahoo! grew (both through editorial accretion and submission), it became more useful to many people.

Yahoo! was a huge, friggin' collection of bookmarks back when people were still sharing bookmarks.  So, it was natural for people to link to Yahoo!.  But then the search engines started appearing: Galaxy, Lycos, Hotbot, Altavista, Infoseek, and many more.  As the Internet started drawing investment capital, the search services began advertising.  The media began mentioning their names.  NBC acquired it is own search engine and directory (in fact, they had one of the best -- better than Google, even).

It no longer made sense to provide links to Yahoo!, Altavista, or whomever.  Everyone saw constant advertising on the Internet and on television for various search engines and directories.  But people continued linking to the old giants.  Why?  Pure laziness in some cases.  I watched many a popular site update its content but not its links.

And then one day, someone in an SEO forum asked, "Does it help if you link to Yahoo!?"  The first replies of "No, it's a waste of time" were drowned out by "Well, I don't know, but let's try it" which metamorphosed into "Hey, that sounds like a good idea!" which evolved to "Yeah, you better do it OR ELSE!" which finally became "It's a good idea to link to Yahoo! and Google so they will know to search your sites!"

How did they know that?  Apparently they were looking at their referer logs the way SEOs do and tracking down the good people who were sending them much needed traffic.

So, in the end, Yahoo! ended up with a great number of links.  Do those links represent some sort of communal assessment of quality?  Sure they do.  Is the assessment accurate?  Not by a mile.  Yahoo! doesn't offering anything that other sites don't do better.  They aren't even the only site that aggregates all the kinds of content that they do.  But they are Yahoo!.  They were here first.  They have been grandfathered into perpetual link popularity with no real consideration for the fact that their directory is now so outdated it's no longer even featured on their main page (except as a link).

Some people would argue that this makes a strong case for link popularity.  And to them I can only say, "Really?  How is that?"  After all, if you type a random search into one of the major link-driven services, say for "search engines and directories", you won't see Yahoo! come up in the results.  You'll most likely see some non-search engine/directory come up first.  To their credit, Yahoo!'s search engine and directory category page should appear in the top ten results .. somewhere.

However, if you look at the URL for that category page, you'll see it falls under "world wide web".  Run a search for "world wide web" and you won't see Yahoo!'s Web category page in the top ten results -- even though Yahoo! is undisputably (at the time of this writing) the most link-popular site on the Web.  Clearly, it's not all about building links.

Well, now we get into the area of anchor text.  Link anchor text is used to "bomb" content up to the top of search results.  The principle goes like this: get 1,000 sites to link to your site with the phrase "scrumpy bears" and you'll most likely outrank any of those sites for that phrase, even though it only occurs on their pages.  Why is that?  Because some search engines associate the text with which other pages link to your page with the content of your page.  That is, other sites append their link text to the content of your page (in the search engines' warped way of thinking).

In the case of "world wide web", it is true that many more sites link to www.w3.org than link to yahoo.com with those three words.  Of course, if you just want to browse the World Wide Web at random, W3.Org is not the best place to start.  And why the Library of Congress should come up high in a search for "World Wide Web" is anyone's guess.  It gets far fewer WWW-related links than Yahoo!.  Oh well, must have something to do with the .gov top-level domain name.

In fact, if you look at the search results on Google, MSN, Yahoo!, or Ask.com (currently the four "major players"), you will find that their search results are being ordered by a number of undisclosed criteria.  On-page content is usually taken into consideration, but so is off-page content.  And off-page content falls into at least two categories: the stuff people say when linking to you, and the stuff people say NEAR their links to you.

Other factors do include the number of links your site gets, but the number of links your page provides to other pages can help influence your page's standing, too.  Many people in the SEO communities just gape in utter astonishment when I mention as much.

But it's true.  You can find research papers (largely speculative) coming out of the communities which suggest tat the search engines provide a bonus or premium to pages which offer unbiased links -- that is, if you have ten outbound links on your page, they are unbiased if they go to ten different, unrelated sites.  A search engine which no longer exists pioneered that principle, but Inktomi (now owned by Yahoo!) and Google both appear to be awarding outbound link content pages.

I say that only because I create outbound link pages which achieve top rankings for popular search terms on both services.  It certainly doesn't have anything to do with the number of INBOUND links because I don't bother getting them for those kinds of pages.

And I could go on.  Maybe I should write a book.  I think I may.  But the bottom line is that, search engine optimization is not "cool".  It requires a lot of hard work, attention to the kinds of details that most self-appointed SEO gurus (hint: we are ALL self-appointed) never even notice, and a constantly changing frame of reference.  Just because something worked two years ago doesn't mean it will work today

There are other factors involved, and if you rely solely upon the advice of search engine optimizers who know nothing more than to say, "Build more links" and "improve your PageRank", you will surely be one of those people going from forum to forum, asking for help when one of the big engines changes the way they do things.  That is because you built your links and have good PageRank, but you didn't pay attention to your rankings in the search results.

In the end, it's all about who is on top in the search results, not how many links you have, not how good you think your PageRank is or should be.  Don't believe me?  Just wait a couple of years.  By then, all the gurus will be repeating that mantra, too.