1) "MORE QUALITY PAGES and more QUALITY links = bette SEO from what the top SEOs have told me. "

For this purpose, indexed by Google counts as "quality." Please read the PageRank paper, and you'll quickly see that more pages in the index == more PageRank.

That doesn't always mean putting crap pages into Google is a good idea, but strictly speaking, it will raise the total amount of PageRank your site has. Seriously, read the paper yourself.

2) "but we don't scrape content. our search results do have abstracts but they are smaller than Google's, and in some cases they actually are google's."

Perhaps scrape is the wrong term. But you absolutely do include other people's content and nofollow it, for example all of the images on this page:

http://www.mahalo.com/chupacabra

NoFollow is meant for links to content which you don't want to "vouch" for. If you've included their content in your page, I think you can vouch for it.

Maybe an honest oversight, maybe not. Either way, you know about it now, so fix it.

Your pages do compete against each other in some narrow senses: for any given query, you'll typically be capped at two results in the SERP (results page), so if you had a third best option on your site it gets left out in the cold. However, pages on your website are (and should be treated as) comrades in arms.

The more links my page on, e.g., Jane Austen bingo cards collects, the more trust my domain will have and the more juice that individual page will pass to the literature category its in and the other page it links to. This helps me rank both the other literature pages (which have scant anything to do with Jane Austen) and also the almost wholly unrelated, e.g., Easter bingo.

In fact, in the MarketWire article, having a bunch of keyword-rich text all pointing at the same page will likely have little SEO value, as diminishing returns hits really quickly in a case like this.

These are topic pages that people are working on and THEY DON'T RANK in search engines until they we get the word count to around 300-500 words.

We are the process of NOINDEXING the pages that are below 300 words just to make Aaron happy... we actually had these noindexed before our last version and that got lost in the shuffle of the new launch (really, it did... when you do new code you might leave something out of the old code).

i'm also getting a list of every page under 300 words and having the page managers build them out in 30 days or deleting them.

Anyway, i thank Aaron for busting out chops and making us better!

The claims that we are "scraping" are absurd... we're using google, bing, twitter, etc. apis to do a comprehensive search page.

i dont know everything about SEO, but i don't understand this claim by Aaron. i think he is trying to start trouble for us... and maybe it will work. Thanks pal!

But most of the first page results have many times more backlinks. We've got less than a dozen organically during the last year.

UI: LOL, yeah, it's a toss up here whether to make it prettier or keep it a bit old school.

the page we get traffic for ten to have a LOT of content... also, if we see a page gets more than 25-50 page views we put a writer on it to build it out.

so, basically nothing that ranks is a short content page (stub in wikipedia terms).

however, the truth is google doesn't rank short pages except for VERY long tail ones.... and even that is rare.

google ranks you for long, deep content that is updated.

Aaron is making a big deal out a problem that doesn't exist because he is mad at me for saying seo is bullshit back in 2006. :-)

It's not a perfect system, people can't put multiple search boxes in there.

However, that page will never rank well in a search engine (unless by a fluke). In order to rank well you really need to have 500+ original words.

We're in the process of moving all pages to that standard. It's really a self-regulating thing: if our contributors make short pages they never rank and never make money. They get frustrated and we teach them how to make longer pages and some day they may rank.

... it's really not a problem, and the truth is we rank for three things well:

1. video game walkthroughs (typically 2-10,000 words!) 2. how to articles (typically 800 to 5,000 words) 3. question & answer pages (typically 300 to 10,000 words),

Isn't this basic SEO (and i'm not expert): build original content and you might rank. Build short pages, you don't rank.

All pages start short (just like wikipedia stubs do), and over time we make them longer. that's the normal process.

... the truth is having short content pages indexed works against you--that's why i no indexed them to being with.

Again, I'm not as big of an expert on SEO as Aaron, but I think there is something called "page rank sculpting" in which you push your sites page rank to high-quality pages and no-index the ones that are shorter in terms of original content. We did that because one of our people read about it on a blog.

We're probably holding ourselves back having removed this and we are putting it back on because we didn't realize it was off.

That is why I thanked Aaron.

Is the page rank sculpting thing not a good idea? I thought this was a fairly certain thing: only index the best pages.

Google already has a rule to deal with this: buying and selling links (and, by extension, renting links) is against their guidelines. They just don't enforce it for big publishing companies.

Regarding ranking algos, you did not mention the Trust Rank (there is a patent G filed some years ago). A low Trust Rank is equally bad as a low Page Rank. I don't really know much about it, but afaik it has to do with the trust that G has collected on your site, while Page Rank is based on individual pages. If you link to "bad neigborhoods" (another important term, think casino sites, v*agra, etc.) your TR will go down for example, and its hard to get it back up. If National Geographic links to one of your pages, your site's TR goes way up.

And then there is the number of pages on your site. Google will only crwal a limited amount of pages from your site, depending on your Page Rank and distribution of incoming links. So try to keep the number of crawlable pages focused to the relevant pages (ie the ones you'd like to see in G's index).

After some time and if you have tons of links, you will see a "deep crawl" with a bunch of Gbots hammerings you server and downloading many more pages a day than usual.

Why are they easier to crawl and index? Most people do shoot themselves in the foot with some duplicate content if they try to implement those speaking URLs.

And "rank accordingly"? Like keyword tags help to rank better?

It would seem that, because PageRank is divided amongst the number of links on a page, that a page with fewer links is more effective at passing link juice then a page with many links.

Quality of content and Quantity doesn't matter all what matters is backlinks!

I really just wanted to point out that the article wasn't 'Proof of how important website titles are for SEO', as there are other elements on that page that could have been just as responsible for the ranking.

Shouldn't that be more important than whether it has original content or not?

Maybe an aggregator displays the content in a more useful way than the originator so it gets linked to more than the originator.

If the content creator doesn't like his content copied he can take it up with the copier. It's not Googles job to get involved in that.

Google's job is to give the searcher a list of the sites that matches his keywords in an unbiased way. They should do that mostly on what the internet thinks is the best site, not what Google thinks is the best site.