Corey Northcutt

Exactly right.

No arguing that great content is irreplaceable.  But of 200+ Google ranking factors, you could split on-page and off-page factors about evenly.   50/50.

But if you want to rank on a particular phrase, improving a single piece of content will yield diminishing returns, while obtaining more links can be expanded virtually forever, until the game is won.

So the effort begins as 50/50.  Then 60/40.  Then 70/30.  Until 99% of of the value comes from links.  

But never does content matter more than links.  

Personally, I like the idea of Karma and don't necessarily see a problem with there being a system for it.  I do think you've identified a real problem though.  This seems to echo something that I see happening throughout the industry.  Bigger than that, it seems to happen throughout all blogging, but is especially bad in the SEO space.  And that issue is this:  

If I blog on my own, fairly new agency blog, I might get 10-20 tweets, and similar sharing across all other major sites, and 1-2 on inbound.org.  When I post inferior content on SEJ, SEOmoz, HubSpot, or ProBlogger, the same content sees thousands of shares, or 10's of shares on inbound.org. 

The first reason that I see for that is that the brand of these blogs is so far embedded in people's minds, that people do curate the content without reading.  It's become trustworthy, and a safe/lazy bet.  Worse than that though, there is certainly a pretty big popularity contest in the SEO industry, that isn't always welcome to new voices (aka. the /r/circlejerk).  Nothing new, anyone that's gone to a conference or has even read an SEO blog where the top ~50 bloggers name drop one of another in almost every post, knows how this goes.  And I get the impression that even the people that participate in it don't necessarily like it, but it is what it is, and that is, a big junior high school popularity contest at times.  

I was skeptical whether I was actually going to find 101 sentences there, let alone a lot of legit points.   It came through.  

Nice job Brian.

Fantastic breakdown.

These exams ... teaching SEO like traditional academia .... it just doesn't seem to work, and has always struck me as a gimmick to invent credibility for those outside our industry.  No offense to anybody that holds these HubSpot certifications - but I would not hire someone that held every single HubSpot cert based on that fact alone.  In fact, it would make me more wary than anything.

There's no substitute for practicing SEO every day if you want to be an expert.  It evolves.  Google says things that don't actually hold water, or are mostly misconstrued, but every blogger takes as gospel and hypes each other up with horrifically bad advice through the telephone game and opportunistic oversimplifications of things.  And the article points out repeatedly, the best strategies tend to be very subjective based on industry and audience.  The only way to get better is to practice and measure.

This exam looks particularly awful, but in their defense, it seems like a losing proposition to begin with.

Not that the information here is terrible, but I have a critique - I'd say that "the perfect link" does not exist in a vacuum.  Anchor text is not always appropriate.  Pushing any one thing into a level of "abuse" from "moderation" is a problem.  Not maintaining usefulness to humans or doing this sort of thing on sites that aren't "built for humans" can also trash an effort - though I could see that as "bearing authority" as was mentioned ... if referring to only "link authority", that could be misconstrued too.

Bonus points for still crediting those "dofollows" though.   :)

I'll just leave this here..

Force SSL via .htaccess or httpd.conf by way of 301 (after you install a CA-signed cert, that is):

RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{SERVER_PORT} 80 RewriteRule ^.*$ https://mydomain.com/\0 [L,QSA,R=301]

mod_rewrite required.  Place your domain above.

I love the split in opinion on meta keywords.  No, loading meta keywords up won't help you rank more - but I like that  Adam Sherk doesn't count it totally out, unlike much of the industry, even a certain unnamed WP plugin bizarrely advises to avoid them.

I know Matt Cutts directly said "we don't use this information at all", but Google does still look at the tag, last I tested with a made-up word; it just holds minimal weight. But more importantly- why only care about Google?  Smaller search engines still use them.  Niche search engines use them.  Tagging and bookmarking sites use them.  Basically any data aggregation tool without the crawling resources of Google or Bing benefit from them.  And Google does crawl many such sites as well.  It doesn't hinder the user experience.  Just like schema.org - it's just providing extra data where it might be useful.  

Truth.

I'm going to be a critic here: When do we grow out of thing "X thing done by people for SEO is dead".  Please, some day?  

It's never happened.  Ever.  Any of it.  Since 2000 at least, these titles should read: "People spamming by doing X are seeing Google's webspam team get incrementally better at recognizing their spam done using this medium".  Only, that's a boring title.  Because it's boring content.  

The NY Times won't be getting deindexed for accepting guest editorials anytime in your life.  Nothing is dying, at least, nothing that deserved to be a thing ever to begin with.  It hasn't happened after 2.5 million of these- https://www.google.com/search?q=guest+blogging+is+dead and it won't be after 250 million more.

Hi Dharmesh, 

Thanks for doing this.  

What are a few of the of the biggest upcoming challenges that you think the inbound marketing industry has yet to solve, specifically with software/technology?  

Obviously HubSpot is a bit of an all-in-one that attempts to cover a lot of the spectrum, but I imagine you'd agree that there are still an enormous number of gaps between an enormous number of projects.  And to follow that up:

Will there ever truly be a "cPanel" of inbound marketing?  A single application that attempts to truly cover every need of an inbound marketer, to a point that most marketers would never even bother looking for more tools?

Cheers.

Good stuff.

Super double plus ultimate so.

Great stuff, love the transparent goal progress bar.  

Videos are a nice touch too - think I noticed them early last week?  Maybe they're old news, but great.  Really shows some key angles of Rand's mustache.  

Totally true.  And it seems that SEO consumers still largely need this reminder.  

http://i.imgur.com/ElkNCb5.gif

Thanks!