Courtney Tuttle, Ibiza Best SEO Blog Awards Finalist 2008 & legendary “Google slapped” Internet Marketing guru, mentioned in a previous post here:

Internet Marketing – content is King?

…is back in action, he has a new site (well launched 3rd Nov but we’ve been too busy watching the google tweaking to notice)

It’s: http://thekeywordacademy.com

Interestingly enough only today we noticed his (old) site ranking in the high #60′s for internet marketing..

Even though he’s still nowhere to be seen for his domain name, or did it always do this after the slapping?  or maybe there might be an algorithmic explanation after all, too many footers from WP themes etc as has been hypothesised elsewhere?

It seems a little unlikely to us that a manual intervention would allow the site to carry on ranking for a much tougher phrase than his name like that?

Anyway, the new site has some good stuff on it, including a post called “an introduction to seo“which is a pretty good grounding for anyone new to the game, where Court continues giving away all the secrets in his usual fashion, but what stood out was this. (bolded)

“Most people I have met focus on the on-page stuff and honestly, that doesn’t do a whole lot for you. You can tweak and test your on-page optimization all year and you’ll never see much improvement.

Google puts a lot more emphasis on the links pointing to a page than they do on the content that appears on the page. In other words, a worthless page with links pointing at it is more likely to rank well than a great page with no links pointing at it.

That said, great pages usually attract links so the great pages usually have more links than worthless pages and Google operates on this principle.”

Hmm. his last word on this particular subject was..

“as it turns out content is king…” Hmm some more… 

We have a lot of respect for Court, and wish him luck in his new ventures.