No it’s not another ebook or some such nonsense, you know not to expect that here by now, surely?

We picked up a hit today that signals success in a strategy (or some  long term testing to be more accurate) we’ve been working on for a  good while now. Woopra lit up  for “Internet marketing for your site” on the third page (Google.es only so far) and had a quick look (screenshot below)

- That’s not too shabby at all, it’s actually a potential buying term, and we’re nicely sandwiched in-between 2 of SEO’s uberlords, Bruce Clay & Jim Boykin (webuildpages.com)

..Ok as entry level

Interestingly though the hit turned out to be what has been a previously “dead” rankings page that we’ve been working “balancing” (within the site, using the site: search) since the major realignment for all the big terms (SEO, SEO Services, Internet Marketing) way back last May when we might have pushed just a little too hard and we hit a filter and broke it’s rankings.

That’s ok, its what it’s here for, to find the edges of the matrix envelope/s. It took about 4 weeks until we’d slipped it again and it taught us valuable lessons about what you can and cant do.

Since then (and before that the whole time too) this page has always been Google grey-barred. It has actually been the stalwart of our “control group” in amongst all our other experimentation, in that it was written, and has remained static since then.

It’s this page.

We’ve had other pages act like this before, greyed out, no Google hits to speak of, and then all of a sudden they just randomly start ranking. Previously our SEO tools page did it, and then our SEO Resources page did the same thing. Both are now (mostly) showing PR4.

It’s like they reached some critical mass threshold in either linkweight or trust, and suddenly get included in the results, sometimes quite high up from when you first notice them, then afterwards G think about maybe showing you some toolbar, maybe.

A trust aging filter lifting? ..Internal link aging filters? who knows?

Or if Google are going to have phrase related penalties for over optimization, it might make sense that some  words come preloaded with this bias and could just time out over a period, maybe depending on a number of other factors, IBLs trust etc.

Anyway were taking bets that this is the next page from our Google greybar studies to start alternating between grey and PR3/4.

The real point here is that whatever the silly toolbar is saying, doesnt change the fact this page obviously has plenty of real pagerank floating around because this is a fairly heavyweight search now, and our position there in between 2 of the gods  of SEO is definitely not that of a penalised or supplemental page (any more anyway?)

The strategy is the one we’ve been working on and testing all the way along, our meaning of the ubiquitous “Content is King” cliche..  ..groups of optimized blog posts around a target subject, all referencing each other contextually, and all referencing the main page contextually.

For example we have posts called

• internet marketing – content is king? then google is god
• internet marketing – court’s back
• internet marketing 2009

All of these posts reference each other, and because of the  general base strength of the blog now, will all rank for their title terms to a greater or lesser  extent.

So we now have an “internet marketing” cluster of relevance.

Going out trying to find other people’s high ranking Internet marketing longtail posts and persuading them to link us seemed inefficient, when we can just make and incubate our own powerful relevant links instead – albeit internal so you need a few more.

Because of the way the blog is integrated into the main site (technically not visually) the main site pages lend their ranking strength to new blog posts immediately, and maturing (pre-incubated) blog posts can provide increasingly powerful contextual links at the main pages over time.

All it means is that as new posts go up, you go back to the previous ones [where you wrote the post with anchors already in place for the future stuff,  didn't you!! ] and drop the link in to the latest one.

Make your own links people, no-one else will do them as well as you do.

it’s pretty simple stuff really. ..and it seems to be working ok, ask numpty – just dont ask him to do any workfor you, you might get banned