Comments on: Lessons From The Roundabout SEO Test

By: Shane

Shane — Mon, 10 Jan 2011 10:16:16 +0000

fyi – years later Mike Portney has added the html tag to his site. lol maybe he read your blog post. :) this is an old post but still thought it was a good one and I think I may have learned something about SEO.. like, how irrational it is. :)

By: Donna

Donna — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 04:14:27 +0000

I just ran across this. lol. I don’t think I’d ever be able to rank for my own first name. Sigh.

By: Paul

Paul — Tue, 26 Aug 2008 10:41:19 +0000

excellent article.. very interesting reading. has given me a few new ideas on how to tart things up a little more too! thanks Mike.. one thing I always wonder though (and I guess would be prevailent on a test like this to some degree) how long does it take google to find / update your site or directories and start netting you results for such a test?

thanks & all the best!

Paul

By: Joshua Unseth

Joshua Unseth — Wed, 07 May 2008 17:22:43 +0000

Great Post Mike. It was really helpful. Seems like a lot of work though. One thing you didn’t address: how long did it take for google to index or not index the sites? I’ve had posts that google indexes within hours of posting them, and I’ve had others that take weeks.

By: natesees.com | The rants and ramblings of Nate Sees » Blog Archive » SEO Test

Sat, 19 Jan 2008 00:14:06 +0000

[...] I’ll be checking the ranking of a made-up word on each of those seach engines to see how they rank the test pages. If you’ve actually read this far, you will probably be interested in a fantastic test by Mike Davidson on Google’s ranking results. [...]

By: Sean S

Sean S — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

First of all, when did you have time to do this? Haven't you been a bit busy?Secondly, you said that developers should write clean (semantic) code as a matter of professionalism rather than for SEO -- but how are we supposed to convince corporations of this if it makes no difference? It's one thing to start by writing clean code, but to change practices means time (and money); which companies aren't willing to spend if it doesn't mean results.Thanks for the experiment and demonstration, though!

By: Michael McCorry

Michael McCorry — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

And there you go. You’ve just added four more “mike”s to your homepage (and 25 more on this page). You’ll be numero uno in no time :)

By: Mike D.

Mike D. — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Sean: This was one of those posts that took about three months to complete… little by very little, as I had a few minutes here and there. This is also one of the myriad reasons (I suspect) why I don’t have a girlfriend.

By: Christopher Hawkins

Christopher Hawkins — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Very interesting, Mike!

It seems that you’ve not only demystified a bit of SEO and Google-fu, you’ve also made a case for standards-based development, which I recently questioned out of frustration.

Great post!

By: Mike D.

Mike D. — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Sean: Oh, I forgot to answer your second question. Well, it wouldn’t be lying to mention during your web standards pitch that it does indeed help SEO. It’s just that it doesn’t help “that much” (that is the part you either keep in your head or mumble under your breath as you cough and ask for water).

The truth is that web standards help in all sorts of little ways. They help SEO a bit, they help in accessibility a bit, they help in maintenance a bit… and so on and so forth. They just don’t turn water into wine overnight as some people would have you believe. Developing with web standards is the right thing to do for many, many reasons… it’s just important to manage expectations around them.

By: Sean Madden

Sean Madden — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Mike…oh Mike {shakes head}

You are up at all hours of the day tracking Newsvine and still you have the capacity to write the most engaging post centered around ego-surfing EVER.

Strong work my friend, strong work. However, you may have single-handedly brought back the era of the table-based designer by dismissing web standards as a tool in SEO. Damn you! You know marketing people couldn’t care less about professionalism. They want results baby! If tables become hot again, I will blame you entirely.

By: Chris Renner

Chris Renner — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Blast! Accidentally reloaded and lost my comment. Well..

I tend towards the incoming link pagerank theory. Wikipedia’s List of websites with a high PageRank suggest that .gov links do well in this arena.

PR 10 – 5 out of 17 are government
PR 9 – ~34 out of ~215 are government

Also news mentions. NY Times, 10. Washington Post, The Economist, USA Today, all 9s. I’m sure he gets more mentions from those pubs than you do.

Amazing to actually see standards and SEO in action. Thanks for this post!

By: Don

Don — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Nice Work Mike as usual. My sidekick over at http://htmlfixit.com wrote a blurb a while back on how to optimize based on some findings we had kept track of. We were perhaps less "scientificish" in our findings (you may soon be number one for that term as well and you will then know if things included in comments help ...) here: http://htmlfixit.com/tutes/tutorial_How_to_improve_your_search_engine_rankings.phpI am going to go back and read what he wrote and perhaps consider a cross reference.

By: Mike D.

Mike D. — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Sean M.: Was there really any question that table-based design is back? Load that baby over a slow connection for the full-effect.The new game in town is how complicated - nay, sophisticated - you can make your grid. If I'm not seeing at least "colspan=15" up in there, I'm not coming back.

By: grey

grey — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

After all that, how I can even be stuck on this little bit of information, I don’t know, but I am:

Mike was the drummer for a now defunct rock band called “Dream Theater”.
…
This guy was in a rock group called “Dream Theater” a long time ago…

Other than the fact that he’s a drummer and he’s actually in the band, I think that’s all wrong. They aren’t defunct, and it wasn’t a long time ago. They’re, umm, on tour as we speak.

They’ve been around for like twenty years, and they produce the most boring brand of progressive metal there is, IMHO, but they’re still a band, and he’s still their drummer.

Not that it really matters, but for some reason I felt compelled to clear all of that up. Oh, well.

(Editor’s Note: Grey, you’re totally right. Don’t know why I haven’t heard about them for years, but yes, they are apparently still around! Fixed!)