What’s The Difference Between The Well Known Established SEOs and The Newer SEOs?
When I was a kid I remember that I had gone out across the street to play soldier. I had my toy cap pistol and that was all. All of a sudden though, about five other kids showed up that I had never seen before, also playing soldier, and I yelled “Hey, can I play with you guys?” The answer was no.
So even at that early age I realized that the reason why was that their toys were better than mine. I really didn’t like these kids now. So I went back across the street to my garage and put on my plastic army helmet, my web belt with the canteen and mess-kit, my green denim “army” shirt and grabbed my white bolt action rifle that my cousin Richard gave me after he finished military school (a real rifle, but made so it would no longer fire) and went back across the street to play army. All by myself. It took literally two minutes for the new kids to notice me and immediately ask me to play with them.
Disgusted with the transparency and predictability of these buffoons I said no. I Pretended to play for a few more minutes, got bored with the head game I was playing, and went home.
The newer well rounded serious SEO shouldn’t be fooled by the “famous” webmasters with a lot of high page rank sites. They have so much page rank because their domains have a lot of age on them. Ranking a new site (such as your site) is not something they can likely do much better than any other good SEO (except they can throw some of their own “old site” link juice at a newer site, but they can’t do it all the time or permanently).
Aaron Wall says: “A site like SeoToday would not get to the top of the search results if it were launched today, but because it was launched many years back and was easy to link at back then it has many authoritative industry related links that help keep it ranked well in Google.” That says it all – It was EASY to get many authoritative links a long time ago – and they are still there today. The same way these “greats of SEO” got their links easily, they now hoard and jealously guard their link equity and refuse to pass it on. They won’t play with anyone else who doesn’t have toys as nice as theirs – and if someone else came along with toys nicer than theirs, they would immediately act nice and suddenly want to share.
Furthermore, Aaron Wall says: “If you want to outrank established websites you can’t just replicate what they have done, you also have to do unique and link worthy things that will help you overcome their early market lead and the self-reinforcing effects of search.”
He’s right. New sites can’t rank against older ones unless they do a whole lot more and go way out of their way. You can’t merely be equal to the well aged domains, you have to be better. Almost like moving to a new town and being stopped by the good old boy network, almost like women in the workforce, almost like minorities trying to get equal pay and work conditions – if you have a new web site you are NOT going to benefit from having one of these “greats” (They’re not really great, they’ve just been around longer!) working on your business site. Aaron Wall himself has said it (read his story here).
So unless you can pull a couple of “bigger better toys” in the form of really old domains out of your hat, expect to be ignored. One old time very famous SEO / Affiliate Marketer I’m acquainted with wrote that she had been approached by more than one SEO back in the late 90′s and had learned with their help. She is now in the position to help others, the same way that she was helped, but won’t.
The old SEOs snapped up the biggest company contracts during and after the dot com days and are riding high on huge contract profits. Fame keeps them on the speaking tours and seminar circuits where huge companies send representatives to listen to what they have to say, and who hire them for even more jobs. These seminars and speaking deals are some of their most guarded toys – and when they speak, even when Matt Cutts of Google speaks, they don’t reveal anything that any good SEO doesn’t already know. Not only that, but these established SEOs working the circuits aren’t even performing the work themselves any more, but are instead employing newer SEOs to do the work for them (that’s ironic, isn’t it?).
If they were to start again today with all of their current skills and brand spanking new domains with no fame and no budgets (hey, famous people get paid a lot – newbie no-names have no track records), they wouldn’t do much better than anyone else, and maybe they would do worse. With no big checks coming in, no powerful authority links to their sites, no money for speaking tours and seminars or anyone knowing their names – these same SEOs would have a hard time getting anyone’s attention… just like the clothespin in the picture.
So when you hire an SEO – hire whoever is good and pay them what they’re worth. The more you can budget the more work can be done which even Aaron Wall says is what you need to rank well today “…you can’t just replicate what they have done, you also have to do unique and linkworthy things that will help you overcome their early market lead…”
The only reason we have to do something so much better and more linkworthy is because now that the link equity that they have gained from the authority sites has made their sites authority sites, they have turned off the link equity page rank juice – for them to link to you, you have to be better than them. For them to GET the juice in the first place, practically all they had to do was exist because there was nothing else for the authority sites to link to besides them.
Older domains make life oh so easy – don’t fall for the “experienced” SEO line of bull. Newer ones are just as good. My advice to those starting out? Keep your eye on the old coots – and start your own groups. They may be the “A” listers and the newer SEOs the “B” listers for a while – but being from NYC, I’m used to being a “B” lister. Screw the “A” list. They’re going to fall off into the Pacific anyway, come the next big earthquake.
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