Comments on: Capitalizing your links and being paranoid.

By: Scott

Scott — Sat, 17 Dec 2005 15:47:49 +0000

I’m not sure paranoia is the right term… The goal is to be proactive, not reactive. Figure out what would be in the user’s interest to do… bet Google will learn to do it, and update your strategies accordingly. I don’t see that as paranoia, although I do understand your point, and agree that your client’s question was a good one.

In terms of capital letters versus lower case, there is an interesting argument that Google may differentiate the two. Someone who does a search for “keyword phrase” in all caps could be more likely to click a result shown in all caps. That user would be more satisfied with their search, and more likely to use their search engine. Google does differentiate between singular and plural, so it is certainly possible that they would differentiate between caps and non-caps.

That said, in reality, I don’t see these kinds of changes being implemented. I think that in the end, users will judge relevance based more on the words of content that surround a search listing, than whether it is capitalized or not. All things equal, caps versus non caps may matter… but ceteris parabis doesn’t really apply to SEO:)

By: Jim

Jim — Fri, 16 Dec 2005 21:58:19 +0000

JP, I do appreciate devils advicates….it does indeed liven up the chat!

I will say that I’m pretty paranoid….but that doesn’t mean they ain’t after me …. and you

By: jpjoyner

jpjoyner — Fri, 16 Dec 2005 16:43:56 +0000

Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder

Did I go too deep in this converstation? I was just trying to play the devils advicate to liven up the talk.

By: Jim

Jim — Fri, 16 Dec 2005 16:18:01 +0000

OCD = ?

By: jpjoyner

jpjoyner — Fri, 16 Dec 2005 16:09:32 +0000

My comments were pointing to paranoia as a whole. Yes lower case linking is just one thing but when you add that to all the other little things you’re doing it turns into SEO OCD and how productive is that.

By: Gerald Steffens

Gerald Steffens — Fri, 16 Dec 2005 16:05:05 +0000

so what - you have been right in the links.htm discussion

and being a little bit paranoid does not make much more efforts. the main time you lose ist the time for telling others about your opinion

here in germany it’s more natural to use a capital letter first. but i do not think that such things make any difference as long as they are not massively over-used. using the same linktext by 100% is not natural, variation makes sense. variation in typing makes sense too. every greater statistical variance may be used against seo. e.g. not using stop-words, misspellings, capital letters, synonyms, plural/singular, images, superfluous spaces etc in link text. even using the same url may be critical, i.e. using a slash at the end of the domain or not.

By: dog crazy

dog crazy — Fri, 16 Dec 2005 15:51:35 +0000

It doesn’t take more time out of your day to do this, it’s just something you keep in the back of your mind as your building links. I think this can be classified as good paranoia.

By: jpjoyner

jpjoyner — Fri, 16 Dec 2005 15:46:43 +0000

but if you are too paranoid you run the chance of wasting time-energy -resources on things that aren’t important at all.

I guess you have to decide what is more valuable to you. Getting your small victories or having your time, energy and resources spent on other things that we know really matter.

By: Dan

Dan — Fri, 16 Dec 2005 14:38:14 +0000

You can never be too rich, too thin or too paranoid.

By: graywolf

graywolf — Fri, 16 Dec 2005 04:30:21 +0000

there’s no such thing as a “do-over” in SEO…