Dave Pasternack Climbs The Rankings
What do you do if you are a known search engine marketer who doesn’t shy away from ruffling feathers of the search engine optimization community and said community decides to have a competition in your name in an effort to disprove some of the claims you’ve made?
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Well, if you are Dave Pasternack, you engage these combatants on their own ground and try to beat them at their own game… something that seems to be working for the controversial President of Dit-it Marketing.
As pointed out by IncrediBILL over at his fiendishly named blog - Dave Pasternack News and IncrediBILL’s Random Rants - Pasternack is in a position to win the competition designed to point out the errors in his thinking. Currently, the Dave Pasternack about me page (more on this in a moment) from Did-it.com is number 2 in the Google rankings for the same keyphrase.
When Threadwatch’s competition first kicked off, Pasternack’s about me wasn’t even on the front page of these same Google results. With that in mind, the question becomes, how did Pasternack effect such a change in Google’s results?
The major alteration was done when Pasternack (or the Did-it webmaster) developed a new about me page that improved the keyword content while making minor but noticeable changes to the page’s title tags. The Did-It index page also features a “Dave Pasternack” link that points to the new and improved about me page (view the old one).
What I’m curious about is do Pasternack’s relatively minor changes help prove his thesis about SEO not being rocket-science? If you can improve your search position that drastically by simply changing some text, title tags and by adding one backlink (MSN is the only engine to list a substantial backlink count; Yahoo shows 88 and Google shows their standard goose egg), it makes you wonder just how hard the SEO exercise really is…
Of course, Dave Pasternack is not the most competitive keyword phrase in the world, either.
Dear WebProBlog,
Thanks for your even-handed coverage of this issue. As you report, we did notice some improvements in rank last week, and these were due to a number of staightforward activities and internal optimizations performed recently. None of these were, in my view, “rocket-science-level” optimizations: just the kind of tweaks that are part and parcel of the SEO canon.
We have a ways to go before this contest ends, and it’s likely we’ll see some movements the other way. I would like to think that this contest will open a useful window into the reality of the tactics used to gain visibility in SERPs, and further one of my main goals, which is to demystify SEO and make the essential principles of the practice more accessible to “non-rocket science” types.
But again, it’s too early to declare an outcome, or to really know what the search pundits will make of it once it’s over.
Sincerely,
Dave Pasternack
Did-it Search Marketing
he now has people linking to his bio page.. which is fine.. this looks like a good way to test link popularity vs. word count.. of course.. the other side of this might be that his name becomes a spam keyword.. that would rock..
hmm… lmao…
Dave, thanks for the compliments. I’m certainly trying to present both sides of the story and that includes some of the ire previous interviews have produced.
However, concerning SEO and rocket science - I agree with you when you are not dealing with a competitive keyword set. It’s not too terribly hard to lift a site or page’s ranking as long as you do some simple adjusting.
Conversely, if you are dealing with the competitive keywords like “digital camera” or some other phrase with sites upon sites trying to get to that first page. SEO in these conditions can be time consuming and many times, not the most fruitful exercise in the world. Competitive keyword SEO is definitely not a “set it and forget it” exercise.
And yes, there are quite a few spammers in the SEO game, but isn’t that true of just about every aspect of the Internet (blog spam and so on)? In fact, you could argue the business of the Internet was founded on spam (AOL, I’m looking at you).
Enjoy the rest of the competition. I’m curious to see how this turns out.
[…] Chris Richardson puts together a great summation of the Dave Pasternack controversy while at the same time linking heavy to his stuff. I read all of Chris Richardson’s great writing on WebProNews.com and you can’t tell me this also was not a silent vote for Dave Pasternack. […]
Dave wasn’t your main change simply referring to yourself to “Dave” instead of “David” in your page content and title attribute?
You guys are playing “contest” while people are dying of starvation. Anyway, why do people make offensive comments? Think psychology, he obviously ain’t all that familiar with SEO, hence the smack talking. Seriously though, he also has to defend his ‘area of business’ and by him knocking SEO, he may convert some people, as well, hype up his name. If this amazing contest wasn’t taking place, I probably wouldn’t comment, and now, with the amazing mind I have, his dang name will be embedded in my mind forever.
The game has changed since the writing of this article. Rather than clutter up the SERPS with non-relevent pages, most showing the “talking-frog” in a bad light, the #1 spot (Oilman) has 301′d his page to another front page performer (Greg Boser), currently in #2, whose page drops the matter in the proper light. That light being that someone people actually care about, Dave Pasternack, the award winning chef at the italian restaurant Esca, should be in the top spot for his worthy name.
PPC Dave, you guys tried playing the charity card, you tried doing it yourselves, you even tried gettingsome of us to help you.
In the end, your page is falling off the front page fast.
Without a handjob, I don’t see you having a chance.
I think sometimes people get honored for their work unknowingly
Don’t you think so?