Claim: Pages with top search engine positioning are the most optimized. If you imitate whatever the first 10 pages retrieved
for a keyword do in their code, your page's position will improve.
Status: Not always
This claim is the built-in implied assumption of automated Search Engine Optimization tools. On average it is true,
provided that there are a lot of pages for the keyword and provided you examine several different keywords, which the
SEO tools do not do. SEO tools do not take into account the age or authority of a Web page or the site that it comes
from. To an extent, the first pages retrieved by a Search Engine may not be those with the best on-page optimization.
Very often these pages are at the top because they are at sites with a high Google Pagerank or authority. Those sites
have high page rank because they are huge. Huge sites are often created by automatic software. If you are BBC or
Wikipedia, you don't need to do so much on-page optimization to be the top ranked page. This can change over time as
Google and other search engines may give different weighting to authority versus on-page factors. However, for example,
Wikipedia pages do not have a <description metatag. It is wrong to conclude from that that you don't need a <description
metatag or should not have one. BBC or CNN pages may have long meaningless file names generated by software. If they
happen to rank highly, it does not mean that long meaningless file names are better than brief ones. It just means that
they have many more pages in their site, many more sites linking to them, and they probably generated the particular
news item before others did.
Search Engines that base rankings on optimization are fairly new and the rules keep changing. In 1996 you could make
a page about Bill Clinton using then "cutting edge" technology. It might not be optimized at all by 2008 or 2010
standards. But by 2008, if that page had really good content, it acquired a huge number of links. If the site kept
growing, both the page and the site might have
Google Pagerank 6 or 7 or even 8. The SEO tool would look at that top page and
conclude that the best optimization for that keyword is no optimization - straight html code perhaps with a battleship
gray background and no images, as was common in that period.
The top pages for keyword Henry Kissinger in Google are from Wikipedia and the Nobel Web site biographies of
prize winners. Neither one has a description. Wikipedia has a Keywords tag first, with a lot of "garbage code" before
the title. That doesn't mean that that is the best way to optimize the pages. These sites are relatively old and have
very high authority. They were made before most search engines dictated how content must be presented.
Suppose I have the best optimized page in the world, but I just created it, and it is in a new Web site with only 1-2
links. It could take several years before that page makes it to the top ten among, say, 200 million links. Meanwhile the
older, less optimized pages are at the top, and if I emulate their code, the positioning of my page will suffer.
