Wow you were slow on this one Aaron, care to give someone props for getting those FULL interviews out into the mix? ;)

Wow, combined that's an hour and a half! Unless it's "Gladiator" or "Fight Club" I doubt I could sit still for that long.

Great interview. Well worth the listen.

Great interview. Well worth the listen.

Nothing earth shattering but still worth listening to. Thanks Aaron.

Nothing earth shattering but still worth listening to. Thanks Aaron.

Really gr8 interview.. i really appreciate it.. thanx for da info.. Aaron ;) u rock

Good interviews. Interesting that Matt would recommend that I concentrate on traffic from MSN and Yahoo . . . while it's good advice I wouldn't have expected it from him.

Well look at it from Matt's perspective. If you are concentrating on manipulating competing engines then you probably are spending less effort on Google.

From the sound of the conversations, and also what has been being said lately on the forums, it feels like the SEO industry has really changed it's methods from trying to "trick" the search engines to trying to really comply with their requests and stick to strict "white hat", common practice techniques.

It seems to me that what works now is not even close to what the common assumption of "SEO" is. The algorithms have evolved so much, that even a decent linkbuilding campaign is difficult to execute without possibly raising G's eyebrow. It seems the key to rankings now is simply building a solid, well functioning, useful website and letting the engines do their job rather than trying to do it for them.

Hi Kyle
I think for most average webmasters targeting Google you are 100% correct. But for the other engines it also depends on a few other things:

• programming skill (always is a plus, even if it is just used for valuing commodities - like link value, site value, odds of a site having enough authority to rank if you expanded its scope)

• financial and knowledge resources (money allows you to pay people to build software for evaluating the value of commodities, money also lets you buy more of them. knowledge combined with money and programming allows you to more effectively leverage all of them)
• engine you are targeting (MSN is SOOOOOOO easy to spam still. and Yahoo! is reasonably easy as well.)

As time passes they will wipe away more inefficiencies in the market, but in large scale relational databases there will always be some profit potential if you know what to look for.

There will always be factors used in ranking that can be reverse engineered, so there will always be effective "black hat" seo (if that is what any attempt to rank in G has become).

Any algorithmic approach to web ranking will be manipulated by webmasters. Even MC says to experiment with your templates until you are happy with them - basically saying to tweak your on-page factors until you are ranking in the best possible way.

If G is looking for "natural" linking patterns instead of rewarding purchased links or farmed links then I tip my hat because that was a really bad system anyway. But to believe that the greatest minds in the industry can't simulate a "natural" linking structure would be folly.

There will still be ways to buy your way into ranking I suspect. All the talk of "viral" and "buzz" marketing really means that people will have to spend their money creating original content and marketing it in a more traditional fashion which is OK by me. All the time and money spent on irrelevant link obsession was a real drain on value for the Internet at large (and humanity for that matter).