That is the reason I can think of to describe this flatering posts, which explains why Andy thinks this site became successful.

Most linkbait tends to focus on controversy, flavor of the moment hot items, or various forms of regurgitated content. Short term sites can get a spike from such activities, but real longterm brands are not built exclusively off them. Many people ask me how to create something remarkable and linkworthy. You can research just about any market and come up with a few ideas in 10 minutes. See what ideas spread in the past, and see what news stories were popular in parallel markets. Look at

• what people are talking about in the market right now

• the top search results
• popular related searches
• terms in the same field that are often covered by the mainstream media (or others who point authoritative links at competing sites)
• bookmarked results on social media sites

You can take it one step further and create something you would be proud to show your mom. Certainly cliche to say that, but if you are creating that kind of content then you are on the right path. And if your mom hates your market or is no longer around, see who the leaders are in your market and impress them. From their perspective, is what you are doing unique and original enough to be comment worthy. Be honest.

There is also one other way to tell if what you are doing is going to be highly linkable or a passing fad. Imagine you were the person in the market who is seen as the leading authority for the keyword or idea you are going after. Is your idea good enough that the person you want to replace would be willing to link at it or try to copy it (depending on the type of person they are)?

If they are likely to recreate your idea what tangible assets can you leverage to make it hard to duplicate? Is there a way you can brand the idea as your own to where others market your brand by even mentioning the topic? Is there a domain name that adds credibility to your offering? Is there a way you can ask for community involvement to get other topical gurus to help spread your idea?

It doesn't matter if you try and fail. You at least learn from it. Eventually something will stick, and you only need to be right once.

A bit slow to mention this article that came out while I was at SMX, but it is worth mentioning. The NYT ran an article about Google's relevancy algorithms titled Google Keeps Tweaking Its Search Engine, which talks about how Google reacts to relevancy problems. The article should be required reading for all SEOs and search lovers. Rand offered a great overview of the article, highlighting that Google noticed their age weighting was too heavy when Google Finance was not ranking where they thought it should, Google changes their matching algorithms to place more weight on phrase matching for some queries, and that Google has created a query deserves freshness (QDF) algorithm which determines how well to mix in new and old results.

Matt Cutts, who was quoted in the New York Times article, also commented on it on his blog, confirming that

The search-quality team makes about a half-dozen major and minor changes a week to the vast nest of mathematical formulas that power the search engine.

Google is not the only search engine heavily focused on the human elements of search. In one of Tim Mayer's slides he showed a Yahoo! search result which said something along the lines of Yahoo! employees see bad results? Report spam.

The two things Google does more aggressively than the other engines are:

• Drive traffic: they send Wikipedia 12x as much traffic as Yahoo! does

• Impart intent upon the publisher

Build as many quality signals as you can, such that if they ever impart intent on your sites you can get away with more dirty stuff than a spammy sounding unbranded site can.

Google recently added the ability for you to report link buyers, which is probably nothing more than a mind control game and a complete waste of time. I recently saw what looked like obvious link buying by Discovery.com. Do you think Google would do anything about it if I reported them? Nope.

Google also recently starting a phased launch of their position placement reports, which is far more beneficial to webmasters, as it shows what sites your AdSense ads are syndicated to. Most sites monetized via AdSense only make a fraction of their full potential, so sharing this data presents more arbitrage opportunities. How you can use this data to profit:

• refine your AdSense ad buys to only target the best performing sites and pages

• better learn who has your desired traffic stream and create things that appeal to their ego / belief system / audience
• buy custom ads direct from the best converting sites (including text links)
• find out what pages on competing sites get the most traffic and see how easy it is to rank for the terms those pages target
• survey a competing site's traffic profile to find out which entire sections or sub-sections you should duplicate
• if a site is getting a lot of traffic but an exceptionally poor CTR, consider buying the site outright and better integrating the ads into the content

I generally get mostly positive feedback here, but sometimes I stir stuff a bit and get negative feedback. Over the last year nearly half of my negative feedback has came from the IP address 24.208.220.xx. The funny thing is, no positive comments come from that IP address, and nearly every comment they leave has a different name signed to it.

• John was worried about me having a Trojan in some software. So worried, in fact, that he also left another comment on the same post under the name Matthew.

• Mark claimed SEO for Firefox violated Firefox's trademark.
• Robin claimed I was an idiot for saying that AdWords was less stable than SEO.
• Stacy made the ignorant comment that search spamming is against the law.
• Marty thought Elite Retreat looked way overpriced.
• Steven called me a jackass.
• Shawn stated he thought I was afraid the Internet was affecting my job security.
• Big John claimed that I had wrote yet another whiny post.
• Steve, Kyle, Talk Radio, Mary J, kind of funny, and Charles Tomey all thought SEO Elite was the best thing since sliced bread, which might explain why they so adamently hate Backlink Analyzer and SEO for Firefox.

If they thought they were so clever with all the rude comments, why were they too stupid to change their IP address when they wrote them?

If a lot of people are throwing hate your way make sure to check the IP address. In some cases it is just one person who really hates you. :)