I have a feeling that Michael Martinez is going to find his site ranking high for some very entertaining phrases any day now

What a frightening prospect, oh my.

Greg, let’s look at what you originally posted about the Amish Furniture and GoKarts once again (I’m cutting and pasted from your previous post):

Do you see the Gokart site sitting towards the top? That’s what happens when you don’t pay attention to pre-existing anchor text.

It turns out that the domain amishfurnitureandcrafts.com, which is listed in the ODP, now resolves to the same IP as gokartsusa.com. It’s hard to say whether or not this was done intentionally, because the hosting location and registration information is completely different for the two domains. That means there’s a chance that the owner of the gokart site has no idea this has happened. (competitive sabotage??…)

Regardless of who is responsible, the end result is the same. The gokart site gets hosed. Google has determined both domains point to a single site, and that has caused the anchor text of the two separate domains to be combined. Now that really wouldn’t be so bad if you still were able to rank for the phrase combinations from each individual domain. I know if I sold gokarts and mini bikes, I wouldn’t mind the occasional email asking why I show up for amish furniture as long as I ranked well for my core phrases.

“the anchor text of the two separate domains to be combined”. Nope.

Take a look at this page:
http://www.xomreviews.com/amishfurnitureandcrafts.com

It’s linking to the old domain name, that still resolves to the IP address for the GoKartsUSA site. You get both “amish furniture” and “go karts” and related expressions on the linking page.

What’s even cuter is that if you look at the source code for http://www.amishfurnitureandcrafts.com, you’ll find the following:

font class=”horznavbar”>| 

Well, Greg, your conclusion that Google must be confusing domains hosted on the same IP address (despite the fact they don’t do this with millions of other shared-IP domains) and your argument that there were no inbound links for the page using the GO-Kart anchor text were what drew my fire.

I never said this was an example of Google screwing up with virtual hosting. This isn’t a case of two unique sites being hosted on the same IP. It’s a case of two unique domains resolving to the same site.

Through the years, I have shown people in SEO forums many examples of pages where Google associates text outside the anchors with target pages. And there is technical literature that refers to this stuff.

I never said there wasn’t. All I’m saying is you would have to be on crack to come to the conclusion that two scraper pages were responsible for the gokart site ranking for amish phrases.

In this case, you just didn’t put all the facts together and you argued for an exceptionally unlikely cause-and-effect.

This is the part where you loose me. What exactly do you consider to be an “unlikely cause and effect?” Are you really saying that it is highly unlikely that the anchor text of the amish domain is responsible for the gokart site’s amish rankings?

As far as rankings go, since Google is now claiming to take into consideration over 300 “mechanisms”, neither you nor I are in a position to explain any rankings.

Then why are we having this conversation? Cleary, I don’t know what all the 300 items are. But it doesn’t really matter because I am quite familiar with the 3 or 4 items that carry the most weight. Google can tell the word they look at 3000 items to determine rankings, and that would have absolutely zero impact on this particular case. I know it’s the anchor text causing the rankings because I’ve documented the same effect with personal and client projects dozens of times. I can also replicate the same effect with pretty much any site in a matter of days.

Through the years, I have shown people in SEO forums many examples of pages where Google associates text outside the anchors with target pages. And there is technical literature that refers to this stuff.

So, yes, I’m going to call you and anyone else on your sloppy analysis. You’re perfectly welcome to call me on sloppy analysis, too. No one is perfect.

In this case, you just didn’t put all the facts together and you argued for an exceptionally unlikely cause-and-effect.

As far as rankings go, since Google is now claiming to take into consideration over 300 “mechanisms”, neither you nor I are in a position to explain any rankings. You obviously feel you are qualified to do so. I don’t feel you are.

But if you have actually been allowed to peak under the hood at Google, and can say so, now would be a good time to establish a bona fide credential on Google rankings.

Matt demonstrated how one can easily rank for a popular expression (“SEO”)

Nothing to do with a PR7 site and thousands of IBLs I suppose.

I had a similar argument earlier this year. I build pages for my brothers website. He is an award winning professional, his site is purely informational non-commercial.
Content wise an outstanding resource site, we have seen nothing to touch it.
I should add, only because of the combination of his expertise and me building it for nothing, paying someone to build it would not be viable nor could anyone build one without my brother’s professional experience.

To prove that content is worthless I took a great page he wrote that was ranking nowhere (year old domain few inbound links to site etc) I replaced all the text in the body of the article with random words – just did basic on page for the keywords H1 – file extension etc.
Stuck it on my authority site which has no connection with this theme at all – bang #3 in days !

Content is king providing you already rank and people can see it.