SEO Page Design vs. Linking - A Cosmic SEO War

I’ve been following this thread and quoted it twice now - it’s an excellent discussion of linking and SEO page design, as well as the rationale behind both. I don’t see the two as a mutually exclusive thing, but I do tend towards the content and on-page side of things. For me, the discussion ended here:

Perception is often a dim reflection of truth.

For example, the four fundamental forces are the strong nuclear force, electromagnetism, the weak nuclear force, and gravity. The strong force is about 100 times more powerful than electromagnetism, while electromagnetism is 10 billion times stronger than the weak nuclear force. Bringing up a very distant rear is gravity. The electromagnetic force is ten thousand billion billion billion times stronger than gravity, which is so weak we’ve never even been able to find its interacting agent, the graviton.

And yet, the greatest concentration of energy in the universe is probably a black hole.

The nuclear forces both work across very short distances, subatomic distances, and can never be concentrated beyond those distances. Though strong, it is so limited that we rarely even perceive it in real life (and even more rarely survive it when it can be perceived). Electromagnetism, on the other hand, operates across infinite distances, but tends to cancel itself when concentrated because it comes in both positive and negative, attractive and repulsive, flavors. Only gravity, which also works across infinite distances and is seen only as an attracting force, can grow and grow and grow, ultimately resulting in collapsing universes and massive black holes so strong that even light, though billions of times stronger, can’t escape.

I think on-page content is like the electromagnet force. It is billions and billions of times stronger than links, but it cannot be effectively concentrated. You can’t just keep adding more and more keywords to rank better. Term vector analysis gives us a mathematical foundation for understanding why content, like electromagnetism, tends to cancel itself beyond a certain point. Relevancy has upper limits.

Links, on the other hand, are like gravity in that they can grow and grow and grow, with the only practical limitation being the size of the Internet. Each link, by itself, is too weak to even detect, but collectively their strength can be truly massive. Googlebombs, whether they are intentional like “miserable failure” or unintentional like “click here,” are the black holes of the search engine universe. Like the light that can’t escape a singularity, content is masked and made to seem superfluous.

In short, content and SEO page design is the secret sauce of optimization. But when you’ve got the necessary content, titles and code together to your satisfaction, the linking must commence for the simple fact that you’ve done all you can do for a certain keyword or keyword combination.