The things you know about the search engines, you don’t really know.

Everybody and his brother has a bit of SEO advice these days.  A bit of this magic powder, or that snake oil, and instant rankings.  It doesn’t take long before the rumor becomes “fact” after enough people have repeated it.  I’m here to say, just don’t believe any of it.

Even the people who watch the search engines most closely, don’t always know what it is they’re seeing.  Matt Cutts recently spoke about the “IP Watchers” and said “The other reason why it’s not worth watching data centers is because there’s an entire set of IP addresses, if you’re a super-duper gungho SEO, you’ll know 72.2.14.whatever.  But that IP address will typically go to one datacenter.  But that’s not guaranteed.  If that one datacenter comes out of rotation, we’re going to do something else to it, we’re going to change the hardware infrastructure . . . So if you take that datacenter out of rotation for some reason, that IP address can point to a completely different datacenter.  So, the currency, the ability to really compare changes and talk to a fellow datacenter watcher and say ‘what do you see at 72.2.14.whatever?’ is really pretty limited.”

Obviously, this inhibits the ability of the datacenter watchers to be able to determine for sure that what they’re seeing is really on the datacenter they think it’s on.  Of course, Matt has a better idea for what they should do with their time.  “So, I would definately encourage you to spend more time worrying about the results you rank for, increasing the quality of your content, looking for high-quality people that you think should be linking to you and letting them know about that, and stuff like that.”  I agree.