Automattic’s Legal Claims About SEO… Is This Real? via @sejournal, @martinibuster

Automattic's Legal Claims About SEO... Is This Real? [if IE 9]> <link rel="stylesheet" href=" <![endif] Skip to content

1. SEJ
2. ⋅

Automattic’s Claims About SEO

The counterclaim explains:

Automattic next argues that the repetition of keywords on a web page is WP Engine’s SEO strategy. Here’s where their claims become controversial to those who know how search engines rank websites.

The counterclaim asserts:

On information and belief, internet search engines factor in the number of times a term appears in a website’s text in assessing the “relevance” of a website to the terms a user enters into the search engine when looking for websites.

They call WP Engine’s strategy aggressive:

Is The Number Of Keywords Used A Ranking Factor?

I have twenty-five years of experience in search engine optimization and have a concomitantly deep understanding of how search engines rank content. The fact is that Automattic’s claim that search engines “factor in the number of times” a keyword is used in a website’s content is outdated and incorrect.

Modern search engines don’t factor in the number of times a keyword appears on a web page as a ranking factor. Google’s algorithms use models like BERT to gain a semantic understanding of the meaning and intent of the keyword phrases used in search queries and content, resulting in the ability to rank content that doesn’t even contain the user’s keywords.

Those aren’t just my opinions; Google’s web page about how search works explicitly says that content is ranked according to the user’s intent, regardless of keywords, which directly contradicts Automattic’s claim about WPE’s SEO:

“To return relevant results, we first need to establish what you’re looking for – the intent behind your query. To do this, we build language models to try to decipher how the relatively few words you enter into the search box match up to the most useful content available.

This involves steps as seemingly simple as recognizing and correcting spelling mistakes, and extends to our sophisticated synonym system that allows us to find relevant documents even if they don’t contain the exact words you used.”

What Is The Proof?

Screenshot Of Graph

Screenshot Of Graph Closeup

Automattic’s Comparison Is Arguably Biased

Two of the hosts listed in the comparison, Namecheap and GoDaddy, are primarily known as domain name registrars. Namecheap is the second biggest domain name registrar in the world. There’s no need to belabor the point that these two companies in Automattic’s comparison may be biased choices to compare against WP Engine.

Of the eighteen hosts that Automattic chose to compare with WP Engine, only two of them are comparable in service to WP Engine: Kinsta and Rocket.net.

Here are the results:

Rocket.net

Screenshot of Google’s Search Results

Kinsta

WP Engine

• Rocket.net: 21 times
• WP Engine: 27 times
• Kinsta: 55 times

Here are the results:

• WPX Hosting: 9
• Flywheel: 16
• InstaWP: 22
• Pressable: 23
• Pagely: 28

A Comparison With Generalist Web Hosts

Next, we’ll compare the generalist web hosts listed in Automattic’s comparison.

Other Web Hosts Compared To WP Engine:

1. InMotion Hosting: 101 times
2. Greengeeks: 97 times
3. Jethost: 71 times
4. Verpex: 52 times
5. GoDaddy: 49 times
6. Cloudways: 47 times
7. Namecheap: 41 times
8. Liquidweb: 40 times
9. Pair: 40 times
10. Hostwinds: 37 times
11. KnownHost: 33 times
12. Mochahost: 33 times
13. Panthen: 31 times
14. Siteground: 30 times
15. WP Engine: 27 times

Will Automattic’s SEO Claims Be Debunked?

Keyword Density Tool

Featured Image by Shutterstock/file404

Category News SEO Read Full Bio SEJ STAFF Roger Montti Owner - Martinibuster.com at Martinibuster.com

I have 25 years hands-on experience in SEO, evolving along with the search engines by keeping up with the latest ...

Source: Search Engine Journal