Like most people in the SEO industry I am a massive fan of Rand Fishkin from Moz and always dedicate 10 – 15 minutes of my Friday afternoon to watching the latest Whiteboard Friday video. In this weeks video, Rand talks about Topic Modelling & Semantic Connectivity and how Google can understand the intent of a users search without the requirement of traditional on-page optimisation. In the video he uses the example of searching for the term “That movie where the guy is called The Dude”

Google can correctly determine that the user is searching for information about the film the Big Lebowski with IMDb.com and Wikipedia ranking at the top, interestingly when searching for “That movie where the guy is called The Dude” using Bing the Big Lebowski is still the first search result however Bing’s search algorithm doesn’t understand the query quite as well as Google does and returns the IMDb.com in third with information about the James Bond film The Man with the Golden Gun.

This weeks Whiteboard Friday got me thinking:

What is That movie where the guy is called The Dude?

I think we all figured that out pretty quickly, what I was really thinking was how important is traditional on-page optimisation vs semantic search? After all yes Google does understand what the user means by the example search phrase and does return information on The Big Lebowski but the fact remains not a single website indexed in Google contained the exact phrase “That movie where the guy is called The Dude” until about 8 hours ago when Rand published his post.

This post has the basic optimisation the tell the search engines what the content is about: Page title, Page heading (h1), subheading (h2), main body of content, meta description (not that that would help rankings) all mention That movie where the guy is called The Dude. Previously not 1 website page mentioned the exact phrase. I don’t think our Reflect Digital Blog can quite compete with IMDb.com and it’s relevance to The Big Lebowski not to mention their Domain Authority of 100 and Page Authority of 89 but i’m interested to see how relevant Google thinks this post is.

Give it a few days and test the results for yourself by Googling “That movie where the guy is called The Dude”. Although I fear I may have gone too far and been penalised for keyword stuffing for this last mention.