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It is such a beautiful morning here where I live today and to make it even better, it's a public holiday. That means that I can sit here in my office at home and look out at the beautiful blue sky and the palm trees gently swaying in the breeze ... and later we can head down to the beach to try out our new cameras.

Before we can do that though I've got some work to chew through and this column is one of them.

Don't believe all you see or hear
I've said it plenty of times before and but I'm going to have to say it again ... don't believe everything you see and hear about search engine optimization without testing what you've been told. And that piece of advice applies regardless of who said what you believe.

It especially goes for what I say here because I claim no expert status in anything but it also applies to what someone like Matt Cutts might say. I've just finished watching one of his little video clips from YouTube where he gives some advice that may not be entirely correct.

I'm not suggesting for a moment that there was any ulterior motive in saying what he did but he may not be as fully informed about what Google does in some instances as what he might think he is. In this particular video clip he was talking about how important it is to have a site hosted in a certain country if that site's focus is that certain country.

It may be that he's correct but our testing over a number of years has not shown that at all. In fact we can get sites that are hosted on our server in the United States but that are local to us to rank much higher than similar sites that are hosted here in Australia. Of course there may be other factors involved here but when some of your competitors are locally hosted and supported by heaps of inbound links and you can still outrank them it does make you wonder.

A glitch or an indicator of something more?
Yesterday Steve posted something to one of his mainstream blogs and then realized that he had forgotten to add a link to another website that added more information for his readers ... and on this blog he does get a lot of readers.

So 15 minutes after he posted his blog entry Steve went to Google to look for the site that he wanted to link to. He typed in the keyword phrase that was important for both his blog entry and the site he was looking for and discovered the very top entry in the Google search engine results page for that phrase was the blog entry he had just posted while the site he was looking for was in second place.

Apparently in just 15 minutes Google had indexed the entry and kicked it right to the top. Today the same search from a different IP address shows that Steve's blog entry is in second spot and the site he was looking for is in the top spot.

Now before you all rush out and try that with some ultra-popular search term and find that it doesn't work for you let me say that the term Steve nailed was only reasonably competitive so we don't think that it's really going to work for competitive terms. We're also not sure why it actually worked at all ... Steve's blog entry certainly did leap-frog over a lot of other sites ... but we're going to test it with a few more entries to see what we can discover.

Oh, and by the way ... Steve's blog is hosted in the United States but is focused on an Australian topic while the site he was linking to is hosted in Germany but is focused on Australia and both of them rank far better than a .edu.au site that deals with the same topic.

Yep more testing is definitely required.

Don't always share what you discover
There are two reasons why you shouldn't always share what you may discover when you're testing what works in the search engines. I know that you can get very excited when you actually discover something that works and it's hard to keep it to yourself. I often see Steve dancing round the house and firing words at me like a machine gun when he's trying to tell me about something he's discovered. But really, discovery time is the time to take a deep breath and maybe even a cold shower.

Before you start telling people about your discoveries you need time to exploit them yourself. The more people you tell the more competition you have so don't rush to let everyone in on the secret. I know that other people will think that you're something of a guru if you share your knowledge but being a guru doesn't always put food on your table.

The second reason why you shouldn't rush to blab about your discoveries is because you may just be wrong. What you think you have found could just be an anomaly and if it is then you're going to look a little dumb when your discovery doesn't work for anyone else. If you do aspire to be a guru some day then the less dumb points you've amassed the better.

And that's where I'm leaving you for today ... the sun is still shining, those palm trees are still swaying and the siren song of the beach is becoming harder to resist.