By now you have probably heard and seen Leslie Rohde’s two videos from StomperNet’s Going Natural series: Advanced SEO: LSI is Lame and A Top Ranking Hiding in Your Site?

The first video bothered me because Leslie didn’t use the suggested title of: “You can’t spell Bull S**t Without LSI.” Humorous and true.

Now before you think this is a direct slam on Russell Wright of Theme Zoom and Bruce Clay, both of whom I consider personal friends, you are obviously looking for something that isn’t there. The only person Leslie seeks out to personally slam and humiliate is me, and I have the pictures to prove it.

Let’s face it, just the thought of LSI has always been sexy. And then the talk of the Google patents and things just sort of snow ball and we often lose sight of what really matters when it comes to ranking criteria. I remember from ’04-’06 I was a big supporter of LSI and Michael Marshall’s tool, Theme Master. The tool would later be sold to a company and it was renamed OptiRanker, very close to Leslie Rohde’s OptiLink and OptiSpider.

Which was quite interesting.

So, why did I support something that really didn’t work? Because I was an idiot. Yes, an idiot. It happens. Let me explain.

When you test, it is vital that you have a control page and a test page … and after you are done testing, you remove what you did and it should return back as it was before. I was just blinded by “LSI” in that it worked so well that I never reverted back – I just kept moving forward. And then a new staff member suggested removing the LSI components to see exactly how much of effect it had on the rankings in Google. So we did and guess what?

The rankings didn’t move.

We then tore out LSI components from all the pages we could find that we used Marshall’s tool on and the same thing …. rankings didn’t move.

It was then when I realized that LSI was just a sexy subject but not part of the algorithm as we had thought.

So watch Leslie’s videos and StomperNet is reopening Stomping the Search Engines 2.0, which I was a part of for just a dollar. The one part which Leslie didn’t mention that I feel is vital is that you must check the cache date where you get your links. If you acquire a link and the page isn’t indexed by Google and NEVER gets indexed by Google, how much impact do you think it will have on your site? Right. None!

Back to Russell Wright and Bruce Clay. Both of their models are solid and I am still a member and an active user of ThemeZoom. It is a great research tool. I’ve talked with Bruce at length about his methodologies and what Leslie debunks in this video is NOT part of Bruce’s methods – at least from my perspective. Watch the videos, and you will gain great insight how you can improve your rankings in about three days. Seriously.