• Register
• Log in

SEO Theory - SEO Theory and Analysis Blog

Algorithm analysis, Web community relationship analysis, SEO practices and techniques, industry news, etc.

• Home
• About SEO Theory
• SEO Glossary

Walking With SEO Gurus: How Not To Get Trampled

Posted by admin on December 27, 2006 in SEO Theory

I just deleted an entire blog post because I realized, as I was winding down toward the end, that I was about to divulge a competitive secret I haven’t really shared over the years. I thought, “Why am I writing this post?”

Well, the short answer is that I want to provide meaty content for this blog. Advanced SEO theory stuff.

The problem is that I have a conflict of interest. I’m no longer just doing SEO for myself (or personal clients). I am now Director of Search for an Internet marketing firm. I have to be a little more careful in what I share now than before.

Of course, I could just discuss things at a very high, very conceptual level but that’s boring. In fact, I recently saw someone complain in an SEO blog comment that they don’t like the various SEO blogs because the bloggers don’t share very useful tips.

On one hand, I can agree with the commenter. The vast majority of SEO blog posts appear to be filled with fluff. SEO bloggers like to whine a great deal. On the other hand, it’s not fair to expect people who are trying to market themselves (and their experience) to explain everything they do in detail. So, what’s fair and what’s just fluff?

I think all the hostile, critical, drag-down-some-strangers posts are pretty much fluff. I don’t mean every post where someone disagrees with another person in detail, or where someone just criticizes another person’s stance on a position. I mean the frequent “DIGG is so stupid”, “Wikipedia is so stupid”, “DMOZ is so stupic” kind of rants are pretty much wastes of time.

All the “Top 10″ lists, “101 ways to pick your nose”, and “5 fatal flaws of SEO” style posts are pretty much fluff, too. Top 10 (or Top 5) lists are just boring wastes of time. But if someone tries to provide a comprehensive list of tips, they’re not only shooting themselves in the foot, they’re hurting everyone else, too. Those of us who really have experience in SEO know that as soon as you share a good idea — a really useful methodology — its lifespan of usefulness has just been shortened to about six months.

It generally takes me about two years to figure out how to stabilize an idea. That’s two years of experimentation, analysis, and sifting through a lot of somewhat relevant forum and blog posts that may shed some light on an issue. Take Trust, for example. I’ve been writing (and reading) about Trust since February 2005. I’ve written a great deal about it. I have read even more. But I have not shared the several tests I have devised for indicating whether a site is trusted.

I think I’ve got a pretty good test or two. Don’t expect me to share them any time in the near future. After spending all that time figuring out ways to determine which sites are probably trusted, why should I throw it all away by sharing the tests? Won’t anyone benefit for very long from that kind of expertise.

Nonetheless, I have written enough on the topic that if you were to review everything I’ve posted over the past couple of years, you could probably figure out what my tests are. After all, I was thinking in public. It helps to bounce ideas around with other people who are fumbling for answers as much as I am.

But I’m to a point now where I’m holding back. I have often advised people who are just getting started in SEO, “Never reveal everything you know. Hold back at least one idea. That could be the difference between you and the guy you’re competing with.”

I have held back for many years now because, when I first became involved in SEO, I shared all my ideas on forums and people would take them and run them into the ground. I’m not the only person who has watched useful ideas burn out.

The advice I give out is pretty sound — more sound than most advice you’ll see on the Internet, if only because I’ve been through more ups and downs than the SEO gurus who have only been doing this for 5 years or less. And you might be surprised at how many of your favorite gurus have only been involved in SEO for so short a time — they all still have a great deal to learn about real search engine optimization because they mostly depend on links. (And, to be fair, my experience would only put me in the second generation of SEO professionals by some standards — I am not one of the founding fathers of SEO by any means.)

Nonetheless, if you have been following SEO advice for at least two years, you’ve already gone through the entire life cycles of tips such as: submit articles to free distribution services, get links from directories, exchange links only with relevant sites, and use social bookmarking services (or Wikipedia) for linkage.

All of these ideas are still popular. And there are people who still make them work. But as free SEO advice goes, these are all now pretty stupid ideas. And I used to advocate several of them. In fact, I was one of the people who helped to popularize article submission.

If you have been around for four years, then you’ve seen the life cycle of such tips as: get only high Toolbar PR links, get DMOZ listings, get links from forums and blog comments, join reciprocal link programs, buy links, etc.

I used to advocate some of those ideas. I helped to popularize three of them. All are now very stupid ideas. Reciprocation and link buying are not dead, but they are certainly far more risky now than many other practices. You really need to know what you are doing to make reciprocation and link buying work with a minimum of risk.

Some advice has remained good through the years, so don’t misunderstand what I’m saying. Some tips are just basic good sense tips, such as implementing unique page titles, using only one linking style in your pages, use bold and italics to emphasize words that make your points for your readers, write for your visitors not the search engines, and give out links freely to good sites you honestly want to recommend to people.

I’ve been advocating linking out to other sites since 1998, when I first got involved in search engine optimization. Even when I didn’t know anything about SEO, I understood the marketing value of being a resource. That is one of the fundamental principles of building Web visibility and it will always be a solid foundation on which to build a great Web site.

And yet, even today, as 2006 winds down, there are people who argue against linking out to other sites unless those sites link back to them. Such people always strike me as being too small-minded to ever achieve much on the Internet. Why in the world should anyone else link to your site if you only reciprocate links? The only people who would agree to such a bargain are people who are as desperate for links as you.

Some people excuse their reluctance by saying they don’t want to link to competitors (I haven’t advised anyone to do that in at least 6 or 7 years); or they want to “preserve their PageRank” (there is no hope for the brain dead anyway); or they don’t want to send their visitors elsewhere (Yo! Moron! How many people have spent the last four weeks camping out on your Web page?).

There are a lot of stupid excuses that justify following bad SEO advice. So, to bring this all home, here is how I think you can sift through SEO advice and find useful information. These tips won’t cut out all the noise, but they should help you evaluate SEO advice more logically and less emoitionally.

First, ask yourself: Is this advice being challenged by anyone in any popular forum? Be careful before you say “Yes”, because there are people in every forum who are still as new to SEO as the next guy, and they may challenge some very good advice. Good advice withstands challenges by virtue of being time-proven, supported by strong references, and having the virtue of at least not contradicting search engine guidelines. Good advice doesn’t necessarily have to comply with search engine guidelines, but if you’re not sure about a tip, compare it to search engine guidelines. If it flies in the face of what the search engines advise, ask yourself: do you know enough about SEO to survive the risk of being filtered, penalized, or banned?

Secondly, ask yourslf: Is this advice being offered by someone with high post counts in multiple forums? Being active for several years in more than one forum doesn’t guarantee that someone will give you good advice. For example, there are popular idiots whose stupid ideas are shared by enough people that they can get away with murder for years.

But then there are the rest of the idiots whose suggestions are so bizarre, so lame, or just so blatantly wrong that the forum moderators, admins, and regulars shoot them down quickly. When you see a tip in an active forum, wait a few days to see how discussion responds to it. A lot of new people say, “Thanks for the tip!” (perhaps only out of courtesy) before more experienced folks come in and ask the challenging questions that help people see the tipster is too new and green to be giving good advice.

Thirdly, ask yourself: Does this advice come with any substantiating references? This is where you have the popular idiots espousing really stupid ideas that should have been shot down years ago but somehow slipped past the SEO community’s BS filters. One example of really bad SEO advice is the idea of “hoarding PageRank”. This nonsense emerged from a handful of PageRank tutorials that should never have been written. All the popular PageRank tutorials (from people like Chris Ridings, Phil Craven, and even Rand Fishkin) are just blatantly wrong, directly contradicted by numerous technical papers going all the way back to the original Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine paper that first proposed PageRank.

Most people don’t know how to check these references, but you can ask a simple question when you see an “expert” advocate what seems like an advanced idea: Does everyone in the SEO community agree with you?. Anyone who is credible will immediately point out at least one contrary point of view. But be mindful there may be considerable history behind the conflict. If you run into a “Great Debate”, don’t allow yourself to be quickly swayed by either side. You can usually find less controversial advice that will be more reliable. Controversy is a red flag, and you don’t need to waste your time on figuring out who is right and who is wrong. You can throw yourself into the fray when you are well past the “I need SEO advice” stage.

Still, if you’re not sure about some point some pontificator is advocating, ask for references. If all the substantiation an SEO guru can offer comes from papers, blogs, FAQs, forum posts, and tutorials written by other SEO gurus (especially their “good friends”), there is most likely nothing useful to you in the advice being given. It may be good advice, it may be bad. If you’re easily convinced one way or another, you probably don’t know enough about SEO to figure out who is right and who is wrong.

Virtually every popular SEO pundit has given out bad advice. I have given out bad advice, and so has Jill Whalen, Danny Sullivan, Brett Tabke, and anyone else you can think of. We’ve all been wrong on one or more occasions. We’re human. We make mistakes. We may believe incorrect ideas for some length of time before changing our minds. Hold every SEO tip you read and consider accountable to the highest standard of excellence. You’ll find that most SEO tips just don’t make the cut.

How much should free advice be worth? How much is your Internet income worth to you? Are you prepared to risk it all on advice that an SEO guru gives out freely?

There are, of course, content advocates who preach against the perils of using SEO gimmicks and formulas. They want people to create compelling content so that their sites will attract lots of linkage. But the reality of the situation is that most people will never create content that is so very compelling. Maybe you can hire a good copywriter to help you, or a great graphics designer, but you get what you pay for (and sometimes you don’t even get that).

People are looking for the magic bullet. There are no magic bullets. There are ideas that work, ideas that people think should work, and ideas that should never see the light of day. Most of the time, the vast majority of SEO tips are pretty much harmless fluff. They help newcomers become familiar and comfortable with many of the basic concepts that are popular in the SEO community.

It’s when people try to get down to the nitty gritty too quickly that you need to beware. And keep in mind that just because someone has an idea that works does not mean you’ve got all you need. You have no idea of how long that idea will work, or why it works (or seems to work), or what you’ll have to do if it turns out in the end to be a very bad idea. The most reliable practical advice in the SEO industry is usually the least immediately satisfying advice, the advice that makes you feel like, “I don’t want to wait six months to a year for results.”

If I were doing your SEO for you, I would not guarantee you results, but I would expect to see something in about two months, even with a new domain in a competitive industry. If you haven’t been doing this as long as me, expecting to figure out a two-month solution — or to find a two month solution on the Web — is a waste of your time. Even if you do find one, its days of being useful are numbered. And then you’ll be right back where you started.

Welcome to the land of the giants: be careful where we step, for we may indeed step on you.