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Wishful thinking optimization cures all SEO ills

Posted by admin on January 17, 2007 in SEO Theory

There are people in the SEO industry who “would like to think” that some things work certain ways, or they believe that some things “should work in such-and-such a way”. I see these people, some of them fairly well-known and respected, make such remarks in forums, on blogs, and reportedly even at conferences.

There is nothing more dangerous and detrimental to the success of any project of any scope than wishful thinking. Business executives tend to wallow in wishful thinking, and they often interject their wishes into the productive conduct of successful projects that are not performing to expectations. But sometimes projects don’t work and the wishful thinkers roll up their sleeves and jump in, assuming that any change is better than no change.

In search engine optimization, wishful thinking continually resets the clock. That is, with search engines, you have to create content or get links placed and then wait. But wishful thinking optimization has the unfortunate effect of causing people to spin their wheels, and when you spin your SEO wheels every day is a new day. It’s an opportunity to stop wasting your time hoping the search engines will take W3C standards into consideration and to get back to fundamentals.

Wishful thinkers tend NOT to get back to fundamentals, so each day that goes by is wasted and the clock resets for them. You are always stuck at the beginning of a successful campaign when you trap yourself in the wishful thinking zone.

Which is not to say you may not be practicing good fundamentals out of pure habit. But if you feel the search engines should be ignoring certain sites because you feel those sites are not “quality sites”, you’re practicing wishful thinking optimization. If you feel you have “good quality links”, you’re practicing wishful thinking optimization.

Wishful thinking doesn’t look at both sides of the coin.

Wishful thinking doesn’t bend to the clear results of scientific evaluation.

Wishful thinking leads you to conduct poorly designed tests, the results of which are so ambiguous anyone can draw contrary conclusions from them. Think of all the times I have pointed out to people in various SEO forums that their tests provided insufficient information. Those people were practicing wishful thinking optimization.

Wishful thinking optimization has proven time and again that Google relies mainly or solely on links.

Wishful thinking optimization has proven time and again that domain age matters.

Wishful thinking optimization has proven time and again that Toolbar PR is useful to know.

Wishful thinking optimization has outproduced productive optimization techniques by every possible measure. It sounds plausible, makes you feel warm and fuzzy, and offers quick glib answers to every problem posted in forums.

You cannot distinguish between SEOs who practice wishful thinking optimization and SEOs who are careful to avoid it. How do you avoid wishful thinking? As soon as something goes wrong, are you even aware of what happened? Most of us coast along until we see serious drops in traffic, a client hammers us for lost traffic, or we see everyone else complaining about something and then we think, “Maybe I should check my rankings.”

Sure signs of wishful thinking optimization include: checking rankings every day (except I do it for good reason — just in case something changes); doing the same thing over and over again (it’s a good fundamental practice regardless of whether it actually works); assuming that your opinion is just as valid as anyone else’s (more often than not, the entire SEO community has absolutely no clue as to what just happened with any particular search algorithm update); reading blogs and forums for SEO insight, wisdom, and advice (after all, if other people are willing to share then they must have something worth sharing).

Wishful thinking optimization rationlizes itself with professional grace. You pretty much know you were optimizing wishfully when you reluctantly concede that, yeah, that bozo with the cheap Web site just passed you up in the SERPs — for five or six expressions you thought you had nailed. After all, you were practicing good fundamentals, right?

Every now and then I lose control of a SERP or set of SERPs because of wishful thinking optimization. I would like to think that I have done all I can or should do and that my clueless competition has no chance of taking my positions away from me. But I’m not the only vain person on the planet. Every now and then, someone says to himself, “I can do this.”

That’s all it takes. With the right attitude, you can change any SERP. You don’t assume the search engines are going to keep giving you all the love. You don’t assume they are going to keep ignoring you. You don’t waste your time hoping they favor one standard over another.

You change something, anything, and start looking for whatever works.

Successful search engine optimization is pragmatic. You do whatever it takes to get the job done.

Don’t mistake that as a rationalization for so-called “black hat” SEO tactics. I’m not raising any ethical arguments. All I am saying is that when you get tired of scratching your head, you drop the wishful thinking optimization facade and you get back to basics: you experiment, you evaluate results, you adjust.

That’s search engine optimization. Everything else is just wishful thinking optimization.