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Linked to the Ochlocracy and other S.E.O. cliches

Posted by admin on January 30, 2007 in SEO Theory

There is an old story I love to tell about a day during the French Revolution when a brave salon owner opened for business. Not many people came by at first but after a while a ragged-looking man came running in and demanded a brandy. The salon owner poured his drink for him. The man gratefully sipped at his liquor and as he did so a raging mob brandishing torches, pitchforks, ropes, clubs, and other weapons of the peasantry thundered by like a river of fury.

When the noise had abated the salon owner saw that her customer had finished his drink. “Would you like another?” she asked him.

“I cannot,” he replied. “I have to follow that mob that just passed by your door.”

“Why?” she asked.

“I am their leader,” he told her, and he stepped out the door.

That’s pretty much the way you could describe all of the leaders of today’s search engine optimization industry. They follow the mob. This field is ruled by the Ochlocracy of “collective SEO wisdom” and people who dare challenge that collective wisdom are usually laughed at, flamed, or ignored.

If you know better than the mob what is going on, being ignored is a good thing if you are directly competing with them for traffic. But if you’re trying to build your reputation and establish your credibility, you cannot afford to let the mob pass you by. In that respect, most people are me-tooers. They follow up to every forum and blog post they can find with some variation on “Great post!” and “Hey, that’s exactly what I was thinking!”

Empty minds can think alike just as easily (or perhaps more so) as great minds, so one should be careful about where one offers a “me too”. Many me-tooers appear to just be in it for the links anyway, so perhaps it doesn’t matter how great (or empty) their minds truly are. What matters is how well they execute the link drop.

Of course, the one serious challenge of dropping links within the SEO community is that you’re pretty much wasting your time. SEOs do not trust other people involved in SEO. They nofollow your links, delete your links, warn you, ban you, block you, ridicule you, apologize to other SEOs for allowing you to drop your link in the first place, shame-facedly admit they should not have left themselves open to a link, and sternly advise you not to run around the Web dropping links (even though they’ve been known to leave a link or two themselves).

Still, for a community whose members trust each other so poorly they won’t allow each other to link home to their own pages (or client pages), isn’t it interesting that they follow each other’s primal teachings so quickly? Where else can you find an industry filled with experts and leaders who only a year ago were completely new to the whole business? Where else can you find top leaders in the field who don’t even know how to use on-page optimization to achieve quick placement in competitive search engine results?

It’s okay to use the mob as a weather gauge as long as you’re standing on a high rooftop, looking down at the city. You can see the fires where they’ve been and you can see at least some of the fleeing aristocrats who may next fall prey to the mob’s wicked vengeance. But if you run with the pack, you are no better off than anyone else in the pack. Even the mob’s leader cannot really tell it which way to go. He has to look at what everyone else is doing to get an idea of what he thinks he should be doing. After all, he doesn’t want to give up that coveted leadership role.

SEO leaders can be very close-knit. Some forum communities will close ranks in the face of contrary statements and even edit posts by people who are not echoing what the moderators say. It has happened in more than one forum. In fact, in my opinion, you haven’t earned the right to be called an original thinker in this field if you haven’t found at least one forum where something you say flies completely in the face of some forum moderator’s pet peeve.

There is enough diversity in the SEO community to accomodate every idiotic idea and every great breakthrough. Most people won’t know the difference anyway, so why not find a niche and stick with it?

Well, I’ll give you a reason: competition.

If you never do anything for yourself, you’ll always be doing only what other people say worked for them. There are two problems with that approach: first, you aren’t getting ahead of the curve; secondly, what worked for someone else may not work for you.

It’s easy enough to learn the holey mantras of “get more links” and “my PR is X”. It’s not so easy to learn why the page with relatively few inbound links outranks the page with lots of inbound links (hint: it could be because of one really good inbound link or because of on-page optimization or because the search engine burped or …).

It’s easy enough to see who slaps whose back and run around all the blogs to become another good buddy back-slapper. It’s not so easy to see whose brilliant post of the week actually tells you something useful.

When you’re new to the business and just learning the principles, copying what other people do is almost the only way to learn. But the time to stop copying is when things start working for you. At that point, you need to sit down and figure out why they are working.

Clue number 1: It’s not all about links.

Until you can get past the ridiculous notion that it’s all about links, you’ll always be behind the curve. Sometimes it’s the links. Sometimes it’s not.

Generally speaking, there are four things that affect your search engine rankings:

1. What you do with your pages
2. What other people do with their pages
3. What the search engines do with their data
4. What people search for

You know, that last part is where a lot of people get stuck. They don’t realize they can actually tell people what to search for.

Where does linking fit into all that? It falls into sections 1 and 2. And section 3. I’ll leave it to you to figure whether it falls into section 4.

Generally speaking, you can tell people:

• What to search for
• Where to search for it
• When to search for it
• How to qualify their search results

You know, that last part is where a lot of people get stuck.

Just go search for failure on Google and you’ll see some surprising results (hint: I set it up to show you what I want you to see). What does that query tell you? It tells me something very interesting. It tells me that failure in the white house is still very much a part of our political reality (even though I may personally associate that failure more with Dick Cheney than with George Bush — but you’re not interested in my political analysis, are you?).

You can still show that anyone is a failure with the right query. It’s not the query itself so much as the presentation. After all, we can easily say that Mr. Moore is most famous for his fahrenheit 911 failure.

The bottom line is that it’s not so easy to force the mob to change direction. If a search engine — which supposedly controls its own data — fails to change the mob’s momentum, how much success do you think you will have?

If you want to be a leader in the field, you cannot lead the mob. Link popularity may or may not make a difference for your ranking campaigns, but it won’t help you stay ahead of the curve.

Do you see why?