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We Have A Critical Need for SEO Standards

Posted by Michael Martinez on January 29, 2008 in SEO Theory

I don’t speak for Dirk Johnson, a partner in the reciprocal link management firm Domain Drivers. Nor does he speak for me. In the January 29, 2008 LED Digest, Dirk shared the following comments as part of an ongoing discussion about the SEO industry:

…99% of this is not rocket science, by any means. I cashoun explain basic SEO concepts, while showing actual examples of sites that follow them successfully to a real estate agent during a 30 minute phone call. In fact, I have been doing exactly that for the last few weeks, to a lot of people. At the end of the conversation, they are not only grateful, but stunned that it is all so straightforward. Many are also quite upset that they’d previously spent thousands of dollars for “SEO services” and got very little tangible to show for it.

Dirk makes other comments, some more complimentary to successful SEO consultants. However, he has a long history of trashing the SEO industry. As a reciprocal link management service provider, Dirk has taken his lumps from the so-called “White Hat” or “Best Practices” SEO providers who almost regularly advise people not to engage in link management schemes, not to retain those services, etc.

Through the years, Dirk has told many people how great his service is, how happy his clients are, how he has often had to clean up the mess made by “SEO consultants” that got his clients into trouble, etc. I have no doubt that Dirk has had more than a few burned people come to his service for help. A lot of people get burned when paying for online promotion. Some of them get disgusted and give up. Others turn to a different type of service for satisfaction.

I could easily name a few SEO consultants who have been as self-promoting as Dirk. Some of those SEO consultants are actually much better at trashing people than Dirk is. So there is, in my opinion, unprofessional behavior and marketing hype on both sides of the fence.

And there are successes and failures on both sides of the fence. Reciprocal link management, when done right, should offend no one — and I have no doubt that every reciprocal link management service will step up to tell you that they do it right. By the same token, search engine optimization — when done right — should offend no one. But I’ve watched people get burned by both the SEO and Reciprocal Link Management industries.

Both service fields lack standards. Dirk’s fuller commentary in today’s LED Digest deplores the lack of standards in the SEO industry — I agree with him to a point, but he claims it’s simple enough to optimize sites and therefore most people are being overcharged. That kind of claim is where I have to side with Danny Sullivan’s classic defenses of the SEO industry, though I still maintain (like Dirk) that SEO is NOT Rocket Science.

Search engine optimization should begin with on-page factors, and most people in this industry pay too little attention to them. If you’ve been reading the major SEO bloggers for the past few months, you’ve probably seen (like me) their increasing attempts to address the on-site side of optimization. They don’t do a very good job of it. Their site navigation tutorials are a step above amateurish but they lack the sophistication that extensive experience in building complex site navigation would bring to their tutorials and comments.

So the SEO industry has embarked upon learning again what it should never have turned its back on: rich content managed through strong insite navigation provides the most firm foundatin upon which to build your house of links.

Yes, SEOs still love their links but the social media Bizarros are starting to come clean about how the traffic spikes but you get no conversions and no permanent links on non-social media sites. Good social media marketing will help build social-media friendly content and I think that social media marketing is both important and has a future in which to grow, but social media marketing is not a search optimization methodology. It never has been and I have always been reluctant to endorse social media marketing for SEO.

Search engines, on the other hand, have made link building more challenging because more and more links no longer pass value or they take a very long time to pass value. Some people in the SEO industry still have their heads buried in the sand but I’ve already seen the so-called Black Hats (the evil search spammers) have turned their attention to … well, I won’t say what they are doing. It’s interesting and I’d like to watch it evolve without public comment from me. But Google is already behind the curve once again.

In any event, the SEO industry is transforming itself by returning to basics — the same basics Dirk Johnson claims to be oh-so-familiar with. However, good title tags, ALT= text, and page URL naming is just the tip of the iceberg. I seriously doubt that Dirk can explain why a particular site ranks better than anyone else. After all, there are four reasons for why any search result changes and most people in this industry never take them all into consideration.

At least not in their public comments. For example, someone who claims they saw a spike in search referrals over the holiday season may naively conclude that it’s due to some cheap and sleazy link navigation trick they implemented — but the fact you do something today and something happens tomorrow doesn’t mean you have shown cause-and-effect. It just means that two events happened.

It’s this kind of shoddy “Look what I did!” blogging that so discredits the SEO industry and gives power to the derogatory remarks that people like Dirk Johnson, Jason Calcanis, and Dave Pasternack (to mention three of the most well-known “SEO isn’t rocket science” dudes in the same sentence) make on occasion. These guys are not, in my opinion, expressing objective critical remarks. I feel like they are simply trying to promote their own businesses at the expense of the SEO industry.

Recent bad press that talks about “Google bombing”, companies suing former SEO providers, former SEO black hats going to jail, etc. only makes our industry look cheap, sleazy, and scummy. And then we add to the tarnish by sharing ridiculous causeless-effect posts that make outrageous claims about what works.

Search engine optimization lacks standards and I don’t like that. But where I disagree with Dirk Johnson is that he doesn’t acknowledge the effectiveness of the numerous methods SEOs have devised through the years. Yes, many SEO methods actually work — my long-time complaint has simply been that they don’t all work well.

In an industry with standards, the muck sinks to the bottom much more quickly than happens in the SEO industry. That’s why you still see people posting with reverence about “Hilltop” and “Florida” as if one has something to do with the other. No one has ever proven that to be the case, whereas SEO Theory showed that Krishna Bharat was hired to implement Hilltop for Google News Search in 2002 — the so-called “Florida” update occurred in late 2003 (and I often wonder how many people can name the month in which it began).

SEO bloggers tend to be undiscriminating conspiracy theorists, blaming Google for every lost ranking despite the fact that they don’t even bother to optimize the pages they feel should have been ranked for specific expressions.

SEO bloggers also tend to be Good Ole Boy back-patters. They’ll leap to each other’s support without stopping to ask, “Is what this blog says making any sense whatsoever? What if we assume it’s wrong? Can we test their claims?”

The failure to push back, the failure to demand clear and concise proof, the ridiculous mob compulsion to applaud every lengthy blog post that claims some sudden break-through in knowledge with accolades and praise makes the SEO industry look every bit as ridiculous and unprofessional as Jason Calcanis, Dave Pasternack, and Dirk Johnson would have people believe.

The fact that most people in this industry don’t write blogs, don’t make stupid $10,000 and $50,000 mistakes, don’t write incredibly dense and misleading long-winded posts and tutorials, and don’t make huge sweeping generalizations means that those of us who stand out here in the cold rain singing our own praises are just a small minority.

There are a lot of hard-working SEOs who manage to make it work somehow. Maybe they go to conferences and listen to the tripe that is served up by panelists who get the shakes when they see Matt Cutts standing in the background. Maybe they take SEO courses offered by popular blog consultants. They make an effort to learn, to improve their knowledge, to get the job done.

It would be better, however, if we had standards to share and to apply to every claim of success, to every tutorial that attempts to explain how search engines work, to every tip and technique that is shared.

Standards would make us more skeptical and demanding. Standards would not silence the critics but they sure would make it more difficult for those critics to sound credible.

If you comment on blogs and forums, you can help the cause by legimately asking other people how they would like to see standards implemented. Don’t offer your own solution. There are already people doing that and, frankly, I’m not impressed. Open up dialogue. Start talking about standards. Get people to thinking about them.

Demand that SEO bloggers be more critical. Stop accepting smoke-and-mirrors posts as if they are great SEO advice. They’re not. They’re crap posts and often times you’ve seen better from the posters.

If you attend conferences, ask the conference organizers to promote panels on standards. Don’t settle for back-room placement that no one will participate in. Demand that the conferences make standards front-room, main programming, major events.

If you don’t put standards on the schedule, no one will.

If you don’t make SEO standards a priority for your professon, no one will.

If you don’t demand better from your peers, they won’t give it to you.

This is where we stand today: it’s all up to you. Each of you. All of you. All of us.

Do your part. Don’t leave it to Dirk Johnson to do your part for you.