• Register
• Login

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

Real advice from bad SEOs

Posted by Michael Martinez on March 24, 2008 in Search Engine Optimization

Maybe I should call this post “bad advice from real SEOs” but I think it’s better to emphasize the fact that it’s real advice being offered by people in the SEO community.

When I wrote about Google’s March 2008 Update (and I use the term “update” loosely as only an SEO knows how), I was only acknowledging that a phenomenon which had already impacted many other people had crept into my own optimized world.

People have been reporting problems with Google listings continuously for years. You only get a sense of when something major is going on by comparing the level of complaints and questions in SEO blogs and forums to their historical patterns. When you see a significant increase in “screaming” in multiple discussion groups that’s a pretty good sign that something is going on.

Early March 2008 saw such a rise and the screaming has continued to increase since I wrote my post. This weekend I decided to scan the more popular SEO forums (and Google Groups) again to see if there are new screams or if people are starting to see the changes I predicted would happen. For my part, I’m seeing some indication that we may be approaching the end of the long, dark tunnel but I don’t yet have enough information to be sure. (NOTE: So far, I have found two discussions where Googlers have supposedly indicated that people just need to wait a few more days, but don’t hold me to that.)

Just scanning the discussions I could not help but notice just how much bad advice is being given out to people who either cannot launch new domains (one guy with 4,000 pages only got 17 of them indexed within a week) or their old, long-existing sites have suddenly loss rankings or simply dropped out of the index altogether.

In any search engine’s day, Webmasters are constantly doing dumb things with their Web sites and the most common reason for lost search visibility is making changes on the Web site. Most people who ask for help in SEO forums usually are reluctant to admit that they changed their CSS, modified one obscure (but critical) file, revised their site structure, removed thousands of pages and put up thousands of new pages on different URLs, etc.

Complainers’ point of view: It’s always Google’s fault that your site lost its search visibility.

I see that quite a few forum moderators are pretty good at running down the list of possible dumb things people could have done to themselves, and that’s a good thing. And there is also a growing list of things beyond your control that can affect your search visibility that many mods also suggest: maybe your ISP has a DNS issue, maybe the search engine has a DNS issue, maybe the sites you have links from have problems, etc.

Nonetheless, when you see enough discussions where these plausible reasons for lost visibility don’t really address the issue you have to look at whether the search engine may be making changes. It always helps to have one or more of your own sites be affected by the phenomenon because then you can run down the checklist yourself.

There is, in my opinion, enough consensus of pain among people asking for help in SEO forums for us to be reasonably sure that Google changed something or broke something or is changing or breaking something. I can guess wildly at what may be going on but that’s not the point of this post.

Instead, I want to focus on the dumb things people are suggesting in SEO forums right now when people come screaming about lost visibility. Generally speaking, most people assume the problem is with backlinks. That kind of limited thinking emerges from the very narrow-minded approach that most people in the SEO community take toward search engine optimization.

Links aren’t everything, they aren’t most of everything, and they are rarely responsible for a rising crescendo of complaints in SEO forums. The very fact that people just whip out the standard “get links from this place” advice in response to complaints and pleas for help indicates that most SEO forum participants don’t bother to check their facts, don’t look at other forums to see if other people are reporting problems, and don’t know what they are doing.

Typical suggestions in one of the most popular forums included:

1. Drop links in forums
2. Drop links in blog comments
3. Distribute articles with links (to article archives)
4. Join a link exchange program
5. Don’t create a site where your pages are more than 3 clicks from the root URL
6. Submit links to directories
7. Put links in CSS galleries
8. Get links from social media sites
9. Use “nofollow” to promote your most important pages

Every one of these suggestions is bad SEO advice. It’s amateurish, it’s ill-informed, and I wouldn’t hire anyone who admitted to me they had given out such advice in the past three to six months.

Social media has its place for building traffic but if you haven’t caught on to the fact that social media profile pages start out with no PageRank and the fact that a growing number of social media services are embedding nofollow attributes in their links, you should give serious consideration to getting out of the SEO industry before someone catches on to the fact you don’t know what you’re doing.

Social media link building is a complete waste of time from a search engine optimization point of view. Even if you know of social media sites that haven’t yet implemented nofollow you don’t know how long that gravy will continue to taste good. Google is chasing your sorry social media linking profile and you need a better plan than that.

If you want some quick traffic and don’t mind getting banned for abusing the services, hit the social media circuit and drop your spammy Web site announcements on all the popular SEO social media sites. Plenty of people are still Link Faking their Bait that way. But stop pretending that this is search engine optimization. It’s not.

Just doing something because idiots in an SEO forum tell you to do that is the worst possible thing you can do for search engine optimization. If you don’t understand what the risks and benefits are you don’t need to stick your neck out. Terrible things can happen to people who practice SEO-by-the-bad-advice-numbers. Terrible!

What’s the best thing you can do when a search engine appears to have gone on hiatus? Take a break. Or run down the technical checklist and see if maybe you tripped over your server’s power chord. It’s always a good idea to run down that technical checklist every few months, just to make sure nothing awkward has developed by accident.

I’m waiting the storm out. I’ve checked my technical lists. I’m not making radical changes or assuming I’ve done something to merit any penalties or bans.

Nor am I wasting my time looking for answers in Google Webmaster Central because there is never any help there for a situation like this.

There are things I can do right now to take advantage of new query opportunities and of course I am moving ahead with such projects. But I’m not trying to fix any problems that haven’t presented themselves. When a lot of people say a search engine has suddenly dropped their pages or changed the SERPs, that’s a pretty good sign that the problem is with the search engine and not with the Web sites.

Of course, some people are guessing there is a new penalty or filter at work. Maybe, but if that’s the case we have yet to see any evidence of such a penalty or filter. Sometimes the new filters take out innocent content and they need to be adjusted but it doesn’t look to me like Google is owning up to making any changes. They have, on some occasions in the past, stepped forward to admit that something didn’t work out as planned.

So whatever is happening at Google either hasn’t been resolved or else it’s a case of a rare planetary misalignment that has simply affected the shape of the universe. We’ll eventually see the distortion go away either because Google does something or because all the people with problems will eventually get tired of waiting for a fix and they’ll do something that actually works.

That’s the nature of the beast. No one really knows what happened. But I’ve seen becalmed periods like this before and I expect to see them again. Eventually the wind will pick up and we’ll have smooth sailing again.

Until then, be very suspicious about any advice you see in SEO forums, especially if it has less to do with checking your technical issues and more to do with where to get links. Remember: If everyone knows the secret formula to success, it’s not a secret and not likely to be helpful in building success.