Demand An SEO Standard
Today I started my daily blog reading with SlightlyShady’s primer for black hat networks and decided to travel through the blogroll and comment links. Every once in a while it is good to stretch into the corners of the business that I don’t read often. I found that many of these people frequent SEO-Theory. I am happy to see that. Michael has been on a consistent message about links being overvalued because of Google and that Google’s insistence on rel=”nofollow” is essentially a cop-out for fixing search results in a broken system.
And certainly Google, through Matt Cutts, has taken responsibility for some errors:
When Barry asked me about “position 6″ in late December, I said that I didn’t know of anything that would cause that. But about a week or so after that, my attention was brought to something that could exhibit that behavior. We’re in the process of changing the behavior; I think the change is live at some datacenters already and will be live at most data centers in the next few weeks.
When I came back to Sphinn I found two “Hot” posts about snake-oil SEO. It seems that every few weeks there is a dust up about scam companies — Traffic Power, Internet Advancement, or whoever being sued. Which makes me weary. Running a legitimate business is a pain when every third prospective client wants to recite a litany of things that they have heard about this or that company.
Well today Michael Martinez turned his attention to the SEO community insisting that we need to fix our forts:
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.
I think that he is right we don’t need to fuel flames of mistrust. We need to hold ourselves to higher standards in our content. Certainly we all know the value that content provides, but that doesn’t give us free reign to vomit out useless bits. I am all for discussion and extrapolation — I love talking theory. Still I find the amount of noise that is produced daily, especially when it is in a hostile spirit (trying to bait big name bloggers or communities), to be distasteful.
Part of what our detractors say is right 90% of SEO isn’t rocket science. Cooking a good steak isn’t rocket science either but that doesn’t mean everyone can do it, even if they are told how. So let’s not be scared to lay our 90% on the table and challenge each other to really push the boundaries in the content we produce.
We need to work toward something better.
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 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.
Start by asking more of yourself. If you agree that we can do better and you want to be part of the solution join me in putting a golden knib in your sidebar to show that you are going to strive toward a higher standard.
Feel free to copy my knib.
But how can you go with higher standards if search engines continuely adjust their algoritmes?
@Jan – standards should be concerned what we produce. At the very least we should agree that SEO indicates that you are providing a basic set of values to a client, inclusive of titles, keyword research, internal structure, copy writing, etc.
It doesn’t matter how the search engines change if we agree as a professional community that we are going to provide an identifiable base offering as legitimate professionals.