SEO Irony
This post was made Feb 22, 2008 by Carlos del Rio
I just read an article that make me happy ( a response to this). Rand Fishkin disputes the thoughts of Micheal Martinez. The quick recap: Rand loves links, Micheal hates them. Both men have accomplished commendable things on the web. I worked with Micheal for close to a year and I have seen the things that he has done, Rand is more publicly visible.
I want to put my following comment in perspective. I am one of the SEOmoz Recommended Companies and I have been recommended by Micheal Martinez:
“Carlos is knowledgeable and innovative, recognizing the value of going the extra mile for a client account in trouble. He is deeply interested in advancing his knowledge of search marketing and has many times provided me with valued insight and advice.” August 3, 2007
Michael Martinez, Director of Search Strategies, Visible Technologies
worked directly with Carlos at Visible Technologies
I have learned a lot from both of these guys. Most importantly I have learned that there is too much Internet to be authoritative in all areas — so you need to find friends and share in some way.
Here is my response to the posts:
I am a fan of both Micheal and Rand. I have discussed search with both of them, they both make very astute points within their expertise.
They have different approaches to the problems that are set forth by search. I agree strongly with the end of Rand’s disclaimer:
“As readers and as search marketers, you’ll have to decide which pieces of advice and information serve your campaigns best – don’t just take our word for everything.”
I think the most important thing to look at is this:
Micheal:
Blackhat spammers burn out the usefulness of about 10% of all SEO tips, tricks, and techniques that are openly or semi-openly shared on blogs and forums in about 12 months. White hat SEOs, newbies, and SEO gurus burn out the other 90% in 6 months or less.
Rand:
If he’s right, it would mean that linkbaiting, a 3-year old tactic (at least), would have fallen out of fashion years ago. Putting important keywords in title tags is an age-old SEO tactic, and yet I still see great value there, as well. He must mean something else, but I just don’t know what it is.
Search optimization, white hat or otherwise, is essentially taking advantage of the system. We as an industry are 100% counter productive to the goal of the search engines. Whether we are following the rules or not we are gaming the system and necessarily changing that system to compensate.
Whether you believe that you are raising up the most appropriate content the ultimate goal of a search engine is to put up what pleases the masses, not what pleases us as marketers.
The best that we can ever hope for is to better serve the masses than the search engines.
And I continue…
Imagine what would happen if there was sudden Internet equity, if tomorrow 50% of the world were to access the Internet. If tomorrow 3.3 billion people logged on to the Internet everyone’s traffic would double. Who would be happy?
Small site would be happy. Imagine growing for 1000 visitors per month to 2000 per month — nice right? Large sites wouldn’t. Imagine going from 90,000 per day to 180,000 per day — that’s a little scary. Now consider 260,000,000. That would have been Yahoo!’s traffic on December 17th, 2007. Two hundred and sixty million visitors would crush even the most prepared site, and social media is less equipped than search for that kind of traffic.
If 3.3 billion people arrived on the Internet suddenly what you have learned from studying either, or both, of SEOmoz and SEO-Theory will fail you. Every thing you know about search engines will fail you, because either the major search would overload or half of the traffic would circumvent the game we SEO’s know so well.
The reason that usability and information architecture are so important is that they are not derived values — they rely on behavior. Search is always dependent on things that are beyond your control like algorithms and what people search, things that are known to be highly fallible.
Search marketers are forced to make a decision to either shoot in front of the main stream or into the mainstream. Either way you are gambling that the uncontrollable factors are going to fall in your favor. Whether you are betting on the success or failure of any particular search system (semantics or connections) you are feeding one undeniable cycle:
Your efforts will change the system.
I found your blog on google and read a few of your other posts. I just added you to my Google News Reader. Keep up the good work. Look forward to reading more from you in the future.
Tina Russell
Sure, you link to An’s blog and you don’t link to mine? I’m the sexiest man in all media! Why do I get the boot?
Way to be bud!
Hm. Just so you know, your SUBMIT button does not render in all browsers. I tried to post a comment this morning and could not submit it.
Anyway, “link baiting” is not search engine optimization and certainly doesn’t bring much to search engine optimization. It’s a traffic building technique that several people have been claiming in recent months doesn’t bring quality traffic or generate many links.
However, Rand is probably better at creating real link bait, whereas I think other people tend to confuse social media site manipulation with link baiting.
If it’s true link bait, all you have to do is create it and people will link to it.
If you use 50 faux personas on social media sites to link to it, it must not be very linkworthy.
So I stand by what I said about the general SEO community burning through “tips, tricks, and techniques” quickly.
@Michael-
What browser did the submit button fail in? I have been having issues with this layout and the comments section.
I found this comment: “We as an industry are 100% counter productive to the goal of the search engines.” quite telling.
My goal when I do SEO is to make sure that my pages get found for as many relevant queries as possible. Since the search engine’s goal is presumably to provide relevant results, it seems as if my goals and the search engine’s goals coincide quite nicely.
The only case where I see that statement being correct is if someone is trying to be found for content that isn’t relevant to a search query, which hardly describes the entire industry.
But I agree with Rand that using your target keyword phrase in your title tag is helpful. :)
Any intentional attempt to show up in the search engines defeats the search engines purpose. They need to assume that all content is equal to deliver the best results, so our work creates the need to filter to combat our effect.
The energy and attention that we put in artificially inflates certain qualities and reduces that qualities true value. The irony is that making too much relevant content is what necessitates action. If every site has identical signal values new signals have to be created to accommodate differentiation.
@Tina – Thanks! I’m always glad to hear that people like what I am putting out. Please let me know if there are any topics you would like me to address.
“Any intentional attempt to show up in the search engines defeats the search engines purpose.”
When I put a keyword phrase in the title tag of my page, I’m communicating to the user and to the search engine what my page is about. That doesn’t defeat the search engine’s purpose, it supports its purpose. The only time it would defeat the search engine’s purpose is if I added a keyword phrase to my title tag that lied about what my page is about.
“They need to assume that all content is equal to deliver the best results, so our work creates the need to filter to combat our effect.”
That’s exactly the opposite of what they need to assume. Some content is better than other content, and the search engines need to assume that this is so in order to rank results. A search engine couldn’t rank results if it assumed that all content is equal.
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