Central Perk: SEOptimise

joi, 24 martie 2011

SEOptimise

Posted: 24 Mar 2011 02:04 AM PDT

Denouncing SEO is a popular sport these days on the Web. It always draws crowds. Over the years the simple “SEO is spam”, “SEO is dead” or “SEO has no future” rants have worn out though as they have no basis and have been repeated far too often without any proof.

The sport of denouncing SEO has evolved.

Bloggers, journalists and entrepreneurs of the aspiring kind denounce SEO while understanding the importance of it. The obvious linkbaits do not work anymore so these people have to come up with some theory of SEO that makes at least some sense before they denounce it.

Also by now we witness a variation of motives to denounce SEO.

It’s not just the folly of mistaking SEO for spam or the attention grabbing anymore, you don’t get as many links for denouncing SEO these days, it’s too common by now. So you have to at least try to prove the point of your rant or at least package it in a way that does not look like one.

Depending on the hidden motives the approach varies. I don’t want to explain the absurdity of denouncing SEO anymore, I’ll just repeat my short answer: saying “SEO is spam, dead or has no future” is like saying web hosting, web design or usability is spam, dead or has no future. As long as there is an Internet you will need a way to put content online (web hosting) design it (web design), to make it findable (SEO) and user friendly (usability).

So assuming the sanity of the “SEO is spam”, “SEO is dead” or “has no future” proponents we have the following motives:

Trying to convince your competition not to optimize in your market to gain an advantage

“SEO is no longer a viable marketing strategy for startups” by Chris Dixon co-founder of Hunch and investor in a 12 of others startups is a great example of this. Hunch is a pretty useless content farm that actually has little or no content. It optimize for lots a generic phrases with almost empty pages. For example the page optimized for ”Ways to Save Money”, which uses the exact match keyphrase in the title, URL and H1 tag only contains a 12 links to other empty pages with ”ideas” like ”Cook at home”.

The actual phrase is the only ”content” on that page. There are comments and more links on it. A blog could sumarize all the “ways to save money” in a single post but here they are spread on dozens of pages. Luckily the Hunch content-less farm doesn’t rank anywhere near the top for this query.

So Chris Dixon tries to denounce his luckier competition, the content farms, which ironically are really valuable in contrast to his own set of keyword optimized empty pages. He says things like: ”Some of the SEO industry is "white hat," which generally means consultants giving benign advice for making websites search-engine friendly. But there is also a huge industry of black-hat SEO consultants who trade and sell links, along with companies like content farms that promote their own low-quality content through aggressive SEO tactics.”

Indeed he targets his direct competition here. He can’t compete with the content farms for obvious reasons so he tries to at least limit the number of competitors by advising not to follow his own business model.

Getting the attention of Google engineers in order to get competitors downranked

Do you remember the early wave of content farms are bad articles? Almost all of them focused on one example, Demand Media. The one site most often cited as the prototypical content fam was Demand Media’s eHow. The bad publicity for Google allowing content farms to rank high became so wide spread that Google had to act quickly. They have worked on a low quality conetnt update for a while but it went live recently to counter the impression that Google results increasingly deteriorate.

The big surprise was that eHow didn’t get penalized It didn’t even lose in rankings, it actually gained in the Google index according to more than one SEO statistic provider. So while almost all other content farms lost significantly in the update eHow actually gained visibility in Google search.

Demand Media was aggressively dealing with the menace of a Google penalty beforehand. The PR effeorts have worked out. While Google has destroyed most of its compeition, Demand Media itself, the content farm that started is now more than ever a dmaining force in the content farm business.

Stack Exchange CEO Joel Spolsky tries the same approach and anti-SEO tech blog TechCrunch is glad to assist in the following post: ”(Founder Stories) Stack Exchange's Joel Spolsky On How SEO Makes The Internet Worse”.

Stack Overflow by Stack Exchange is a Quora-like Q&A site focusing on the programming industry. The above mentioned Chris Dixon is also an investor. Stack Overflow does not create any value itself, it’s 100% user generated content. It’s basically a mix of forums and a social voting site. Mr. Spolsky’s main complaint is that:

“SEO spam sites just rip the questions and answers straight off the site, wrap them with some black-hat SEO magic and Google ads, and rank higher than the original page on Stack Overflow. ‘They took our content, put Google ads on it, and made it worse because not in situ,’ … ‘They used SEO techniques to rank higher.’”

So while he seemingly addresses the common issue of content theft on the Internet he ultimately wants to save his business model of earning money by content provided by others. He takes ”his” content from users who earn no money for posting it and he wants to be the only one to own it. There’s a bigger issue involved here, who owns the content you put on a site, you or the site you post in on? I’d argue you do that but here someone who capitalizes on content by other people complains about others taking advantage of it.

Also let’s look at a random example question I took from Stack Overflow to show how low quality user generated content outranks expert bloggers. I used the question ”Change an input’s HTML5 placeholder color with CSS” from Stack Overflow for this purpose. The two short answers only offer a very basic workaround for the actual issue while there are adavnced scripts available online to deal with it.

Nonetheless when you search for [input HTML5 placeholder CSS] stack Overflows outranks the actual HTML5 placeholder CSS styling expert solutions by Nico Hagenburger and David Walsh. Why does Google favor such thin content UGC sites? Is it due to the fact startup CEOs and Google engineers are like buddies and can influence them to get competitors downranked ”algorithimically” while simple bloggers have no such davantages? Stack Overflow is no different than all the other UGC based content farms, it’s just more geeky.

Making the impression that SEO is not your business model in order to make sure Google doesn’t act on you

Ariana Huffington is probably one of the most hated competitors in journalist circles. Journalists and old media publishing houses who in most cases fail at SEO are very envious at her meteoric rise to money and fame. How did she get there? To a large part due to SEO best practices and user generated content. By now the Huffington posts even ranks with empty pages scraping third party tweets.

So she should be praising SEO for what it’s worth, after all, it was not just the exploitation um huge numbers of idealist and activist cntributors, it was a well planned SEO strategy that made the Huffington Post succeed. Now that everybody noticed though Ariana Huffingtom tells the envious professional journalists that it’s actually not about SEO. Her opinion on SEO is already in the headline of an interview piece called ”Arianna Huffington: SEO Is Just A Tool, Not A Way To Produce Great Journalism [TCTV]” on the same TechCrunch blog which is renowned for badmouthing SEO.

Then she goes on to claim how the new AOL-HuffPo will be focusing on high quality journalism. She even goes so far as to claim that she already focused before the merger on high quality journalism. She did not. The HuffPo empire was build on unpaid labor by thousands of activist bloggers most of whom feel cheated now. Many contributors left immediately and publicly decried the the sale to AOL as a sell out.

HuffPo was basically a huge group blog run by idealists for free. They created value and one person now became a millionaire by selling it to a megacorporation that doesn’t fit with the idealist worldview of most contributors.

So what is the business model of HuffPo? It’s taking free content from unpaid contributors, pushing it to search engines via SEO and making money off it. All the journalism is good and SEO is bad talk is just a way to cover up her tracks. She ceated a huge content farm by fooling people into unpaid work by pretending that it’s an activist site. No that’s clear it isn’t the HuffPost team is getting desperate and thus uses Mahalo-like spam technique like scraping tweets. As people in the search industry already notice she has to blow the trumpet of journalism in order not get penalized like the other content farms.

So you see that in all three cases the hidden motives for denouncing are quite obvious when you look a bit more closer.

It’s not that these people want to see a clean, valuable and relevant content on search engines. It’s their own business they have in mind. The spam they talk about are ”sites positioned above me”. They want to use publicity to press Google to act on their competitors. Demand Media already succeeded using this tcatic it seems so more an dmore shady individuals will do try it. Prepare for advanced variation of “seo is spam”, “seo is dead” and “seo has no future” articles.

* Image by Toni Blay