So Bob Keating is the U.S. Government’s search guru and he gives out some of the sorriest SEO advice I’ve seen in a long time. Now I understand why it’s so hard to find stuff on government Web sites.
I don’t know Bob Keating, have no personal opinion of the man, but he has probably set back Government Web information search placement at least five years with his ill-advised advice.
Bob is the Editor-in-Chief of the Open Directory Project (who won’t get any links from me again until they act on the submissions I made to their directory several months ago).
Search industry insiders like Keating don’t always give out good advice. They don’t always give out bad advice. Some of his advice is pretty standard stuff. Some of it is just just plain wrong. Do you know which of his tips to government Webmasters are wrong? Every SEO team in the country should be picking apart his presentations, not for the sake of laughing at the man but rather to help them learn why government SEO practices suck.
It’s pretty obvious, in looking at his slide presentations, that Mr. Keating does not practice the SEO Method: he doesn’t experiment, he doesn’t evaluate, and he doesn’t adjust. And that is why he doesn’t know what he is talking about. This guy should not be presenting SEO advice to government Webmasters.
I like this one: “Pages will not rank well if your site does not have a navigation scheme”. Really? So the old 1-page site won’t rank well? A site with thousands of inbound links to otherwise disconnected pages won’t rank well? The point of the presentation should not be a provably false negative statement. What he should have told his governemnt Webmaster audience is, “Internal navigation is critical to improving your search engine visibility and rankings”. There’s a difference.
He admonishes Webmasters to avoid “dangling pages”. Hey, maybe I want some of my pages to dangle. For example, if I have to create .PDF images of government documents, they’re more likely to dangle than not to dangle. Of course, I know a few things about .PDF documents but Mr. Keating doesn’t seem to have done any experimenting, evaluating, and adjusting.
“Keywords in links tell crawlers about the pages to which you are linking”. Not always, Bob.
He tells Webmasters to avoid “Click Here” links. I can see how every SEO on the planet should now be calling and emailing U.S. Government Webmasters, asking for changes in link anchor text.
He confuses “link popularity” with inbound link anchor text on one slide.
He babbles about “keyword density” in more than one place. That is SO 1999.
He says meta tags don’t matter. Clearly, he hasn’t experimented, evaluated, and adjusted. Two major search engines still look at the meta keywords tag. Do you know which two those are?
“Crawlers tend to read text links first”. Now, that’s interesting. Unless he is sharing some insider information from the crawler writers (and for all I know he is), there is no basis for making such a statement. Given two links on a page, one text and one graphical (with ALT= text), how does the search engine decide which one to follow first? (Hint: Crawlers rarely do the parsing for themselves any more.)
There are other gems of nonwisdom in the presentations.
This is an industry where opinion prevails more often than fact, if only because verifying facts is so hard to do. Most people do not approach search engine optimization scientifically and it’s painfully obvious that the editor-in-chief of DMOZ doesn’t have the appropriate background to do a bangup job of reverse engineering search engine algorithms and processes. So, never mind the fact that much of his misinformation is directly contradicted by easily findable search engine research papers and presentations, Mr. Keating is the wrong person to be teaching government Web developers how to prepare to meet the search engines.
He has done a wonderful job of moving U.S. government Web design forward into the past. Advising people to get links from Yahoo! and DMOZ (maybe he is sharing the secret email address tips that only “trusted” insiders have been given) is like telling people to buy an Edsel. That advice is a little outdated.
Telling people not to use frames because crawlers cannot get to the page is SO 2000. Crawlers can crawl framed pages just fine. There are far more appropriate reasons to move people away from framing content.
I was actually going to write a piece about “Managing PageRank” today, but out of curiosity I decided to see what was ranking for that expression and got sidetracked. As a tax payer I’m outraged that I have to pay for this kind of bad advice to the people who work for me. As an SEO who has been involved in the industry since 1998 I’m just totally disappointed that the government is getting no better advice than if it were to randomly scan old SEO blogs and forums.
There is no excuse for not knowing what you’re talking about when all you have to do is test your assumptions on a periodic basis. It’s not that hard. Someone tell me that Mr. Keating doesn’t have access to the Internet any more. That would be about the only reasonable explanation for the nonsense he is dispensing in his presentations.
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