Can we talk SEO? In one SEO lexicon?

In A Modest Proposal For SEO Standards I suggest that search engine optimization specialists (firms and consultants) include an SEO lexicon on their Websites.

There are many SEO glossaries around the Web already, but they rarely agree on their terminology. This lack of agreement has created a bizarre and humiliatingly divergent conversation between SEOs, their clients, the search engines, the academic community, and the media.

In short, none of us is talking the same language as anyone else. This failure to communicate reveals itself in numerous online publications both within and without the SEO community. For example, a recent academic paper titled The Role of Search Engine Optimization in Search Rankings pretty much butchers the jargon of the SEO world.

Here is the surprising thing about that paper. One of its authors, Ron Berman, worked for a venture capital firm that specialized in tech industries and Web startups. He is no stranger to the Internet, according to his LinkedIn profile.

The paper’s co-author, Zsolt Katona, has a strong technical and science background but no apparent Web marketing experience.

Neither author seems to have any experience with search engine optimization and their paper — which proposes a method built upon Game Theory for evaluating the value of search engine optimization to Publishers, Searchers, and Indexers — reveals their naivete.

Their theory reaches some right conclusions albeit in the wrong way and for the wrong reasons. That is, their axioms are flawed because they are based in an inappropriate mythology.

We all have mythologies — we use mythologies to explain our environment to ourselves and to each other. Every SEO specialist in the world has constructed an SEO mythology that is at best only poorly and partially articulated to others.

It is precisely because of this almost inaudible articulation from the SEO industry that no one else seems able to get it right. The academic community has seriously missed the mark in every attempt to document what search engine optimization is and how or why it is employed (that I have read — and all I can say in defense of my criticism is that I have read many dozens of academic papers that attempt to discuss search engine optimization).

I don’t blame students like Ron Berman for not knowing how to define common expressions like “white hat” and “black hat”. The Berman-Katona paper seems to view “white hat” SEO as dealing with on-page factors and “black hat” SEO as dealing with off-page factors. They also use the words “link” and “links” to refer to listings in search results.

The theoretical concepts they propose seek to measure the economic benefit of search engine optimization. The problem with their work is that it is not relevant to actual search engine optimization. There is far more going on in the paper than a mere misuse of terminology. It creates a symbolic world in which search engine optimization is distinguished from the creation of content, an idea that stands outside reality.

Although you can create unoptimized (even unoptimizable) content, you cannot optimize without content. On-page optimization, off-page optimization — it all has to revolve around promoting some form of content (even if it consists of nothing more than a domain name or non-existent document name) toward the top of search results.

SEO does not exist outside of or in spite of content. SEO is all about the content, just as search is all about the content. Neither search nor search engine optimization have any use or function without or in spite of content.

This lack of comprehension of what is actually happening in search among academics is a serious problem for the SEO industry because their papers, books, and presentations all go into the academic continuum where they will be ingested and digested by future marketers, decision-makers, search engineers, and journalists.

In 5-10 years we will be dealing with a large number of outsiders who think they have an idea of what search engine optimization is all about, when in fact they are only relating to a fantasy application that cannot function on the real Web or in the constantly evolving marketplace.

It’s not enough, really, that everyone publish a Website about their SEO expertise and services which includes an SEO glossary. We MUST acknowledge that other glossaries exist and ideally we should seek to come together on some kind of consensus.

Even here at Visible Technologies (which has almost 100 employees) I hear people casually drop SEO terminology into conversations that makes absolutely no sense. I can’t train everyone and I cannot prevent them from finding loosely jargonized expressions on Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and Web forums.

The problem exceeds epidemic proportions in that it has not only clouded communications within our industry, it has divided them into multiple conversations that essentially talk past each other.

People in the SEO industry assume they are speaking to an informed audience but we are not. We are largely speaking to an UNinformed audience — and that’s just when we speak to each other. We all have our own ideas of what constitute link farms, blog farms, link circles, good content, site structure, Web spam, and more.

This lack of congruence in how we describe our activities, the activities of other people in the field, and everyone else exacerbates itself by an order of magnitude each year because we are continually developing new ideas, testing new expressions. Our conceptualization rolls out new buzz terms faster than any one person can document them.

What’s worse, we have no way of coordinating the discussion. Attempts to document the SEO jargon through social resources like Wikipedia have proven to be only partially effective and in some cases absolutely disastrous.

You can get a quick idea of how bad the problem has become by browsing the AIRWeb (Adversarial Information Retrieval) site. Their various papers look at Web spam from a search engineer’s perspective. The papers (and many others like them that you can find through Google’s Scholar search) often use terms that either don’t enjoy much frequency in the SEO field or which are often used in other ways.

We have ourselves to blame, of course, but the academics seem to do a very poor job of searching out the best quality resources. Their ideas are insular and barely resemble what is actually happening on the Web.

Web spam itself is a curious notion. The name implies that any spammy process entails excessive repetition, but while some Web spam may rely on repetition, other Web spam may rely on deception.

Although I don’t think many people would agree in detail on what constitutes white hat or black hat search optimization, it seems to me that black hat SEO is universally deemed to be unethical and usually entails deception and/or excessive replication (of links and/or content).

White hat SEO is really very difficult to nail down. Some people say it seeks to comply with all search engine guidelines. But what about practices that search engines neither endorse nor oppose? Are these to be relegated to so-called “grey hat” SEO?

If we ourselves cannot draw clear distinctions between the Good, the Bad, and the Sort-of-Good-but-may-be-Bad then how can we expect anyone else (especially people in academia, Web search, or the media) to get it right?

There is no right or wrong when it comes to how you talk about search engine optimization. That’s just wrong, and you know I’m right.