Some years ago while giving an SEO class I mentioned the story of the “Thief of Baghdad”. In all the versions of this tale with which I am familiar the thief finds himself seeking a treasure on a pathway that is fraught with perilous temptation. “Stray from the path,” he is warned, “and you are doomed” (or something to that effect). In various movies based on the story you inevitably see the pitiable fools who sought the treasure before him, forever frozen in time because they stepped off the path — overcome by desire to possess the treasures they saw strewn carelessly around them.

Search engine optimization practices walk this path every day and unfortunately for both practitioners and their followers there are many old practices and ideas standing frozen in time to either side. People give in to temptation too easily. Just look at the black hat SEO forums where wannabe millionaires pursue empty dreams of success, their eyes filled with the tales of success passed on from generation to generation of black hat practitioners.

I have known many black hat SEOs through the years. None of them retired from the business on the basis of passive income; but that’s just my personal experience and you may actually know some dudes who no longer pay attention to “Internet Marketing” because all their money is now invested in bonds rather than Websites.

Everything Black Hat is White Hat

I have often said that the chief difference between spam and “white hat” SEO is excess, which is usually based on the faulty realization that “if 1 (of X) is good for me then 10,000 (of X) will guarantee my SEO success”.

Some things never change in our industry and that seems to be one of them.

Years ago people submitted links to “SEO friendly” directories so that their Websites would soar to new heights of Googly brilliance; and then Google delisted thousands of “SEO friendly” directories (which did not prevent at least 2 new generations of such directories from rising again).

People engaged in PageRank Sculpting until Google came out and said, “Don’t do this — we’ve fixed your sites for you once. We may not do that again.”

Then people latched on to blog comments. “It’s not spam if I write the comments by hand and make them relevant,” they said piously. Now thousands of Webmasters are piously uploading disavow files through Google Webmaster Tools, hoping they have named all the DoFollow blogs they spammed.

Article spinning was all the rage with “Internet Marketers” who wanted to retire young on passive income; now they fill desperate black hat forums with pleas for help as their spinning achieves little to nothing (which has not prevented new spinning tool vendors from hitting the market).

Infographics flooded the Web last year as people turned away from begging for links, using article networks, and blog networks. And now Infographics are (thanfully) slowing down as people fear that Google may crush them.

Widget links? Dying.

And whatever happened to good, old-fashioned “link bait”? That buzz expression has died. Was it too hard to make real link bait after all, and all the social media sock puppets failed to help realize dreams of Googly success?

And now guest posting is on the ropes, although not “good” guest posting — just “bad” guest posting. Bad guest posting is the next “good blog commenting”. No one actually writes or relies on bad guest posts. Google won’t have any reason to penalize sites that are splattering “good” guest posts across the Web, right?

Templated boilerplate content that just differs by name of city, product, or whatever — that’s a surefire Panda algorithm trap waiting to be triggered. So we’re no longer in the cheap content business. Now we only write “quality content”.

And Then the SEOs Said: Let There Be Content Curation

My predictions about guest posting have not yet come true but Matt Cutts has already fired two shots across the guest posting community’s bow.

Publishing guest posts is a form of content curation, although what I think most people mean by “curation” probably has more to do with the links you share on social media sites than anything else. Of course, many a black hat / passive income “Internet Marketer” has probably toyed with content curation at least 100 times over the past ten years. Remember all those bloggy sites that republish other people’s RSS feeds? THAT is content curation.

What is content curation, then? Its proponents argue that it consists of “sorting through all the content on the Web” and “selecting only the best content for (re)sharing” on some medium (presumably a blog or social media account). Sounds noble, does it not? It’s a bit like only posting GOOD comments on blogs that are relevant and meaningful.

The problem with the “good” comments is that they were not published for the purpose of joining the conversation — they were published for the purpose of obtaining links.

Content curation holds the same promise of eternal youth and glory that has flowed from the bitter, poisoned spring of search engine optimization depravity for over 12 years: it looks fair but feels foul, as J.R.R. Tolkien might have put it.

Yes, there will always be a place for truly good and useful content curation but if 50 people decide to curate content about car insurance the average consumer is going to wonder what all the fuss is about. How many content curators do we need for any topic? And how does one become qualified to curate content?

Publishing other people’s guest posts is no different from sharing their links on your Twitter account. Yes, you have a right to do this. Yes, your opinion is as important as anyone else’s on the Web. But if you’re doing it because this is your latest SEO strategy you have already failed the honesty test.

SEO Strategies Are Self-defeating Propositions

It’s only a matter of time before someone stands up at a conference and proclaims that “content curation is real company shit”. Maybe it has already happened. To a certain extent this is true. Think about it. Real companies like IBM, Hewlett-Packard, Google, Yahoo!, and even Walmart have been curating content of various types in different ways for decades. So, yes, content curation is “real company shit”.

But in the hands of an SEO content curation is mostly just shit.

There are three simple reasons why any idea that is popularized by the SEO community leads to the next generation of search engine algorithms and filters:

1. Most people in the industry adopt the practice because “this is now the way it is done”.
2. Using a popular idea “for SEO” eliminates unique value from the equation.
3. No one wants to spend any time figuring out a different way (from the crowd) to do things.

It’s easy to be “contrarian” as someone once put it. It’s not so easy to be different. Different doesn’t always work because it requires experimentation, resilience, and patience. “Different is expensive,” a business owner once told me. He was right. Different is expensive. But then, so is pre-programmed failure that results from using SEO strategies that represent “the way things are done now” that eliminate unique value from the equation by saving time and effort.

There are good SEO strategies. Most — perhaps all — of them are never shared on SEO blogs and forums. It’s too damned expensive to give away truly useful information unless you’re not planning to use it yourself. Anyone with a Python script can be an SEO expert but those who sell the picks, pans, and shovels make more money in a gold rush than those who actually dig for the gold.

Expert SEO Advice is a Dichotomy of Contradictions

Ask anyone in our industry today where you should start getting links and they will inevitably mention a handful of Websites: Yahoo!, Joe Ant, DMOZ, and a couple of other well-known directories. And then they will say, “But you don’t want to go out and buy a lot of directory links because directory links don’t work like they used to.”

We have conversations with clients like this all day long, don’t we? “Don’t use link schemes. Google and Bing hate link schemes. But here is my strategy for helping you get some links.”

There is no technical difference between a scheme and a strategy, so are we teaching people to invest in link schemes or not?

When people come to me for link building advice I tell them up front, “Everything I can share with you may be deemed a violation of search engine guidelines at some point. I cannot guarantee 100% safety.” Some people walk away at that point, some people pay to pick my brain.

I do my best to help people mitigate risks. I am constantly telling people “there is a better way” but I lose a lot of folks when I point out that the better way may take up to 2 years to fully implement. No one wants to wait 2 years to earn 7-10 years’ worth of income. They’d rather invest 3-6 months in 1-2 years’ worth of income. Guess which path takes longer to achieve the same goal, when measured over 10-12 years?

Still, implementation is the real problem in most SEO campaigns. How many times have you handed a client or vice president a carefully-written, finely detailed, date-annotated “SEO plan” only to see it sit around and collect dust for weeks or months before someone starts yelling, “Where’s my search traffic? ALL HANDS ON DECK!”

I can hand you all the SEO advice in the world and if you do nothing with it that advice is completely worthless. It spins not; nether does it toil. And perhaps it is the lack of spinning that makes so much SEO advice worthless: that’s really all people want to do. It reminds me of a boss I once had. Every week for 2 years he called me into his office on Monday morning and he would give me the same lecture (almost word for word each time): “Michael, I want to push a button and have the computer do everything….”

But if I give you the button, and you push it and allow the computer to do everything, why then do you get upset when you find you don’t like the consequences of letting the button make all your irrevocable choices for you?

Taking Responsibility Mitigates SEO Risk

So Content Curation is the new buzzword and it will be beaten and abused and slavishly destroyed as SEO after SEO sucks all the intrinsic value out of a pretty good concept. But no one in our industry will stand up and say, “Yes, this Content Curation Update was inevitable because we all did it for one reason and one reason only: to bring in search referral traffic.”

It’s not search engine optimization if you’re doing it for the search engine. That’s the lesson none of the big SEO gurus wants to tell you. They would have to take responsibility for all the bad advice they have handed out, sold, and served on golden platters for the past 10-12 years.

All the little SEO bloggers who are writing posts about how great guest blogging and content curation are — they have no clue about what comes next. It’s a very simple pattern:

• Some SEO tests an idea to build search referral traffic
• They share that idea
• Other SEOs take up the idea and share it
• Everyone laughs and celebrates over their newfound wealth and success
• The search engines decide they don’t like the idea
• Everyone who adopted the idea is struck down in the midst of their laughter
• Forlorn and desolate, they wait for someone to test an idea that will build search referral traffic

When you write about the “SEO Cycle”, you don’t really picture it this way, do you? This is completely different from the pretty circle annotated with “Keyword Research”, “Content Creation”, “Link Building”, “Reporting”, and “Analysis”. I think the above 7 points describe the SEO cycle better.

We owe it to ourselves and clients and bosses to point out that any popular SEO strategy has a short lifespan. It is doomed by its own popularity, drowned by the widespread success it breeds in changing search results.

Ultimately we as SEOs have failed to prove our worth as curators of good and bad SEO practices. We stand frozen beside the pathway, forever focused on the wrong treasure, victims of our own desire for unearned success.

Knowing this, if you could go back in time and do it all differently, would you? I think far more people would choose to do it all the same way again because they would not want to wait however long they must for real success.

Hence, it’s only a matter of time before we succumb to the Content Curation Update.