The long cost of silence, the hard cost of sharing

As I’ve indicated a few times, I’m under a very tight non-disclosure agreement, the most iron-clad I have ever signed. Essentially, all my new SEO research and test results belong to my employer. One might ask how many more posts I can make here before I run out of useful things I’m allowed to say.
There is a fairly brief lifespan to the most useful SEO techniques once you step away from the fundamental principles. Fundamental Web design and promotion principles never really change: make your site compelling, accessible, and user-friendly. Implement unique, interesting content. Emphasize what is important to you.

Fundamental principles are good to know and absolutely must be used for a successful long-term SEO campaign. If you’re not burning through a thousand spam domains a month, the value you create in your site begins with how you put it together and how you market your content. Your site is your brand, is your value, is you.

Still, because of competition fundamental principles often take you only so far in hyperoptimized queries and then you have to fall back on “SEO techniques”. Most people would say that consists of link-building, but that’s not true.

For example, Rand Fishkin of SEOmoz, likes to bait links rather than build links. The difference between building links and baiting them is that baited links tend to come much faster and they are all one-way links. Also, baited links are editorially chosen. Rand’s not stupid — he understands the intuitive value of having thousands of people linking to your site quickly and freely.

And some people rely extensively on paid directory listings. You’d be amazed at how much juice is still flowing from old school sites that charge you for “editorial review with no guarantee of inclusion”. Or maybe you see the juice but you cannot afford to pay for it.

Beyond buying links, baiting links, and paying for editorial inclusion, however, there remain other methods of building success in search engine results pages. I’m not talking about reciprocating links, distributing articles and press releases, or seeding forums and blogs with posts that link back to your sites. Take everything off the table that you have learned to do for “SEO” and then start adding skills. Now you’re into what I call “second-tier SEO”, the secret sauce, the hard-to-find stuff that usually has immense benefit.

The difference between second-tier SEO and first-tier SEO is that anyone can do the first-tier stuff. You’ll find it documented on blogs, forums, and SEO Web sites across the universe. It’s candy, baby food, the basic stuff. Some of it works well, some of it used to work great, and some of it never worked at all. First-tier SEO tactics are tried-and-true or tried-and-tired formulaic approaches to capturing someone’s attention.

The real distinction between second-tier SEO and first-tier SEO is that in the first tier someone talked. Second-tier SEO is the trade secret stuff that more effective SEOs don’t share on their blogs, in their tutorials, and in the forums. Second-tier SEO techniques become first-tier SEO techniques when they move out into the open. And they are not necessarily unethical or so-called “black hat” techniques. They very often do not violate search engine guidelines.

Through the years I’ve done my share of demoting second-tier SEO techniques to the first tier. Many other people have as well. We all do it for a reason. I would say that in most cases the primary reason is a desire to help someone, and to be perceived as helping people with a new innovation before other people ruin it. You cannot safely assume you’re the only person to figure out that doing this helps and doing that hurts. Life should be so good, but it ain’t.

On any given day, there are probably between 400 and 500 seriously competent SEOs who have active research experiments in the process. You never hear from the majority of these people. Many of them are probably better than the SEO gurus whose blogs and forums you read. These are the paid professionals who have been doing their thing for years. Like me, they most likely read the forums to see what other people say and give considerable thought to the possible significance of everything that is said.

You can learn a lot more from the problems people present than from the solutions they are given if only because most of the solutions are wrong. But how do you learn if you assume the answers you see are wrong? That should be obvious: try to replicate the problem yourself and then test various possible fixes. It doesn’t get any more zientific dan dat Doctor Einstein.

If you have a good heart and you want to help people, running around various forums and trying to out-blather other people who probably don’t know any more than you isn’t going to make you a great SEO. If anything, it makes you look like a blathering fool. Take me, for example. Those of you who are reading this blog regularly respect my opinions. But many of you have seen me go through some heated exchanges with other blathering fools. I lose some people’s respect every time I clamp down on someone I think is an idiot.

So if there is a cost to speaking up and sharing what you know (you lose your competitive advantage) or what you think you know (you look like an idiot), then why speak up at all, except to maintain a reputation for breathing on an occasional basis? I think the chief value in reaching out with occasional sound, previously unvocalized advice — in addition to building your brand value — is that it helps you stay in touch with the community.

You never know when you have all the facts. I can easily look back through many forum posts I’ve made and say, “Well, that turned out not to be true” or “That is no longer true.” In fact, just yesterday I reviewed a discussion I had in late 2005 about site wide links. At the time, my experience with Google made what I was saying seem very clear and substantiable. I was able to leverage my site wide support for my own resources successfully.

I no longer feel that is entirely true. I believe, as I have documented elsewhere, that Google has now implemented an algorithm for figuring out how many links a given Web site (and I do mean site as opposed to domain or sub-domain) receives from another Web site. That knowledge, when compared with the fuller backlink footprint, probably helps Google decide whether to let those site wide links help. And I believe it’s a qualified all-or-nothing proposition.

Some people argue that Google, like Yahoo!, probably just allows one link to count from each domain. However, that does not appear to be the case. It never has. Not only has Google never admitted to such an arrangement, the technical literature published by Google employees all but excludes the possibility.

I was speaking with someone on my team today, showing him a second-tier technique I discovered just last month. He was a bit taken back by the simplicity of the idea, but even more so as I spelled out the possible implications. My test of the idea is still in progress, so even I don’t know if it works. Yet. But he made a comment about “how much stuff you know”.

Yeah, I know a lot of SEO techniques. Most of them don’t work, no longer work, or may eventually work. The problem is, I’m doing almost nothing now that I was doing a year ago — except for the fundamentals. I stick to the fundamentals before I try anything else. If you cannot master the basics, you’re not ready for the advanced stuff, and in my opinion “practice makes perfect”. So with every new Web site I go for the basic, fundamental stuff first.

SEO techniques don’t die within a year — not usually. But by the time everyone else is talking up a “great idea” I’m usually into something else. By the time I start dissing the ideas that “work well for (some forum pundit)” I’ve already refined another technique or two to replace it. And keep in mind that I am not the only person who does this. The voices on the blogs and forums are building value. Some of them know more than they share, some of them really don’t know enough to be sharing but they share anyway.

You can’t help everyone. Worse, if you share your best secrets openly, you hurt yourself (and your clients). You have to draw a line and say, “This is where my help ends. Take it or leave it.”

Some people would argue that some second-tier techniques are really available on the Internet. Some people do share: for a price, or because they want to build a reputation for themselves. Sure, there are some not-so-secret techniques that have not yet made it down to the first tier. But their days in the second tier are numbered. If you stumble across a secret that no one else is sharing on a popular blog or forum, before you pass it on, make sure you do two things:

First, test the tip in a safe environment so you know it really works.

Second, weigh the cost of sharing against the cost of remaining silent. What do you stand to gain or lose with either option? Is being popular in a forum really so important to you?