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Good copy: You are who you write about

Posted by Michael Martinez on June 21, 2007 in SEO Theory, Search Engine Optimization

Relevance is a meaningless concept without copy. Copy is relevant to the query. Sometimes the copy is found off the page, and as we all know some search engines believe that off-page copy is actually useful for determining relevance.

For example, you could say that anchor text describing the Google query ‘failure in the white house’ is relevant to the query results for “failure in the white house”. On the other hand, you could say that anchor text claiming ‘failure to understand SEO’ is not very descriptive (it’s subjective).

In other words, opinion (either true or feigned) is not descriptive. It can be malicious, complimentary, or misleading, or even (in some cases) informative.

Flattering anchor text may be manipulative. Unflattering anchor text may be manipulative. If I can borrow a concept from Pyschology, you cannot NOT communicate. Hence, on the Web, you cannot NOT manipulate.

Ergo, all anchor text is manipulative, regardless of whether search engines pass the anchor text. Your outbound link anchors form part of your content. If it’s human visible content then you are expressing an opinion or sharing a fact that helps people form some sort of impression about something.

The manipulation may backfry you. For example, people who don’t think to look for “rel=’nofollow’” on outbound links in blog copy may wrongly conclude that someone is trying to pass malicious anchor text to another Web site. If you are not sensitive enough to the capricious nature of links and how they can manipulate both people and algorithms, you won’t think to distrust any and every outbound link.

As Aaron Pratt has conjectured in the past, there seems to be a “good ole boys” club in SEO, where people with popular blogs consistently link to each other. Of course, there is more than one such group — the elitists are legion.

In the old days there was one SEO community. It was elitist in some ways. Spammers took a very big chance by participating in that community. Cloakers did as well. Eventually, enough people were turned away or became frustrated enough or became ambitious enough that they branched out on their own and formed their own communities. Some of today’s most popular SEO communities were launched by people who participated in second gen SEO communities.

The links we give to our online friends and nonfriends are all designed in some way at some level to manipulate. Take Wikipedia, for example, which recently added “rel=’nofollow’” to its outbound links (except for links to specific Wikipedia-related sites). Wikipedia’s leadership did not want its links to be used to influence search results. One consequence of the conversion of the links was that Wikipedia moved up in search results for many expressions. After all, it was no longer passing anchor text to other pages and indicating to search engines that those other pages are important for those words.

Wikipedia’s manipulation was intended to stop the third-party arbitration of Wikipedia resources for manipulation. In other words, in order to prevent people from using Wikipedia pages to manipulate search results, Wikipedia had to manipulate search results in a different way.

You cannot NOT manipulate.

Once you create copy that is indexed by the search engines, you must decide how you’re going to manipulate search results because you have no choice about whether you’re going to manipulate them. This follows on what I was saying yesterday: you own the search engines. They index your copy and they show people what you want them to show. The search engines have no choice but to show someone’s copy so your choice is whether you want that copy to be yours.

As I pointed out in my high quality links discussion: Selectivity is key to understanding what makes a high quality link and what is not a “high quality link”. Your choices about whom you link to (and how you link) define who you are to the search engines and to your visitors. It’s the same with copy. What you choose to write about and how you write your copy defines who you are to both the search engines and your visitors.

You’re faced with many choices. Do you want to be hostile to someone else or gracious? Do you want to be competitive with someone else or supportive? Do you want to include someone else in your discussion or do you want to exclude them? Do you want to call upon someone else’s support or do you want to challenge them?

Your copy engages other people’s copy in your strategy one way or the other. By throwing down the gauntlet, by offering an endorsement, by ignoring someone else completely you manipulate both the search engines and the visitors. If you put your most important points inside links, those links may point to content that support your points. But what if they don’t? What if those links point to content that disagrees with what you say? You can use links to draw support from other documents or to knock them down.

You can use links to build authority in your copy, not because search engine algorithms designate some documents as authoritative (that’s another bit of nonsense that is SEO myth), but because you back up what you say with credible references. Or you can use links to destroy authority in your copy because you link to incredibly poor resources.

A lot of people do link to incredibly bad, poorly informed resources. Sometimes that is all they have available to link to. If you link to 100 poorly designed, poorly written, poorly informed Web sites, how authoritative will your page be? To a search engine it may look very authoritative, but to a visitor it will look like a stupid resource. And the lesson to take away from that circumstance is that fooling the search engines won’t help build the visibility and reputation you want for long-term SEO success. You need to link to good resources. More importantly, you need to create unique, useful, and informative copy.

The better informed you are, the better informed your audience will be.

You can write about cheap, sleazy SEO spammers or you can write about the best SEOs in the field, the best SEO leaders, the leaders of SEO. You can show people what works or you can show people what is easy to link to.

You can share an opinion about what is helpful, or you can share an opinion about some site that says “Buy Viagra Now”. Either way you’re sharing an opinion.

You can manipulate the search results by linking to pizza content that doesn’t benefit from link anchor text or you can link to ‘click here’ results that don’t benefit from link anchor text. The more people who click on those links, the more active those queries will become, the more visible they will become to people searching for pizza queries to place ads on, the more likely those queries will become inundated with pizza advertising.

What are the implications of manipulating query behavior through links? What are the implications of manipulating search results through links? What are the implications of manipulating opinion through links?

Be sure you understand what comes out the other end of the tube before you start throwing stuff into the end nearest you. You are part of the process. The search results begin and end with you. That link you give to your online friend today may become the obstacle between you and success down the road. It may be the key to a fortune of free advertising you never thought about.

For as you cannot NOT manipulate, neither can you NOT put something into the pipeline. By creating copy you put into motion forces you don’t understand very well. And if you don’t understand the process well, your manipulative efforts may be only marginally rewarded. We push rockets into space more easily and economically today because we understand the process better than we did 50 years ago.

You are who you write about because you define the copyspace you create, and that copyspace in turn becomes your avatar on the Web. You avatar is entangled with other people’s avatars and those collectives provide momentum in one direction or another. You cannot NOT participate in the process.

You had better learn how to understand it and control it better. It’s time to think about the consequences of your copy and linking decisions because once you put them out there, you cannot take them back.