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The rules of SEO Idiocy

Posted by Michael Martinez on August 8, 2007 in Seo Myths

Any idiot can create a Web page that makes money. Spammers do it with automated software all the time, and I would say that most idiots are actually smarter than software. Most.

Once in a while someone will take something I write to a forum guru and ask for an opinion. Some forum gurus like what I say, some forum gurus don’t. The same gurus might agree with one of my articles and disagree with another.

So someone who reads this blog (or perhaps who used to read this blog) took a recent post to a favorite SEO forum and asked the forum guru (the site admin) for an opinon. The response began with: “He also says the article he is writing is about horses because he mentions the word horse so many times to make a point. Wrong.”

That’s the kind of knee-jerk analysis you get from people who don’t know the first thing about search engine optimization theory.

SEO is not, never has been, and never will be about making money. Search engine optimization is about placing pages in search engine results and the post in question was part of an ongoing discussion of long tail SEO.

Long tail SEO doesn’t have anything to do with “market share” and “themes”, “theme relevance”, “sematnic indexing”, “keyword BS”, or any other SEO myths and nonsense.

Search engines measure relevance mechanically. They assign little relevance scores to various things, add up the scores, and then they may add something else like a linking weighted value.

One might hope that simple principle would have some sticking power with the search engine optimization community, but then we’re talking about the same community that believes Google introduced Hilltop into its search results in 2003 (it actually happened in 2002 with Google News), that you can use Yahoo! to do backlink research for Google (even though they don’t share data), that the major search engines today are doing semantic analysis (if they are, they’ve all failed to mention that in their technology overviews and their SERPs show absolutely no indication of semantic analysis), and that all you need is links.

I’ve been accused of treating the entire SEO community as if they are all incompetent idiots. Well, that’s not my intention but I do have a few guidelines for deciding whom I think is an idiot.

1. SEO idiots propound ideas and principles that are mathematically unacceptable
2. SEO idiots never admit to being wrong, having changed their point of view, or being influenced by non-SEO idiots (i.e., they are inflexible)
3. SEO idiots can always “write a thesis” to rebut any argument but they never actually do
4. SEO idiots look at only the information that supports their point of view and ignore the rest
5. SEO idiots support their favorite blogger, forum admin, contributor, drinking buds, whatever in the face of any facts
6. SEO idiots think that Toolbar PageRank has something to do with search engine optimization
7. SEO idiots use SEO tools, SEO friendly services, and SEO techniques because they don’t know how to do anything else
8. SEO idiots believe the most popular ideas being passed around the SEO community because they are the most popular ideas being passed around the SEO community
9. SEO idiots praise nonsense without ever looking at it critically and asking, “Why should I believe this?”
10. SEO idiots immediately attack the credibility of anyone they disagree with by suggesting the other person doesn’t “know how it’s done (snicker, snicker)”
11. SEO idiots mistake accidental success for measured progress
12. SEO idiots don’t think (or talk or write) in terms of “measured progress”
13. SEO idiots almost always have something to sell

In short, SEO idiots don’t ask “why”, don’t experiment, and don’t evaluate things on the basis of all the facts. SEO idiots are emotionally attached to specific ideas, thought leaders, and techniques and tools. SEO idiots don’t know what to do when a search engine updates. SEO idiots cannot discuss search engine results without embedding buzz expressions like “co-occurrence”, “semantic indexing”, “PR”, “backlinks”, and “link popularity” in their discussions.

A lot of SEO idiots achieve real results. Many of them do it with a lot of hard work. But that doesn’t mean they understand why their hard work succeeds.

Given that no one outside the search engines knows exactly how search engines score results, no one outside the search engines knows why one page ranks above another. You’re an idiot if you think you do. You don’t know why, you cannot explain why, and anyone who listens to and believes your faux explanations is as much an idiot as you are.

We make guesses. We hopefully put a lot of thought and research into those guesses but we make guesses about why one page ranks above another. Only an idiot would think he actually knows why.

The best SEO explanations of search engine technology are the high-level, concept-oriented explanations that leave the details to the search engines.

Search engine optimization is grounded in a few well-established principles and mired in a lot of SEO myths and nonsense. Some people are making money off their SEO myths and nonsense. After all, the people who make the most money during various gold rushes are the merchants who sell picks, pans, and shovels to the miners. The merchants don’t have to know if there is gold in them thar hills. They only need to know that someone wants to buy picks, pans, and shovels.

If you’re buying SEO services and tool subscriptions, ask yourself why you’re doing that. Can you do the work by hand or are you dependent upon someone else to do the work for you? If you can do the work by hand then maybe the tools and services are just saving you time (and time is money). If you cannot do the work by hand then you’re in a really tight spot because you have no way of knowing whether you’re digging for gold in the right place.

And just because someone tells you they are pointing you in the right direction doesn’t mean you should believe them. Nor are their faux testimonials a good reason to believe them either.

When it comes to evaluating SEO tools and services, the SEO Method is just as reliable as it is when working with search results: you experiment, you evaluate, and you adjust.

If someone says you need their whizmo-gadget tool to outrank your competitors the easiest test to determine the accuracy of their claims is to try to do it without their whizmo-gadget tool. If you’re buying the sales pitch because you don’t know enough to do it yourself, you’re in trouble.

This industry has no standards. The next time someone says, “I could write a thesis to refute that argument but I don’t have time,” ask him to write the thesis and then challenge every point he makes.

See if his argument holds up as well as his hot air. That’s how you identify SEO idiots when you don’t know the first thing about SEO.

In other words, the proof is in the pudding, not in the down-putting.