I should create a “Bad SEO Advice” category and collect all the articles I have written about it through the years in one place. There are days when I am tempted to go back and “update” old articles about bad SEO advice. After all, republishing old content with updated information is now considered to be a “good SEO tactic” (for whichever year the idea occurs to someone). I’ve been updating old pages with new information since the 1990s, so consider that to be useful advice unless you’re just trying to create SEO case studies.
What does Pygmalion have to do with bad SEO advice? Read on for the correlation.
I could probably reduce the number of active posts on SEO Theory by consolidating a lot of old articles. That actually improves some older content. But there are over 1,000 articles on this site. I don’t have time for that kind of brute force editorial review. I occasionally make a post “private” and remove recent Tweets to that content.
SEO advice continues to suffer from a lack of industry standards. I have been calling for the adoption of industry standards for many years. It will probably never happen. Too many popular companies now have a vested interest in selling unscientific SEO advice, tools, and SEO education. Even some major universities now sell unprincipled courses in SEO (they outsource it).
I’ll get to the most recent bad SEO advice below but first let me share what I feel are a couple of examples of the best possible SEO advice.
1. Develop Real SEO Industry Standards
Real industry standards, adopted according to an ISO process. It takes about 3 years, according to some sources, to bring a proposed ISO standard to publication. The process is open and formally tested for thousands of standards. There is no guarantee that an ISO committee (assembled from SEO industry experts) would produce anything better than a random blog post, but the development process would force people to talk through everything they want to include in the document. I am pretty sure that much of the nonsense which passes for “best SEO practices” today would be exposed for the fakery it is. But a committee recruited from among today’s SEO industry experts might just deceive itself into agreeing to promote the fakery.
The ISO tries to prevent that from happening. Outsiders will question and comment on the proposed standard. They will compare it to standards developed for other industries. They will challenge the thinking and assumptions behind the proposals. Appeals to authority such as “my favorite video / conference presenter / blogger says this is so” should be quickly rejected.
A reasonably unbiased SEO standard should accomplish the following:
- Set a bare minimum expectation for what SEO can achieve
- Clearly stipulate what SEO cannot achieve
- Outline a minimum process that can benefit every Website for engaging with search indexes
- Provide guidelines for reliably determining what works
- Provide guidelines for evaluating new claims
- Stipulate minimum guidelines for conducting research
- Provide guidelines for marketing paid media and subscription services
SEO research is dominated by unscientific nonsense, much of it shameless propaganda for SEO tools, Webinars, books, and other things being sold and upsold. There is value in sharing anecdotal information, even through paid media like newsletters and conference presentations. Nonetheless, people act like some sort of university-quality peer review process is in place for all the SEO demogoguery. And though every field of science has reasonable complaints about failures in the peer review process, there is no peer review in search engine optimization. The closest you get is the peer review applied to the search engineers’ published papers.
The fact that Danny Sullivan can call up Google and ask a question doesn’t mean he is asking the right question or presenting the best interpretation of the answer he is given. He speaks with authority but he is not the authority. There is no Authority for search engine optimization practices and knowledge. You cannot have such an authority without some sort of standards.
A standard provides a baseline for everyone to match and, hopefully, exceed. Good standards do not begin with codes of ethics. Every attempt to bring some sort of order out of the industry’s chaos has begun with codes of ethics. Every attempt to propose a code of ethics fails. We don’t need codes of ethics. We need for people to agree that most of what is being shared as SEO wisdom and expertise falls into two categories:
- Biased self-promotional case studies used to sell products and services
- Indiscriminate lists of links and “experts” that are designed to earn social media shares and links
There is no real value in either of these kinds of articles or presentations. You’re not learning anything useful. You’re being fed propaganda. You pay for that propaganda and you spread it further. And that is why every year thousands of Websites lose what they believed were good positions in search results. They are being promoted on the basis of propaganda-driven tools and techniques, not real standards.
My advice is simple: start the process of forming an SEO industry standards committee. Learn about what real standards do and how they are used. Don’t let people get away with any more “not in my backyard” dismissals based on ignorance. Adopting standards doesn’t mean people have to take tests or apply for licenses or promise to adhere to codes of ethics. Anyone providing products or services can ignore standards. Any client or employer who ignores standards, however, does so at great peril.
2. Start Writing Better SEO Case Studies
I dread reading SEO case study articles. The format becomes more evil and misleading every year. That is because the most popular SEO Websites publish the worst possible case studies: the kind that promote their products and services.
It’s one thing to teach people how to use your products and services with a case study. It’s quite another thing to write a sensational headline such as “5 Things We Learned from This SEO Experiment” for what is clearly a self-promotional case study. Either your case study teaches people how to use your product / service OR it reveals something you actually learned from an SEO experiment. The difference is determined by how much you talk about your product or service and how much you talk about what can be learned from conducting the experiment.
A valid SEO experiment should be replicable. It should be possible to replicate it with someone else’s tools or services. It should be possible for anyone to do the experiment themselves without having to buy a subscription for any SEO tool or service. Search engine optimization improves the relationship between Website and search engine. There is no SEO tool, product, plugin, or course that accomplishes that task. If you cannot improve the relationship between site and search without SEO tools, you can’t improve that relationship.
A good SEO case study includes the following:
- A description of a specific need or problem
- A justification for solving the problem
- A proposed method for solving the problem
- A description of how the method was used
- What the beginning and final measurements were
- Any personal conclusions the writer draws, presented after everything else
A bad SEO case study promises miracle cures, includes calls to action for buying something throughout the article, frequently mentions the writer’s own tools, and glibly makes unsupported statements of fact or assumptions. Unsupported statements of fact include things like “links are the most important ranking factor” and “Google uses the Hilltop algorithm to [whatever]”. Unsupported assumptions include things like “we wanted links with DA above 50” and “we used [link tool] to collect all the links to the site.”
An assumption implies that it is conveying reliable information. If you’re scouring the Web for backlinks, you’re already writing the wrong kind of SEO case study. You don’t know which links Bing or Google has indexed and you don’t know which links they are allowing to pass value and you don’t know what kind of value those links are passing. So why are you collecting link data for your search engine optimization case study?
Case studies are anecdotal. Each case study should make that clear. You should not EVER say “correlation does not equal causation” because that is just nonsense. You shouldn’t even be using, making, drawing, or mentioning correlations. They don’t mean anything. They provide no insight into anything. You just think they do because you have been reading SEO correlation studies for years. SEO correlation studies are the number one example of WHY this industry needs to adopt standards.
If you’re not allowed to use correlation analysis in your case study, then what CAN you use to show cause and effect? In most cases you cannot and you don’t know what causes the effect. It’s usually not what you think it is.
Case studies should not include references to SEO polls, surveys, presentations, or other misleading statements of fact by the industry. Your SEO case study is your opportunity to share what YOU know and what YOU do. If you pepper your article with praise for someone else who has inspired you or whose statements of fact you accept without question you are just wasting people’s time.
Case studies should not be trying to prove someone else is correct. You cannot prove anyone is correct with anecdotal evidence. On the other hand, it’s okay to present a contrary case study. If you are using the same information (source) as whomever you are contradicting, then you CAN claim to be disproving their assertions (or at least giving people a reason to be less convinced by what the other person says). If you cannot base your case study on the same source of information then you’re not proving anyone wrong with your contrary case study. Don’t act as if you are.
Here is an example of where I used a contrary case study to prove someone wrong: Deconstructing the Hotpads Subdomain Move. The faulty assertion made in the original case study was “We moved our blog from subdomain to subfolder and saw an increase in traffic; therefore subfolders work better than subdomains”. Using Archive.Org I was able to show that Hotpads had originally used PageRank Sculpting (proven to be detrimental to Website health by no less than Google) on the subdomain blog but not on the subfolder blog. Clearly the subfolder benefits from improved navigational support from the rest of the site.
Sometimes you can show a counter-example from your own experience and data, but you have to leave open the question of what has been proven or disproven. Until someone can tie two distinct data sets together (NOT through a correlation analysis) they don’t support or disprove each other. It’s not easy to take two different case studies and use them to show some great principle.
Case studies do not prove opinions. A well-written SEO case study showcases how you go about improving the relationship between site and search. That may not be good enough for someone who wants to pay for a magic bullet. If you want to be in the business of selling magic bullet solutions, well the good news is that there are no SEO industry standards so the unsuspecting public has no way of knowing you’re just selling magic bullet solutions.
Here are Examples of Bad SEO Advice and Claims Still Being Shared Today
Today is mid-2017. I should probably come back and update this part of the article every year but I suspect this bad advice will continue to be shared years into the future.
Correlation studies show that links are dominating search results. No, they don’t do any such thing. No SEO correlation study can determine which links are indexed or passing value in Google. Hence, how can ANY correlation study prove that links are a dominant factor in search results?
A typical competitive search result is determined by evaluating many factors. Correlation analysis looks at the relationship between two variables without in any way taking into consideration what other variables may be influencing or participating in a very complicated system. So, yes, you may find a correlation but it means nothing, tells you nothing, and leads you down the garden path.
SEO experiments show that CTR strongly influences search rankings. No, they don’t do any such thing. Click-rate studies are as flawed as correlation analysis (and really are just built from correlation analysis). Again, your CTR studies are not accounting for all the other things that influence search results.
Just running the same query over and over again can have an influence on search results. Did you know that? The repetition may trigger some random search engine experiment, or it may trigger an algorithm that injects a standard answer. You cannot observe the Searchable Web Ecosystem without changing it.
Track user engagement to improve search rankings. When you are logged into a search engine that provides personalized search results it IS using engagement (with its search results) as a ranking factor. Beyond that, engagement becomes very useless.
Bounce rate does not affect search engine rankings. Not the way you think they do. Many high-ranking URLs that receive thousands, even millions of clicks per year, log high bounce rates. There isn’t even a correlation between bounce rate and rankings.
Time spent on site is a useful metric for Conversion Rate Optimization.
Google is collecting user engagement signals (for Web search rankings) through Chrome. These false claims are made on the basis of ignorance and faulty experimentation. Google explained what data it collects, and what it uses that data for, in this blog post from 2008. That same article points you to this privacy notice (last updated in April 2017 as of when this article was published).
Get as Many Featured Snippets as You Can for More Clicks. This is wishful thinking. Some featured snippets do send a lot more traffic to sites. Some featured snippets suck all the search referral life out of a page. We have a working hypothesis on which kinds of search snippets work better than others.
In general featured snippets hurt the majority of Websites in the search results that include featured snippets because searchers are less likely to explore those other listings. Don’t just blindly go after featured snippets because you read some study that says they drive more traffic. LOOK AT YOUR OWN SEARCH REFERRAL DATA.
You need to optimize your site for the Mobile First Index. Why do we need to do that? How, exactly, do we do that? No one knows what the Mobile First Index will actually do, how it will work, and what strategies will be best for it. Within about 5 minutes of your reading this paragraph, yet another well-informed SEO blogger will publish a “5 Things You Need to Know about Google’s Mobile First Index” article.
Google originally thought they would launch this magic index by the end of 2016. Then it was sometime in 2017. Now it’s 2018. The wait has already become longer than the wait for Penguin 4.0 and now everyone in the SEO industry is an expert in how to prepare for the Google Mobile First Index. Right.
UPDATE: The Mobile First Index has been live for a few months, everyone should know by now that responsive sites don’t need to do anything, desktop-only sites don’t need to do anything, and sites publishing separate mobile content are now relying only on the mobile content for indexing and ranking.
Write Longer Posts and Include More Pictures in Them. So, you want me to believe that I should be finding more things to say just for the sake of ranking better, right? I guess SEO copywriting is not yet dead after all, Jim.
Anything that mentions domain authority in any context (other than pure derision). This is 2017. How many times does Google have to say there is no connection between domain authority and their algorithms and index?
Broken Link Building Technique No. 9 (and counting). If you were to put that much time and effort into writing truly helpful content you wouldn’t need to share your experience with how many broken links you found. People in the SEO industry don’t have time for most of these guaranteed techniques that provide 5% ROI. This is an example of expensive advice. Desperate people chase broken links in a systematic way.
Anything that mentions Google’s Hilltop algorithm. Okay, if you’re still talking about Hilltop in connection with link building in 2017 get out of the link building expert business. Google implemented the Hilltop algorithm in Google News in 2002. The SEO world first began wrongly claiming that Hilltop was used in the main Web index in 2004, and apparently you’re still reading the wrong forum discussions.
Any link building method that is built on Hilltop is NOT the link building secret you are looking for.
Link juice (blah blah blah). I have always wondered, if you squeeze a link too hard, will it squirt you in the eye with its juice?
Get high authority links from Wikipedia and About.com. If you don’t know what is wrong with this advice, I’ll just assume you’re new around here.
Publish Content with a Minimum of [INSERT SOME NUMBER HERE] Words. Why? Because SEO correlation studies say so. Googlers have repeatedly advised people to ignore this nonsense. But what should they know? They only work with the algorithms. It’s not like they have been enlightened by correlation analysis.
If you look at 10,000,000 articles that rank (by your criteria) for some large number of queries, and you find that the average word count for a given position is [X], stop and think about how averages are computed. That means you found a lot of high ranking content with far fewer words than [X].
Only the First Link Counts. This is patent nonsense. Test it for yourself. Use a variety of linking pages, formats, anchor text, etc. You’ll find this isn’t always the case. Search engines can see a list of 5 links and skip over the first 4.
Anything to do with “crawl budget”. Search engines manage crawl budget. You don’t. As Shari Thurow likes to point out, the engineers may refer to this as “crawler cap”, which is more informative about who is actually in control than “crawl budget”.
What you the site owner (or SEO) can control or influence is how much of your server’s processing time and power is used by search engine crawlers. You don’t set their internal caps and budgets; you set your site’s caps and budgets. These are two very different things. The result of them setting theirs and you setting yours is a negotiation between site and search.
The sooner Web marketers stop talking about “crawl budget” the better.
Quality Content or Quality Links blah blah blah. Every time I see someone writing anything using either of these phrases I think of the Bystander in “Pygmalion”: It’s all right: he’s a gentleman: look at his boots. If you have read enough SEO case studies you should see the correlation in all that.
See also:
- How Bad SEO Advice Becomes Conventional SEO Wisdom
- More Bad Advice from the SEO Community
- Real Advice from Bad SEOs
- Dangerous and Irresponsible Link Advice from Experts
- You SEO People are Destroying News Websites with Dumb Advice
- The Difference between Knee-jerk SEO and What You Need from Your SEO
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