SEO Blog

There was an interesting piece in the New York Times over the weekend that looked at fledgling search engine, Blekko [see: An Engine’s Tall Order: Streamline the Search]. Whilst the comments made about the algorithm and their unique approach to was more than readable, it was the criticism of SEO as a practice that caught my attention particularly.

Now I throw my hands up when it comes to this kind of thing. I’m an SEO, therefore I have a vested interest in all things related to the industry and the practice. As such, I don’t think I would ever be described as impartial when dealing with such issues.

However, with the disclaimer now done and dusted, there are a number of issues within the article that really surprised me. For instance, as with many conventional media reports, there appears to be a great deal of misunderstanding about what SEO actually is. For instance, this article includes the following:
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Whenever there is a new algorithm update or search add-on people inevitably look for the potential benefits. However, on the flipside, it’s difficult to ignore the negative side too. With the search engines working hard to stop people benefitting from things like email spam and paid links, surely we are on our way to search nirvana – where results are accurate and tailored to our intentions.

Unfortunately this is rarely the case. Let’s look at Google +1 as a prime example. Here you have a great tool for people to share their favourite sites amongst friends and help Google to gauge which are the most popular pages. This could one day have an influence on the SERPs, meaning that genuine human factors are being employed to rank sites. Great news, right?
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Plenty of people have tried, but almost all have failed to get around Google’s pretty strict rules. All search engines hate to be made to look stupid, they dislike even the notion of another individual profiting from breaking their rules. Therefore they work doubly hard to detect such issues and are inclined to punish suitably.

So how might you consider gaming the system?

How about getting a few sites ranking for the same phrase? Clever in principle, horribly transparent in reality.
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The idea of building links is to attract visitors as well as improving your search engine credibility. Therefore it is counterproductive (or at least partially so) to leave links in places that do little to attract the attention of potential visitors.

Here, let me give you an example. It is good SEO practice to comment on blogs and other forums that allow you to leave links. Invariably many will be no-followed, but still, a link is a link – no matter how much it may have been weakened.

Some people try to exploit this. They will find blogs of little or no relevance to their site or the online space that they’re trying to promote and leave a nonsensical message. Even the token ‘Thanks for the information, great article’ response is better than some. Whether English isn’t their first language or they are just otherwise ignorant to the ideas of effective SEO, random gobbledegook isn’t going to inspire traffic.
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