Common Sense SEO
Have you ever wondered what makes certain people SEO experts? More than any other field, it seems like there is a ton of conflicting information out there about SEO. Is there a Google sandbox? It depends on where you’re reading about it.
The sad truth is, almost everybody who has ever tried to do SEO thinks that they are an expert at it. Unfortunately, the author of this article falls into that category.
Some of the things he mentions just don’t seem to make sense. (I won’t point out his grammar errors, as I’ve likely made a few here as well – but there’s a lot of them!) Let’s look at a few examples:
- The 30 spot filter – Google preaches robustness and scalability. Automatically decreasing a ranking by 30 or so just doesn’t scale well. If looked at from a programmer’s point of view, each site would have a “number” calculated based on various factors of how it relates to a query. Results would then be ordered by that number, not assigned an actual ranking like “7 or 30” for each query. It’d be really inefficient to do things this way. Lowering a site 30 ranking spots just wouldn’t make sense. If anything, there may be some sort of factor in this algorithm that produces what seems like 30 spots, but it’s not just saying “move #5 down to #35.”
- Banned for Google Bombing. I’m sorry, but this just doesn’t happen. If it did, it would be really easy for me to get my competitors sites banned from Google. Instead, what’s most likely happening is that the site which was Google bombed merely isn’t showing up anymore for that term. Google recently released a change in which it will only show Google Bombed sites for queries if that site “wants to rank for the query” (that is to say, it actually contains the text being searched for) Removing a site based on who links to it doesn’t make any sense. I can’t see Google removing a site based on factors outside of the webmaster’s control. In fact, it goes against what they say.
- links.htm – This is ridiculous. I can’t picture a hard coded check for “links.htm” in any type of Google code. Not to mention, it really doesn’t scale well with different languages. The name of your links file should have no effect. This myth most likely revolves around common automatic linking software. This software creates links.htm pages that are nothing but link farms. Google is penalizing for the link farm auto generated pages, not the filename. It’s a case of confusing causation with correlation. Will your rank go up if you change the file name to something else? Probably – but only temporarily until Google spots the spammy behavior of the new file.
- Google says that there is nothing a competitor can do to drop YOUR rankings. (fourth question.) The author highlights this point, then goes on to say several things that go against it. Are we assuming that Google lies in their webmaster guidelines? I’d hate to think so. One example he gives is that if you have a link on a link farm, you could be penalized. That isn’t likely to happen.
If you have a link on a link farm, it probably won’t help you but I can’t see it hurting you either. If it did, millions of link farms would spring up where everybody just linked to their competitors. It doesn’t make sense for Google to penalize you for factors outside of your control. This misconception probably stems from people being told not to link to link farms. That’s good advice, as there probably is a penalty associated with linking to bad neighborhoods.
The point of this is simple: Use common sense when thinking about SEO. If it’s helpful to your visitors, it’s probably a good idea from an SEO standpoint. A good question to ask yourself is “would I do this if there were no search engines?” If so, you can’t go wrong.
A same common sense rule applies for penalties. If it would be possible for a competitor to sabotage your site, then Google probably doesn’t penalize. (but they probably don’t reward either.)
My question is this: Do many SEO’s lack common sense? Are they confusing lack of reward with a penalty? Are they really paranoid of everything they do? Are they focusing on search engines instead of the customer? Or are they just trying to get articles published to further establish themselves as experts?
Disclosure: I used to work in SEO, and have published several articles on the topic. Currently however, I only do SEO for my own private sites (and they all rank pretty damn well.) I’m not claiming to be an SEO expert though, just a computer scientist who approaches the topic with common sense.
13 comments February 5th, 2007
