SEO is still bullshit

Two weeks ago I said that SEO is bullshit and the SEO community promptly got their knickers in a twist. The post was labelled everything from “sensationalist crap” to “linkbait”, but I was still left searching for a solid counter-argument. Even Richard Hearne, one of Ireland’s better known SEOs, decided not to engage in the discussion because my post was “so wide of the mark”. But then why the hype? Why the anger? Don’t tell me there might be some truth to my argument? SEO is bullshit and the SEOs know it too.

SEO is what it is

Paying for SEO services from an SEO consultant will generally get you what you want: higher, relevant ranking in popular search engines. But the majority of what SEO delivers is just best practices. After that, there remains search-engine specific tricks and link-building strategies.

SEO is bullshit for four reasons: it provides only short-term quick-fixes for poorly built sites; it promotes bad practices that cause usability problems; it pollutes the web with spam and noise; and it damages the experience of the web user. I put some of these arguments to the last remaining gentleman of the SEO industry, the very well respected Dave Davis of RedFly Marketting, to see how he defends his profession.

SEO is best practices

I asked Dave if a site, built from scratch and constructed using industry-standard best practices (semantic markup, IA, usability and accessibility), still requires SEO? And if so, why?

Only if you have competition. What if ALL your competitors sites are constructed using industry-standard best practices? I am sure you have competition. We all do. Search Engines do not take fancy designs into account when ranking a site. Search engines do not know that someone at the local chamber of commerce recommended you as the best in your market. All things equal, relevancy is key here. What makes your site more relevant than your competition? How can you tell Google that?

The web is becoming more and more competitive. SEO is absolutely essential when competing on line, especially when in competitive markets. I think it is important to note that in Ireland, in a lot of cases VERY limited SEO is required due to the fact that not many companies are even on line yet. There is no competition and a simple title tag can put you into first position for a reasonable competitive term. Move over to the US or the UK and it’s a different story. Ranking for competitive terms is a different ballgame altogether.

Consider this. If myself and yourself go heads up with a fresh domain each and try to rank for a single competitive word, say “mortgages”. We both design our sites using best practices and you leave it at that. You do nothing else. I however go out, build RELEVANT links, get citations, use tools that search engines provide (webmaster tools, sitemaps, product data feeds etc.) who do you think will rank higher for this one particular term?

I think you know the answer to that and I think your “SEO is bullshit” post knows that too. How many links did you snag with that bait?

The answer to Dave’s question is that his site will rank better if I do nothing but just put it online. But the only part of his solution that resides exclusively in the domain of the SEO practitioner is the “webmaster tools, sitemaps, product data feeds”. These are the “tricks” I’m talking about; the rest is just good marketing. If I’m providing relevant, interesting, quality content (yes, that includes my original SEO post, which ranks second after Jason Calacanis’ post of the same theme), people will link to it and talk about it in the same way that throughout the history of modern man, the most interesting person in the village has his name spoken more than others. It’s bullshit to call this SEO.

SEO is bad usability

Next, I asked Dave if he thinks on-site SEO practices are perfectly aligned with the interests of the visitor?

There are a lot of on-site practices that are absolutely not in the interest of the visitor. These practices are used by either SE spammers or those who have no clue what they are doing. Little do they know but the majority of these practices are also completely useless as search engines are now smart enough to smell them a mile away. Other best practices have absolutely nothing to do with the user experience. Source ordered content, authority siloing etc. These practices make it clear to search engines what content you as a human and a webmaster think is relevant for your visitors.

Others absolutely are in the best interest of the visitor. Image optimisation can bring in a lot of relevant traffic and only serves as useful to visitors that are either visually impaired or using a text browser. Internal anchor text linking also “describes” the page it’s linking to and helps search engines AND users understand what the page is about.

Here I agree with Dave completely; he’s describing nothing but best practices. Bullshit is paying extra for “image optimisation”: if describing images properly with alt attributes isn’t a standard practice, I don’t know what is. But he’s being careful to disassociate himself from “SE spammers or those who have no clue what they are doing”. Maybe Dave’s company doesn’t cross the line where usability is concerned, but even reputed SEOs like Richard Hearne use techniques that definitely don’t best suit the user: linking to your about page with “Internet Consultant Ireland” is putting the search engine before your visitors.

SEO is filling the web with crap

I asked Dave what he considers as acceptable off-site SEO practices?

I’ll give you a few. Registering your site with an authoritative and relevant directory. (DMOZ, Yahoo). Guest posting on other blogs, social media link baiting *cough cough*, article writing, relevant group participating (blog carnivals), mainstream media citations, careful synonymous content creation, content theming resulting from competitive analysis the list goes on. I guess a lot of this falls into the link building category of SEO and I have a feeling that is what you are after here. The list of off site practices is even longer.

Here I get the distinct impression that Dave is either being careful or that he’s actually one of the good guys; but why call yourself an SEO when what you’re promoting are web marketing techniques? I won’t knock all of these suggested approaches; guest posting and “social media link baiting” (aka, creating content that people enjoy and find interesting) are two things that make value for everyone: the content producers and the content consumers. But what Dave calls “careful synonymous content creation”, I call spam. Again, I can’t say what RedFly do, but since my original post, I’ve been sent information on some of these services delivered by Irish companies. One firm, respected within SEO circles and one of the few Irish Google AdWords Qualified Companies, writes spammy “articles” laced with links to the client’s site and spits them into “article networks” at a fiver a pop! This is content made for search engines with the sole purpose of artificially boosting the client’s reputation on the search engines. I know this practice to be widespread amongst SEO “professionals” and I wonder, how is this good for the web? This is pure bullshit. This is filling the web with crap.

SEO is just bad

My final, general argument against SEO is as follows: it’s bad. It’s bad for the user—in the way that it puts the search engine first—and it’s bad for the web—in the manner that it advocates spammy, noisy, web content.

I never claimed SEO doesn’t work. I’ve seen it work and I’ve practised it myself to great effect. But I realised that breaking the semantic structure of the web (for example, by building links that weren’t created because the linked-to document is worth linking-to but instead to boost the perceived relevance of that document for selfish reasons) is bad for everyone. It’s unethical and it’s dishonest and in the long run, gets us nowhere.

SEOs of the world: be good web citizens. Stop adding to the tripe out there on the net and stop spending your time destructively gaming Google. Go out there and make something beautiful, something worth linking to. Tell your clients that quick fixes only get you so far and help them plan new sites and new marketing strategies, using best web practices. SEO is bullshit and SEO is bad. Stop it.

Updates

1. Adjusted a line in the first paragraph so I don’t insinuate that Richard refused an invitation to comment.
2. Dave replied to my rebuttals and included two paragraphs from his original thoughts that I omitted from this post.