SEO Advice, Good or Bad?
June 25, 2008
There’s a lot of information posted on blogs or websites by people who claim to understand how Google works – but a lot of it is confusing, ambiguous, or just flat-out wrong. For example, one blog provided the following advice:
Unethical and dishonest SEO techniques will result in one of two things happening:
* Your website will actually lose rankings and drop like a brick in the Ohio River, or
* Your website will be banned from search engines.
And:
I won’t mention any of the bad techniques here, but if they have to do with creating extra pages in your website; stuffing your site with links, hidden links or hidden keywords, they you are going down the wrong path.
Let’s examine why I consider these statements to constitute poor advice (to say the least).
First, the statements are too ambiguous. The author fails to give concrete examples of what he considers “unethical and dishonest SEO techniques”; he does give a few examples in the second quote above, but they’re so vague as to be useless to anyone actually seeking to understand how to do well in Google.
Second, the second quote above is contradictory – he says he “won’t mention any of the bad techniques”, then mentions several things he considers “bad” (but not in enough detail). And why not mention them, in detail, with explanations of how to avoid them, if what he’s supposedly seeking to do is to help people do exactly that?
Let’s examine the author’s list of “bad SEO techniques”:
1. “Creating extra pages in your website”
So, apparently, one should never add content to one’s website, because that’s “bad”? This defies reason – why create a website in the first place, if not to add content?
2. “Stuffing your site with links”
The author of the blog should perhaps explain or quantify what he means by “stuffing”. In fact, Google’s own guidelines tell us to “Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).” So, if one has a 100-page site, with, say, 50 links per page, Google can handle those 5,000 links just fine. One only need look at such sites as wikipedia.org and about.com – both simply full to the gills with links, and both of which do very well in Google – to understand why including this as a “bad technique” is irrational.
3. “Hidden links or hidden keywords”
This is ambiguous, because the author fails to define the term “hidden”. It could mean links and keywords placed out of sight, or with identical foreground, background, and text coloration so the content can’t be viewed; or to using stylesheet settings to hide the content; or to something completely different. There’s simply no way to tell what it is the author considers “bad” here.
All of the author’s points are made in very broad statements. One should be wary of generalizations such as these; if an author gives no concrete examples and does not adequately define his terms, such statements simply lack credibility.
Third, the author provides no proof of what he says – no links to an expert source to back up what he says, for example – nor does he provide any other sort of credentials that would qualify him as an expert. Were the author someone such as, say, Matt Cutts (a well-known Google Search Engineer), then his statements would have more independent veracity – but apparently, he’s just this guy, shooting off his mouth. Why should we believe him – especially after looking at what Google’s own guidelines say?
Unfortunately, there are a lot of rumors about Google and how to do well in it floating around in the blogosphere, and most originate from posts like the one from which the above quotes were taken. The source seems authoritative and confident, and the content sounds reasonable at first blush – but when there are no credentials provided for the author, and no evidence of the truth of the content, be wary. Do more research.
Now, don’t think that I’m trying to give the quoted blog’s author a hard time; I’m not. He may very well honestly wish to educate people about his understanding of how Google works, and that’s laudable. But the ambiguity of his statements, combined with a lack of evidence (not to mention the fact that some of the statements are simply incorrect), simply raises more questions than it answers, and his blog entry ends up leaving people worse off than when they started.
Unfortunately, there are many similar examples of such poor advice, readily available with a simple search on “search engine optimization”. One can avoid such problematic information by looking for blogs and articles that provide specific examples, the author’s credentials, and some source information that backs up the accuracy and authenticity of the information provided. If these items are not provided, simply move on to the next article.
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