Wisdom From the SEO Desert
What I’d really like to see, somewhere, is something useful being said about SEO. Not fluffy crap like “Make it good. Make it useful. Make it fun. Make it human. Make it reasonably standards-based.” Not pseudo-moralistic techno-evangelism like “Make something great. Tell people about it. Do it again.” The reason people can make these statements and get wide acclaim for it is that they do it loudly, profanely, and because it feels good, but that doesn’t mean that they actually have anything useful to say. I’m inclined to be cynical and say that if you want good search engine rank, then be loud, be profane, be moralistic or crude or salacious or whatever draws attention to you.
I work for a company which is a somewhat notorious poster child for doing things wrong. In fact, up until a couple years ago when technologists took over from the amateurs, the company really didn’t care a whit for producing decent HTML. Even today, parts of the site make design types cringe and generally throw up in their mouth a little bit. We also depend heavily on search engine traffic – around half of our hits come off search engines, primarily Google.
So wouldn’t we do so much better if we used good HTML, followed the standard SEO plan of “make sure to use keywords in the headline, use proper formatting, provide summaries of the content, include links to relevant information”? You’d think so. In fact, what we’ve seen is somewhat different. For example, there are pages where we list a lot of items and offer the option to sort by different criteria; an obvious place where you could simply link to a different rendering of the page using a GET. It turns out that we use POST to sort the page, because of something people call “dilution”; which is essentially presenting the same content in multiple renderings; your pages get “diluted” by Google because a single page is “worth” more than multiple pages of the same content presented slightly differently (i.e. sort order). As a technologist I hate it, but I don’t exactly have standing to challenge the conclusions; I didn’t build up a multi-million dollar company and it’s difficult to come up with empirical evidence of the truth or fallacy of the assertion of dilution.
In fact, that’s the problem with search. It’s like a FICO score: it’s critical, yet totally opaque in the interest of maintaning proprietary intellectual property. A wonderful situation for the holder of a monopoly, less so for people interested in legitimately figuring out how to optimize the algorithm. The fact is that for many online businesses, search engine traffic is life or death. It’s one thing to build up good PageRank and generate huge traffic for a personal weblog; it’s something else entirely to turn that into revenue. And it’s another thing entirely to get to that point and then agonize over technological decisions for fear of losing your search engine goodness. Who wants to put their revenue stream at risk?
I’d dearly love to see someone come up with a book “SEO for People Who Want To Be Able To Look At Themselves in the Mirror”. I’m sure it would be full of chapters on rules for building carefully crafted hierarchies of headings and creating good text content for anchor tags. I’d be more impressed if someone were to actually prove that this advice worked, preferably with their livelihood, as opposed to just vanity.
— Gordon Weakliem
Comment
Commenting is closed for this article.
My crap is never fluffy. Please.
— Tim · 26 December 2009, 11:18 · #