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Why People Hate SEO

Every few months, someone seems to attack search engine optimization. SEOs are often quick to rise in defense of their profession. I’ve done that plenty myself, in the past. But a barrage of recent cold-call SEO pitches in my inbox even has me hating SEO.

Of course, I don’t really hate SEO. That’s because I know the difference between:

SEO and search engine spam
SEO and snake-oil promises

SEO remains the act of gaining free traffic from search engines, and also to me, gaining that traffic in ways that don’t put you at risk of being banned or penalized by those search engines. It’s a perfectly acceptable activity that even the search engines encourage. That’s why Google itself offers a guide to SEO.

White Hat, Black Hat & No Hat SEO

Search engine spam, to me, isn’t SEO. Some who practice it may disagree. “Black Hat SEO” to them remains SEO. Just because they don’t want to follow the rules a search engine puts down doesn’t mean they aren’t doing SEO.

OK, then we have two types of SEO, “white hat” and “black hat.” And it’s black hat SEO alone that cause all the problems, right? Nope. That’s because you’ve also got some supposed “white hats” who don’t violate any rules but also don’t actually provide any SEO value. Let’s call them “no hats.”

The No Hat Pitch

I’m pretty sick of no hat SEOs. That’s because they send me crud like this:

The end of the year is quickly approaching, which means holidays, parties, family, friends, and a lost chance to save money on search engine marketing, Website Designing/Development.
We saved the best promotion for the end of the year! ONLY $50!! HuRRy UP!!
Search Engine Optimization. Love your website? Save initial SEO setup fee and see your website on first page of search engines.
No Black-hat methods.
Take a trial for just $50 and get linked with 100 quality websites having page rank up to 5.
Our team works directly with you to meet our target which is #1 position on search engines. We sincerely believe that the above services will merit with the requirements of your Organization

I’m pretty sure spending $50 will do absolutely nothing for me or anyone using this firm. Maybe they’ll somehow place 100 links on the web, and maybe, just maybe, they really will do it without “black hat” methods.

But those links probably won’t really give my site any benefit. What’s the anchor text going to be? If it’s the same for each page, going up all at the same time, might that trigger someunnatural link warning from Google? And even with low cost labor being used, $50 simply doesn’t cover the necessary time to understand what a site is about, to research other sites and then engage in communication to obtain quality links.

Another No Hat Pitch

Here’s another, sent to me and all the Marketing Land editors through our contact form:

I thought you might like to know some of the reasons why you are not getting enough organic & social media traffic on your website.
I would like to update you that your website is still not ranked on the top pages of Google SERPs for your popular keywords (Products). Your loss is your competitor’s gain i.e. the traffic which could have generated quality sales for you goes to your competitors as they rank well in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) organically. Reasons:
HTML and other on-page errors are present on your website.
Low number of internal and external quality links present on your website.
Duplicate or low quality contents present in your website without any regular update.
Need to update fresh contents on your website and blogs as per the latest Google guideline.
Broken Links and Poison words might be present in your website.
Social media profile needs to be updated regularly.
Long gone are the days when Google used to give priority to websites of keyword based domains or websites with huge number of links. Now Google counts each and every detail to verify if your website is relevant to the keywords you are promoting for. A single un-wanted link or a duplicate content can lead your website to be penalized by Google.
We are a leading website promotion company providing online promotion, SMO, Reputation Management, Content (both web and promotional content) fixing services to clients.
We have a team of 240+ SEO professional working 24*7. Our team of dedicated Google Analytic and Adwords certified professionals excel in promoting and increasing the visibility of a website in various search engines (including the latest Google Panda and Penguin updates), which will directly help in increasing traffics for your website.
Unlike other SEO companies we do not believe in talking rather we believe in delivering what we promise to our clients. We provide guaranteed services or money back-guarantee to all our clients who consider working with us.
If you are getting rigid by paying a huge amount in PPC then Organic listing by using white hat technique will be definitely a right choice for you. As the rate of conversion is more in organic listing as compared to PPC, eventually it will be an absolute gain for you.
This email just tells you the fraction of things we do, our optimization process involves many other technical factors which can be sent to you on your request. If you would like to know more about our services then please write us back else you can give us a call us in our number below.

The email is crap right from the first sentence, given that the person sending this has no idea what keywords are important to our site.

The itemization of problems isn’t correct, but then again, neither is some of the grammar in the itemization. But some people might believe this, in the way they might believe someone pitching an unnecessary product to remove mold in their home or to prevent a car from developing rust.

If this company really does have a team of certified Google Analytics and Google AdWords people, I’d hope Google would pull those certifications, which mean nothing in terms of guaranteeing SEO results. It’s like saying you have a team of certified carpenters and electricians who are going to try and fix your plumbing problems.

The Terrible Public Faces Of “SEO”

Pitches like these cause some people to hate SEO simply because they’re so so damn annoying. Others end up hating SEO because they’re taken in and waste their money on something they thought was SEO but wasn’t. Either way, it’s not a pretty public face that some associate with SEO.

This leads to what I’ve called crap hat SEO. Crap hat SEO produces the second terrible public face that people see.

Crap Hat SEO

A crap hat SEO doesn’t give a damn about anything. They may be generating hundreds or thousands of pages of nonsensical copy using software, then using more software to comment spam the hell out of sites and pretty much not caring about what type of mess they leave behind, as long as they rank.

And mess it is. Publishers who own those comment spammed sites have to deal with the garbage, and they blame the damn “SEOs” for causing it. You also have some searchers who encounter junk pages that don’t really deliver what they’re looking for eventually realize there’s this “SEO thing” that screwed everything up.

The SEO Reputation Problem

I wish I had an easy solution for these things, but I don’t. What I can say is that SEO is not alone among industries where some bad actors can give the entire profession a terrible reputation.

For example, anyone who’s ever taken out a home loan knows that in the following weeks, you’ll get inundated with “official letters” of all types, stamped “time sensitive” or “important notice” and sounding authoritative by listing your loan balance or lender.

These pitches for insurance policies or refinancing offers are crap, public facing crap that give the insurance and mortgage industries a bad name.

But both industries provide necessary services, and there are good people and companies in those industries. That’s why they continue on, and it’s why SEO continues on despite every few months someone writing an article declaring that it’s going to die.

The Attack & Response Pattern

I pretty much stopped responding to those types of articles back in 2011. After I’d written things like these:

What else was there to say? And that’s just a sampling. I’d written many more articles on this topic stretching back into the late 1990s.

In the end, I decided to generally ignore articles that are often written by people who really don’t understand what SEO is about. In the past, I might have fired up a 3,000 word response to such things. Now, at best, I might leave a comment.

Someone on Forbes wants to declare SEO will be dead in two years? It’s not worth the effort. Anyone with any real knowledge of the SEO space knows that’s absurd. And anyway, it’s not a real Forbes writer. It’s just one what I call Fake Forbes writers, where that publication that had a name that once meant something now seems to let anyone write anything for page views.

Some designer wants to warn the world against why a good designer is all you need for SEO? Hey, I was heartened to see Bill Slawski and Will Critchlow step up with a response. But how many times do we have to do this? Wasn’t 2004 enough? How about 2009? Does it have to always repeat? Why on earth doesn’t anyone gripe about how the development and design industries continue to fail to get SEO over and over again?

Well, part of it is that bad designers and bad developers aren’t crapping all over the web in ways that are easily seen and pinned to those industries. You encounter a bad web site. You blame the site, or a code error, not the people that created it, who aren’t associated with those annoying emails you get.

Part of it is also due to the fact that plenty of designers and developers do get SEO, get the need to either understand it and use best practices themselves or work with actual professional SEOs who do.

Education Does Help

And part of it is that yes, I suppose the wheel will keep having to go around and around, that education will always be needed. Personally, I’ll likely continue to ignore the flare-ups from places that don’t deserve attention. But in places where education might indeed help, maybe the good fight continues to be worth waging.

Along these lines, it would be nice if the largest industry body associated with SEO, SEMPO, actually seemed to be doing some of that outbound education when these flare-ups happen rather than individual SEOs themselves having to step forward.

Education won’t stop the crap that’s out there, of course. But maybe it will help people understand how to distinguish the crap they assume is SEO from the real SEO that is beneficial. Maybe it will help the professionals who provide quality SEO get more of the respect they deserve.

One thing I know. Bad reputation or not, SEO has continued on despite 15 years now of people declaring it will die. I fully expect it’ll keep going for another 15 years, if not many more.

Google Algorithm Change Predictions in 2012 – Prepare your Website for the New Year

In order to predict 2012 Google Algorithm changes we need to first look at 2011. Starting from January 2011, Google started making algorithm updates to help weed out poor quality and duplicated content, scrapers and spammy websites.

Some big players such as overstock.com and JC Penney were hit with penalties in January and February respectively. The (content) Attribution Update at the end of January affected 2% of search queries. This gave us a very solid clue on what Google was going to be focusing on in 2011 – content.

Content

We’ve always known content is king, even before all the 2011 algorithm updates, Google has always favoured websites with vast amounts of content.

When you type a search query into Google, you are not looking for WebPages full of keywords or rehashed articles, you are looking for unique and useful information on your subject. Google knows this. They are always trying to provide you with better results – not an easy task by any measure. The best way to make these improvements is through search algorithm updates.

With all these recent changes, Google is trying to put more emphasis on good content; not just a lot of content – but a lot of well written, unique content. It’s not often I find myself doing this, but I actually agree with Google on this one. Content farming and scrapers represented the dark side of the internet, the sooner they are gone, the better. To combat this Google has named this set of algorithm changes Panda.

Panda

2011 for the Google algorithm was the year of the Panda. We saw no fewer than 11 Panda updates. During January a few algorithm updates were released to give clues as what 2011 will be about, it wasn’t until February we saw the first Panda update – affecting 12% of all search results. It cracked down on content farms, poor quality content, and high ad-to-content ratio websites. The effects weren’t instant either, only coming to Europe in April.

Panda 1.0 – Feb 23, 2011 – Initial panda algorithm release, affecting 12% of search results.
Panda 2.0 – Apr 11, 2011 – Rolled out to English search queries worldwide, integration of new signals.
Panda 2.1 – May 9, 2011 – Minor changed not discussed by Google.
Panda 2.2 – Jun 21, 2011 – Continued updates to Panda algorithm, updates were separate from main index and not in real-time
Panda 2.3 – Jul 23, 2011 – Minor update to the Panda ranking factors.
Panda 2.4 – Aug 12, 2011 – Rolled out to non-English search queries. 6-9% of sites affected in new countries.
Panda 2.5 – Sep 28, 2011 – Changes unclear, huge ranking losses reported on some sites.

Minor panda updates affecting roughly 2% of search queries.

Minor Panda updates – Oct 5, 2011
Minor Panda updates – Oct 3, 2011
Minor Panda updates – Oct 13, 2011
Minor Panda updates – Nov 18, 2011

I don’t see panda as another update to the main algorithm, rather a branch on its own, I can certainly see more updates to Panda in 2012, content will always be important and this is what Panda is all about.

Whether we like it or not, as SEOs we will never know exactly what Google will do next, but we can prepare. So here are some things to watch out for and prepare your website in anticipation of 2012.

2012

2012, in my opinion, will see a decent proportion of Google’s updates refining the Panda update. Google is putting more and more emphasis on brands, with bigger brands getting more favourable results. Especially after the Panda updates – with similar content, we saw rankings drop for smaller brands (the review centre), while big brands remain untouched (trip advisor).

Here are a few things you can do to prepare your websites for 2012 algorithm updates.

Work on your brand, this is going to be big – in 2012, if it’s not going to be more content updates for Panda algorithm its going to be brand. Brand has been talked about for a while now, but the panda update really put an emphasis on this. Work on your own brand and Google will love you.

Review your website for duplicate and poor content – it’s not too late. Remove the large amounts of poor content you created to take advantage of Google before the Panda update. Replace them with quality pieces that are unique, helpful and engaging. More Panda will follow in 2012 to see how good you’ve been.

Engage socially – in 2010 everyone was talking about how social is going to affect SEO in 2011, who knew content was going to be the main focus? However, Social is not going anywhere, if not next year it will be the year after. Start early to avoid disappointment later.

Quality over quantity for links – An old one, but a good one. Google will eventually crack down the back link game, the first ones to go will be those with spammy back links and sites with enormous back links to referring domain ratios. Go after a few quality links and spend more time acquiring them.

Kept yourself up to date – Last but least, keep yourself up to date from the official source. Two websites you need to add to your RSS feeds or visit regularly are from Google themselves, the Inside Search Blog and Official Google Blog. The more you know, the better position you will be in to make changes.

Source: Google Algorithm Predictions in 2012 – Prepare your Website

Google’s Updates and the Effects on Blogging in 2012

One of the best ways to plan for online success in the coming year is too look back at many of thealgorithm changes that Google has made and the effects they will have on blogging in 2012. This year has seen well over 500 algorithm modifications, primarily coming from the Panda and Freshness updates. During this period of time, Matt Cutts and fellow Google folk did their best to help a lot of webmasters understand the implications of the various patches and updates that they have uploaded.

But quite frankly, many small internet marketers and niche websites got hit pretty badly. After Google’s Panda updates were first applied, many bloggers lost thousands of visitors per month and often dropped out of first page results that had netted them steady organic traffic. This is not something you want to be caught up in again, so make sure your blog is getting the time and effort it needs to boast user worthy content and see increased traffic from Google next year.

Main Reasons for Lost Google Rankings in 2011:

Duplicate, scraped, or copied content – Panda hit this hard and does a great job of identifying “spun content” through N-grams and other techniques.
High outbound links – link farms and sites associated with them got devalued a lot, if you had a lot of backlinks coming from these sources you may have been penalized.
Stale content – the Freshness algorithm demands regular updates in 35% of keywords, depending on your market and online competition, you may want to add new content on a weekly or daily basis.
Low content volumes – Matt Cutts has said that Panda also targets websites that have very low user worthy content, it is recommended that you update any pages/posts on your site that do not have competitive quality. (i.e. most posts should be 300+ words, a 50 word post could hurt your sites overall integrity)

Blogging in 2012

Many people vilify the Panda update because it was such a problem for their own personal sites. The idea behind changes like Panda, are to improve the search results for Google users. Duplicate content and blogs that offer no value should never rank well in the SERP’s. Blogs that were affected by the update were usually low quality affairs that never deserved first page rankings to begin with. Many of these sites relied on backlinks from article databases to rank well. One of the side effects of removing scraped and duplicate content was the de-valuing of these link sources. Blogs that did not have strong link diversity suffered the most. Article marketing was a very popular method to get strong search results fast. Unfortunately, many bloggers relied on this technique for a majority of their backlinks. After the Panda update bloggers who used article marketing as the backbone of their backlink profiles dropped sharply in the rankings.

Panda Algorithm Overview:

Major penalties for duplicate content.
Content quantity and quality is more important than ever.
Black hat techniques penalized – keyword stuffing, shady redirects, spammy meta data, and others will only hurt your rankings.
Article databases lost link value due to low quality duplicate content.

Freshness Algorithm Overview:

Caffeine indexing – will be placing more weight on newest results and information.
Will affect 35% or more of keywords.
Will affect less than 35% of search results. (some keywords receive the same search results)
Helps authority and large publishing sites due to it being more difficult for small internet marketers and bloggers to keep up consistent updates and content releases.
Daily online activity is more important than ever; ie. Posting, commenting, tweeting, etc.

The Freshness update can thank the Caffeine indexing system for allowing new content to be crawled indexed, and displayed. The new system allows Google to crawl and index fresh information at speeds that were not possible before its development. This innovation could not have come at a better time. Users demand the freshest and most relevant search results as possible. Google thankfully had the tools available to provide this exact service.

Search terms that are time sensitive are now identified by the algorithm even if the notion of time sensitivity is implied. For instance if a user searches for “war in Afghanistan”, in all likelihood they want the most up to date information. Not news results from the 80’s, when the USSR occupied the territory. Google wants to provide this seamless search functionality for their users. People don’t even realize that the search engine is interpreting their request in order to provide the best results possible. Even though the Freshness update affected only 35% of keywords, it has changed the way Google looks at blogs forever.

How does Google see blogging currently?

Blogging has become very popular and 100’s of millions of bloggers write posts on a weekly basis. This is a lot of information for Google to crawl and index on a regular basis, but with the advent of Caffeine, they are now able to do exactly that. Google can crawl and index blog posts only moments after they are written. Even the information in the comments section is crawled and indexed now. The more information that Google has regarding your blog, the better they can associate it with specific search terms.

Blogs must make regular updates if they are to remain relevant in the search results. Quality and consistency are two features Google is always looking for and a great way to display them is through the daily release of unique, well written content.

Must make weekly blog posts to remain current for Google search results.
Only write quality, unique content that is related to the blog subject matter.
Relevancy matters, many paid for services post random articles on blogs for paid links, these are usually not related to the blog subject matter. This is a spam indicator. Avoid this at all costs.

Blogging in 2012 post Panda

Google has made around 500 algorithm changes and adjustments throughout 2011. The majority of them have been done to improve the search results that Google provides. Some of the changes have crippled bloggers that were able to make a living with their blogs. But they probably did not provide users with anything of value or participated in black hat link building techniques. In any case, most bloggers should be extremely happy with the changes that Google has completed. Blogs are ranking for thousands of high traffic keywords and are among some of the most visited websites in the world. The Freshness update has only solidified the relevancy of blogs in the search results and offers more opportunity for bloggers to be found in 2012.

Strategies to get You to the Top of Google in 2011

You may think that once you’ve got your SEO strategy in place you can sit back and rise to the top of Google. Not so fast, warns Ali Husayni, CEO of the SEO service company Master Google. One of the challenging things about SEO is that search engines are always changing, therefore strategies to affect search engine rankings must constantly evolve. Here are some of the changes in SEO that experts foresee in 2011.

Unique Content: Although links and page rank are still important factors, Google’s search algorithms increasingly emphasize the performance of a website. They are looking for fresh content that engages readers and encourages feedback. Spend more time thinking about your target audience and what kind of content they need.

Interaction: Google looks for sites that get users to interact. “If you want to be on the 1st page of Google make an effort to create content that will get the users involved in a conversation,” says Husayni. Respond to every comment you get on your website. Be nice and offer guidance. When other users see how responsive you are, they will visit your website more frequently as well.

User Behavior: If your site is getting good reviews from users, it will improve your Google ranking. If it’s getting bad reviews, the reverse. Know what your users want and give it to them.

Social Media: Google has confirmed that social media is one of the factors influencing natural search rankings. They are increasingly evaluating what users click on and where they “hang out.” So, you must consider social media as part of your SEO promotion strategy. Try to get inbound links from bloggers. If you release a new product, you want to have someone influential twitter about it. Be sure you have a Facebook presence.

Targeted Websites: Be aware of how your target audience does research and try to entice viewers like more traditional marketing strategies. SEO companies like Master Google note that Google is looking for those sites that are valuable to users. You also need to find the online communities that your target consumer frequents. This will let you reach viewers as a group rather than individually.

SEO-Led Marketing Campaigns: Increasingly all marketing will be driven by SEO. Radio, TV, and print advertising will all be part of SEO campaigns to educate the users about products and services. Increasingly SEO ranking is at the heart of the campaign rather than being an afterthought.

Geography Will Be More Important: Google map results are increasingly part of its search engine results. Google is also working on ways to incorporate the user’s location into results. As more and more people use GPS-enabled phones for searches, geographical considerations will play a bigger role.

© 2011 Master Google. Authorization to post is granted, with the stipulation that Master Google are credited as sole source. Linking to other sites from this document is strictly prohibited, with the exception of herein imbedded links.

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What is RSS?

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It allows you to see jobs, news feeds or information in real time, from sites that provide RSS as an option. On SEOVacancies - SEO, SEM PPC Jobs and Careers, once you have carried out a search for a job, you can use RSS to notify you whenever a new job that matches your search is advertised on the site. A discrete window appears on your desktop, a bit like a messenger window, to let you know that a job has been advertised. You then click on the link in the window to go straight to SEOVacancies - SEO, SEM PPC Jobs and Careers to view the job.

RSS readers are freely available for download from the internet as shareware. There are many different providers and SEOVacancies - SEO, SEM PPC Jobs and Careers does not recommend any particular reader. For more information on RSS readers, please visit the links below.

What the BBC says about RSS readers.
Top 5 RSS readers from ZDNet
Google's list of news readers.

Once you have an RSS reader installed, follow these steps to set up a notification.

Click on the orange RSS button wherever it appears on our site
You will then see a page of XML code. Copy the contents of the address window of your browser (the URL), by highlighting it and choosing copy from the edit menu, or holding down the CTRL button and pressing c
Open your RSS reader and click 'Add'.
Paste the URL you copied into the relevant field by choosing paste from the edit menu or holding down the CTRL button and pressing v
Follow the steps your RSS reader uses to set up new feed.
Remember to give it a recognisable name

You can create as many searches as you want for different kinds of jobs. Simply do another search based on different criteria and repeat the steps above.

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