I’m setting up a blog for work and have to balance what I need and want with what the IT department will let me install on their servers. Ths means that not only am I looking at different blogging software, but where to place the blog as well – on a subdomain or in a subfolder.
There’s advantages and disadvantages to both, it’s a case of weighing up the pros and cons and deciding what’s most important to you and your requirements.
What makes me despair is the amount of comments on SEO blogs that are from, supposedly, SEO-ers, that go “I have an n website, should I do x or y?” I’m presuming the majority of these comments are from real people as they either link to real websites, or don’t have a backlink at all (and what’s the point of comment spam without a link it?)
So are there really that many people, that are so dense as to think an SEO professional is going to give out free advice about a situation they know nothing about? But then if they’re reduced to cold-asking advice in comments then maybe that’s the level they deserve to be at – shouting into the ether “WHAT’S HAPPENING? WHY WON’T ANYONE HELP ME?!”
Which also brings me to the SEO blogs themselves. I’ve been gently reading SEO blogs for a while now and there is a lot of bullshit out there, why are these guys, that are all competing against each other, sharing all their secrets?
If You Review the SEO Tools That Give You A Competitive Advantage…
You have no competitive advantage if you tell everyone that you’re using JUMBO SEO JELLY BEANS that bring in 5 links a day, 15 organic search visitors, and improve conversions by 5%.All those people telling you “great post!” will go sign up for those tools and use them. They will either learn that you’re an idiot who can’t tell a cheap smarmy SEO spam tool from a hair brush or they will gradually erode your market advantage by creeping into your SERPs and telling all THEIR friends and readers about how great the tool is. Either way, you lose, your clients lose, and you end up looking really damn stupid because you gave away a competitive advantage for the sake of attracting a handful of links, LIKES, TWEETS, PINS, and other ridiculously over-valued social media shares.
It’s not like a closed-shop conference where one professional is is comparing techniques with another. These are supposedly industry techniques that earn the SEO-er money. I might have a chat with a car mechanic in a pub about fixing brakes but I wouldn’t expect a car mechanic to teach me how to fix my brakes, on someone elses car, for nothing. That’s exactly what these guys are doing. For anyone that asks. Except, the more brakes I fix doesn’t diminish the mechanics ability to fix brakes. If everyone could fix their own brakes, the manufacturers aren’t going to suddenly decide that brakes need redesigning with the consequence that everyone needs to relearn how to fix brakes. But that’s what happens in SEO.
For any technique that raises a website among the SERPS, the more widely it is used there are two effects:
- The effect is diluted.
- The more unnatural the SERPS become.
The more widely used a technique is used, the less it has an effect because if everyone uses it, everyone has the same advantage. If everyone has the same advantage, there is no advantage.
The SERPS start becoming unnatural because it becomes less about the content and relevancy and more about how you can manipulate things to show your page for a keyword, regardless of the context of that keyword. That’s when the search providers have to step in and try to make the SERPS relevant again.
You might say that last bit is bullshit, you don’t want to rank for *everything* to do with a keyword, but you do. Just in case…
Let’s take chocolate. You sell chocolate bunnies. A someone searches for chocolate bears. They’re specifically searching chocolate bears, not chocolate animals, or just chocolate. Just from the search terms you know they want one thing – Chocolate. Bears.
You still want to rank high up in the SERPS. Front page at least. Above the fold is ideal, though. You shouldn’t be anywhere in the SERPS though. You’re chocolate bunnies. Completely wrong species. Or in other words, irrelevant.
But you still want to rank because what if the user hadn’t thought of chocolate bunnies…? That’s fine, you’ve made a sale. You’ve made yourself relevant. You’re an anomaly. Big deal. But if everyone does it, the SERPS are going to be a mess and no one is going to be able to find a thing. You’ve lost your magic touch even before the search providers reset they’re algorithm.
Why would you do that? Make someone re-write the rule book that you’ve only just started to understand?
Maybe the commenters aren’t so dumb after all…
