Sanity and SEO just don’t mix

Written on March 26th 2008, filed under SEO with 0 comments.

If there’s one thing I’ll remember from my first few months as a search engine optimizer it’s that sanity and SEO don’t mix. Common sense, basic testing or knowledge, scepticism, people forget it all when they’re presented with the latest and greatest blogposting on some “A list” blog.

These posts are written by people who’ve earned their money by presenting an image that they are in the know when it comes to search engines. I absolutely don’t have a problem with that. In fact, a tip of my hat when they’ve succeeded in building that image. My concern lies with their loyal groupies who promote these posts as truth.

Most of the time when I read an SEO blog I spew out a silent “Well duh”. This is partly due to my background in accessibility, which has very close ties to search engine optimization. Other times I’m stunned by the assumption that what’s written on these blogs are facts. They are not. Most of the time they’re untested opinions or the equivalent of the rock that keeps lions at bay.

A while ago I came across a post that was promoted from the community blog to the frontpage. Slightly interested in the techniques it claimed to explain I started to read. The amount of utter bullshit sold as solid gold was mind-blowing.

This post told the world that if you placed your text in any block level element that can directly posses text, you would end up in the define section of Google. The purpose of these elements never dawned on the author. I know this because he spread them out across two or three different items on his list as if they were somehow unrelated.

Other fantastic tips included: which letter to capitalize, what word to begin with, what punctuation (not) to use and last but not least to make the definition unique.

The masses were stunned with this vast array of knowledge. They requested, nay, demanded that the post be hoisted from the dungeon called the community blog and that it be displayed prominently on the frontpage of one of the web’s most influential SEO sites.

And so the world was introduced to a post that had absolutely nothing to say. A post that can be applied to everything and nothing. But it was posted on the bible of SEO sites, so it must be true…