Michael Martinez boldly goes where search marketers have always been afraid to go in his post from Monday. “Why SEO Collective Wisdom Lacks Credibility” is a passionate, well-though essay on search marketers, what they are and what they should be. In it, Martinez questions the truth in self-proclaimed SEO experts, points out the field has too many followers and little, if any, leaders and states in a comment follow-up to the piece that, “It’s way past time the SEO community take a long, hard look at itself and started growing up.”
His analysis of the field, and he is an SEO practitioner, is spot on. No one really knows the science of search engine optimization. It’s essentially guess work as to the significance of variables in a mathematical algorithm, and oh, by the way, there are dozens of different algorithms, not just one. (Though it could be said nailing Google’s pretty much covers your bases.)
He calls for a credible professional journal edited by SEO peers, but safely admits there’s no real answer to who the peers are (or editors for that matter).
Perhaps my favorite part of his analysis is this paragraph:
“Volume itself is a factor in both search indexing and search optimization, and it’s a factor that is rarely taken into consideration. Our confusion over standards, practices, methods, and metrics ensures that we not only optimize with blinders on, we analyze with blinders on. The only way we can improve the quality of our collective knowledge is to share it openly and uniformly.”
Herein lies the problem of whether or not what Martinez calls for is even possible.
In my experience, which I’ll admit is not maximum exposure but also not limited, search marketers are chock full of vagaries and round-about answers. No one wants to say what the secret is for fear that someone might figure it out and not hire them. Or is it that they won’t share information because they’ve got no clue what the secret is in the first place?
Getting a straight answer out of most search marketers is like getting a bone from a rabid dog.
I’ve even asked for a work estimate from one and been met with a confusing answer which included several polysyllabic words I didn’t understand.
I didn’t ask twice and won’t ever hire that guy.
Now, it’s rash to generalize, but generalizations and definitives drive traffic (there’s a search marketer tip you didn’t have to ask for) so I’m going to.
Search engines try to offer the best choices among millions of web pages to give users the information they’re seeking when entering a search term. Search marketers try to manipulate websites to rank higher in said searches whether the content is the most relevant or not.
In essence, all search marketers are trying to game the system.
Search engines have to resort to anti-gaming tactics, like altering the algorithms or studying search marketer techniques and countering them, to continue to produce what they hope is the most relevant search results for a given set of keywords.
Search engineers have to game the search marketers in return.
You ever wonder what happened to those weirdo Goth geeks with the Dungeons and Dragons or Doom fixation in high school? They’re most likely search marketers … or search engineers.
Still, the top search result is perhaps the single most valuable piece of real estate in cyberspace and we’re left trusting its generation to Wii freaks and Math Bowl champions.
Mind you, it’s rhetoric like Martinez’s post that leads to change. There are some SEO types out there who are genuinely well-intended, good people. This doesn’t mean they aren’t trying to game the system. It’s not always the people that are wrong, it’s the system.
And the system isn’t fixable.
Mahalo wants search to be based on human recommendation. But when your human recommenders include a bunch of search marketers trying to figure out how to jockey their insurance company above other insurance companies on the list, the power becomes compromised, human or not.
As long as there is search, there will be search marketers trying to game the engine.
The only solution my feeble mind can muster is for there to not be search rankings but for searches to result in tag cloud-like arrays of potential search result keywords. Don’t favor one site over another, but offer the user as unfettered an array of choices to narrow the search as possible.
But I’m sure the clever SEO gang would study user behavior and engineer ways for their client’s websites to pop up under the most heavily trafficked narrowing choices.
Yes, search marketers can turn a critical eye to marketers of other sorts and even public relations types (like me) and say, “He’s trying to manipulate people, too!” True, and there are also cretins in my business.
Martinez’s plea is a welcome sign of decency from a group of people sometimes struggling to separate the white hats from those of darker shades. But will SEO types, as he begs, “grow up” and start helping produce better search results rather than trying to beat level 45 on that rad new video game called “Google?” I doubt it.
Other Posts You’ll Find Interesting:
- Does The Search Engine Optimization Expert Really Exist?
- Why You Should Cut Back Search Marketing In A Recession
- I Hate Spam Email From Bad SEO Consultants
- 6 Tips To Not Get Ripped Of When Buying SEO Services
- Why I Do Not Like 95% Of SEO Experts
IMAGE: “Speak No Evil” by matrianklw on Flickr.
[tags]search engine optimization, SEO, search marketing, ethics, search engines, Google, Yahoo, search engineers[/tags]
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