Let’s say someone found out you liked puppies and gave you one. That would make you happy, right? Now let’s say they went out and told everyone else you liked puppies and they all decided in order to make you happy they would get you a puppy too.
Now you have a million puppies. You have to feed the puppies and pick up a million piles of puppy poo. And the puppies are starting to stink and chew everything up.
Not as good of a deal, is it?
This is exactly how the SEO community treats Google and other search engines.
Let me preface this post by saying that I love search engine optimization.
Creating marketing initiatives that help websites promote their products and services is a highly rewarding business. Through SEO we can help business and website owners compete and succeed where they otherwise may not.
That said, there is a problem in the SEO community. And it is a problem we have created for ourselves.
That problem is the creation of new types of Spam.
It goes like this:
- A marketer has a great idea for a new marketing initiative that will help their website become more relevant.
- The search engines love this new idea and reward the marketer and website with better rankings.
- The SEO decides to share this new idea with the rest of the marketing community.
- Other SEOs love the idea and begin implementing it on their own websites.
- Search engines provide similar love to those websites.
- Those SEOs also share the idea through social networks, blogs, etc.
- More SEOs jump on the bandwagon and soon the Internet is overrun with websites doing the exact same thing.
- Search engines realize the once good idea is now being overused and label it spam.
- SEOs scream and shout about how unfair the search engines are.
- A new and better idea is tossed into the mix.
- The cycle continues…ad infitinum
I have created a quick image to visually show how the process works:
Unfortunately, it is simply human nature to deny that we are part of the problem. And when the problem does arise, we try to distance ourselves from it as much as possible.
Take the current talk about link spam.
Up until the recent Panda and Penguin updates there were a LOT of marketers who simply called themselves “link builders” or “link specialists”. You don’t really see that as much anymore. In fact, many of those same people are now touting something many of us have been saying all along…”build great content that people want to share and let the links come naturally.”
It really is a change of tune. And for now it is a good one.
But here is the issue:
The soap boxes are coming out. People are starting to talk about “content marketing strategies” and how you can create tons and tons of content to build a better rapport with the search engines and improve your rankings and traffic.
Does anyone else see the two major problems with that?!
- There isn’t a lot of talk about doing what’s best for the end user. It’s still mainly about the search engines (especially Google).
- There is an element of trickery in this way of thinking. We are worrying more about ranking manipulation.
Let’s say you build out a hundred new pages of relevant content for your website. And let’s say that every one of your 2,000 competitors does the same thing. Let’s also say this is done VERY quickly.
How is that NOT GOING TO RAISE RED FLAGS?!
And we cannot blame Google or any of the other search engines for this.
You have spam…and something else to complain about with the search engines.
- It’s the reason the keyword tag is given no weight.
- It’s the reason many links are given no weight or used as an indicator for spam.
- It’s the reason sites like Pinterest are nothing more than a future link farm.
As SEOs we have a tendency to say (without really saying it): “Hey, there’s a cool avenue. LET’S EXPLOIT THE SHIT OUT OF IT!”
Now, is the answer to stop marketing our websites? Of course not. But how about slowing it down a bit and not beating every single marketing tactic into the ground? Maybe?
And stop giving Google so many puppies.