Many SEO Blogs Fail to Grasp Real SEO Theory
If you have spent any time reading SEO blogs then you know most of them don’t have to much to say because almost everything they say has something to do with links. These blogs practice what is called “lazy SEO”, which ignores the most important principles of search engine optimization theory in favor of the least effective, least efficient way of practicing SEO: link building.
According to SEO theory, every Web site needs some links because links are the glue that binds the World Wide Web together. But because some search engines treat links as special factors in their ranking algorithms many people in the SEO community — rather than learn how to optimize for search the right way — just focus all their time and energy on acquiring links for Websites. If links were really the most important thing in SEO that would be all you need to do. But the truth is that there are many other things that are important to SEO and if you just build links you won’t maximize your potential.
The bad advice that comes out of the link building community includes some real humdingers. For example, some link building SEO blogs talk about PageRank Sculpting. They claimed for two years from 2007 through summer 2009 that they were running tests that proved PageRank Sculpting was helping Websites. The truth came out in June 2009 when Google told the SEO community to stop doing this because it was hurting a lot of sites. And yet even after Google said it had stopped the PageRank Sculpting from working over a year before, some of the link building SEOs still said that this was a good idea.
Another example of bad SEO advice is how some people who publish case studies and charts showing how much links influence search results don’t look at queries where search engine optimization has not been used to change the results. SEOs work with fewer than 1,000,000 queries but every month people search billions of times. All the search engines say that as many as 25% of all queries have never been seen before. So no one has used links to influence any of the millions of new queries. SEO link studies do not look at any of these new queries.
The best SEO advice you can find is based on solid SEO theory, which studies how search engines interact with the World Wide Web. SEO theory documents the reasons why some things work and some things don’t. By looking at the search optimization process scientifically rather than with guesswork and tricked out charts SEO theory teaches people how to improve their search results with reliable methods that won’t be undercut by the search engines.
