SEO is bullshit

http://www.contrast.ie/blog/seo-is-bullshit/

by danw • 18 years ago

40 43 18 years ago

contrast.ie

jolly• 18 years ago

Just for the argument. Here is a SEO case study and how backlink can help you.

http://blog.ask2link.com/case-study-advertisers-get-great-re...

fallentimes4• 18 years ago

Interesting, but isn't this more "marketing" than "case study"?

trickjarrett• 18 years ago

SEO in its most puerile form of purely gaming the system is indeed BS.

But SEO is also about making your website as friendly as possible for search engines and improving your linking for users while also helping with the search engines. It's about developing your links from other sites and helping get your site placed in front of as many eyes as possible.

Sure a great product or service will rise to the top. But for those who aren't the best, SEO is a tool that they can utilize.

callmeed3• 18 years ago

Yet another anti-SEO post from someone with a notion that SEO is a band-aid for poorly structured pages and that all SEO professionals are charlatans.

Yes, valid/well structured sites give you an SEO head-start, but there's more to it: - Properly structured browser titles matter - The way you write matters - Sitemaps matter - Optimizing Flash-based sites/pages is important because there are a lot of them - Links matter ... A LOT

There is a valid need for honest, skilled SEO professionals. The fact that there are so many bogus ones simply underscores this. Businesses on the web simply need to be educated on when and how to find a good one, when not to use one, and what they can DIY.

I'm sorry, but this post doesn't show much "intellectual honesty".

mrtron3• 18 years ago

Anything that 'matters' you should be doing anyways for a good user experience. So explain what this 'optimization' for search engines exactly is?

Titles? That is for the user. Sitemaps? Actually they don't matter as long as your content is linked to internally. They can be produced trivially anyways if you really feel the need, but Google finds all my pages. Optimizing flash pages? That sounds like frowned upon injection. You should not change the way you write for a search engine. Have anchor text that represents what you are linking to? Come on, thats how it should be regardless. The best thing you can have is backlinks - which good content/interesting sites should naturally develop.

I don't know of a single thing you should do to optimize your site for a search engine. edit: If you are downmodding me be because this is incorrect, speak up.

This article is clearly garbage though.

callmeed3• 18 years ago

Everything you mention is common-sense and easy to tech-savvy people like us. Not so much for "Joe the Plumber" (bad joke, I know) who just wants good search engine placement for his local business. He doesn't know what a "good user experience" means and he's not going to get it he builds his site using an off-the-shelf CMS or have his newphew build it.

Do you just not like the term "SEO"? Would you prefer "user experience consultant"?

My point is, there's a gap that skilled SEO people fill, regardless of semantics or the notion that optimization is inherent in a properly built site.

BTW, there's plenty to optimizing Flash sites that don't involve frowned upon methods. Yes, much of it is also about user experience.

webwright4• 18 years ago

"Anything that 'matters' you should be doing anyways for a good user experience."

Not true 'tall. I'll speak up. Here are a few SEO things that don't effect user experience positively, but do help SEO:

1) Meta descriptions (unless you're counting the SERP as your user experience) 2) Avoiding AJAX to expose more content and increase spiderability 3) optimizing anchor text for internal links to match the target keywords you get from thorough keyword research 4) systematically building backlinks with good anchor text. Yes, they "naturally develop". So what? If I spend 40 hours a week working on accelerating this in a non-sleezy way, which of our businesses is going to naturally develop faster? 5) Flat site organization, minimizing # of clicks to content pages (MIGHT benefit users, but not necessarily) 6) Tons of cross-linking on detail pages (again, MIGHT benefit users...) 7) SEO optimized title tags, header tags, etc. Is the best markup/text for users ALWAYS the best for SEO? 8) Keyword in domain name (vacuum-cleaner-house.com is better than suckit.com for SEO-- is it for the user or the brand?) 9) Age of the site (a "used/established" domain name) might be better for SEO 10) Keyword research. Understanding not only what people search for, but WHICH PHRASES ARE COMPETITIVE. You might sell shoes online, but learn that the search phrase "shoes" is locked up tightly-- and referring to it as "footwear" gives you business-critical traffic because you can get on Page 1 of the (less searched for) phrase.

I could go on.

noodle• 18 years ago

SEO isn't bullshit. however, it is only a tool in a toolbox.

too many SEO firms are selling turd polish.

mike_branski• 18 years ago

I couldn't agree with you more.

A lot of SEO can be done as you're building a site, but there are certain aspects to be made aware of. Unfortunately, too many companies sell these BS packages and belittle true SEO, instead of delivering actual results.

He'd also have more of a leg to stand on if he had given some _reasons_ to back his statements.

jdg• 18 years ago

Yawn. Haven't we had this conversation before?

wmeredith• 18 years ago

SEO is mostly cleaning up after lazy developers or WYSWIG site builders who didn't write standards compliant, accessible, lean code and didn't know anything about information architecture. I know because I do it every day.

Search is how most people find most things online, period. Designing a website with such a contempt for SEO is a recipe for disaster. Yes, some websites don't need SEO or SEM, because they're naturally viral or sticky. Some products also don't need any marketing to catch on. In both cases, this is the exception and not the rule.

(SEO is also spending a large amount of your time defending your reputation against something that was left behind for you by snake-oil salesmen.)

webwright4• 18 years ago

What an utter waste of space (other than, perhaps, as a conversation starter?).

SEO means lots of things to lots of people, and certainly big slices of it are crap.

Here are a few bits of SEO that I'd defy anyone to call bullshit:

1) Unique and descriptive title tags, so that results in Google are findable and make sense when they are found (title tags are used for the "blue link" part of the SERP).

2) Meta descriptions in the event that Google doesn't use bits of the content (not uncommon) to describe to the searcher what's on the other side of your link (this is the 155 or so characters of black text under the link)

3) Keyword research to understand how your customers look for you-- so you can use words that they search for when you have that choice to make. Is your ecommerce site selling "shoes" or "footwear"? "Steaks" or "meat"?

4) Backlinks. Sorry, but this is the currency of the web. If you aren't in the business of trying to be link-worthy and encouraging folks to link to you, you'll fall behind those who are.

5) Eschewing ajaxy guitar solos so that your content is consumable by search spiders.

liamQ• 18 years ago

this IS bullshit - those 5 things you can do without paying so-called SEO Consultants

modoc• 18 years ago

Sure, if you already know all of those things, and can do keyword research, etc... Many small business owners don't and can't. Hence the need for a service.

fallentimes4• 18 years ago

Tony, please correct me if I'm wrong - but I think he was just advocating some simple best practices that improve SERP rankings NOT paying SEO consultants.

webwright4• 18 years ago

He didn't say "hiring SEO consultants is bullshit". He said "SEO is bullshit". Those things I listed are part of SEO.

And, FWIW, you can do ANYTHING without paying ANY consultants. File your tax return, sue somebody, build a bridge. You don't need a professional-- all you need is the time to self-educate.

With SEO, the questions are: "How easy is it to learn the SEO stuff I need to know?" and "How important is SEO to my business?"

brm• 18 years ago

What this should say, is that SEO as an INDUSTRY is bullshit, proper search engine optimization should just be taken into account as you build whatever you're putting on the web. SEO is a feature not an app in startup terms

jasonlbaptiste• 18 years ago

This post is bullshit.

SEO, just like anything by itself, is not an answer. Simple logical way to look at this:

1) You need more customers, visitors, users,etc. 2) Google often drives them to you. The higher you are, the more of them you see. 3) You apply SEO tactics to increase ranking 4) More people come, you've achieved your goals.

Now, doing this alone doesnt mean anything:

a) if your product sucks, you can be number one on google. odds are, you still wont go anywhere. b) if your support sucks, the people you convery will leave. c) if you cant sell, these people will leave after talking to you.

Hope this makes sense, just giving a balanced opinion.

fallentimes4• 18 years ago

"User experience > SEO" -Dustin Curtis

Many of the SEO best practices can be implemented without taking away from the user experience. However, once the SEO crap starts taking away from the user experience...Stop.

nanijoe• 18 years ago

Maybe User experience > SEO, but your users have to find you first right?

fallentimes4• 18 years ago

Read the second part.

And they have to come back.

omakase• 18 years ago

Agreed. Look at going.com, is that footer for a human or for a robot?!

dandelany• 18 years ago

This is dumb, and essentially the same conversation that was had a week ago. I'll repeat what I said then:

A job is anything someone will pay you to do, and as long as there are companies that will pay employees to help them achieve better results on Google, SEO is and will remain a job.

From the [original] article: "Anybody today can achieve excellent search engine ranking for his own blog or website in his sparetime (sic)"

True. Anyone can also be a great cook and keep a house clean in their spare time, but that doesn't mean chefs and housekeepers don't have "real jobs."

I'll agree that there are a lot of overpaid SEO "consultants" who do nothing more than add META tags and ALT attributes and get paid $100+/hr to jerk off the rest of the time. However, speaking as an ex-employee of a company who has 3 results on Google's first page for "health insurance," there are legitimate companies out there who would drown if they didn't have SEO experts working full-time doing A/B split tests and careful traffic analysis on a daily basis.

davidw2• 18 years ago

> working full-time doing A/B split tests and careful traffic analysis on a daily basis.

If I did that kind of thing - actual work, I think I'd find a different thing to call myself to differentiate myself from the snake oil salesmen.

Still though, even that kind of thing strikes me as kind of "zero-sum"-ish... not really adding a lot of value to the world at large. Tournaments (search engine rankings in this case) are zero-sum, aren't they? Not that that's a reason it's "bullshit", but not high on my list of "people making the world a better place" either.

ErrantX2• 18 years ago

BAD SEO is bullshit.

Well thought out SEO as part of a larger scale site impact consideration is AWESOME :D

ErrantX2• 18 years ago

:( I thought that was a succint evaluation....

There are plenty of bad SEO firms out there who have no clue about what they are doing (and often do more harm than good to a site). Also SEO is seen as a fix-all solution - which it really isn't.

But SEO practices are an essential part of any website design, refresh or update.

At the end of the day it's just a buzzword that creates a market for selling their knowledge (knowt wrong with that of course!)

rationalbeaver2• 18 years ago

I was once involved in an SEO/PPC pitch for a major pizza company (by major I mean one of the top 3 players). One of the issues they wanted addressed was their ranking for the term 'pizza'. This is not something you'd think would be an issue for a company like this, but they weren't showing up on the first page of results.

We suggested that they might want to include the word 'pizza' somewhere on their homepage. That's right. The word pizza wasn't in the title, the meta-tags, the alt-tags, the body copy- it wasn't anywhere on the page. Apparently, that little tidbit had gotten lost among all the priorities of Branding, Marketing, Messaging, Promotions, etc., etc.

As soon as they added the word pizza into their title tag, they rocketed to the top of the results. Was that value worth paying for? Of course. Was the solution totally obvious? It should have been, but in case after case we find that, especially with larger/older companies, it's not.

IMO, SEO is completely natural at the one-man-sized-business level. Like most things, it gets increasingly complicated as you scale up.

bena• 18 years ago

Soooo, your client was Papa John's?

rationalbeaver2• 18 years ago

Close! But nope.

jcapote• 18 years ago

It's retarded posts like these that make me with HN had downmods...

unalone• 18 years ago

For people who want a more detailed follow-up: http://www.contrast.ie/blog/seo-is-still-bullshit/

jmtame• 18 years ago

What a shortsighted, lame argument. It's like taking anything you disagree with and then comparing it to a bunch of arbitrary truths in life.

Look at this article and replace "SEO" with any other word that you disagree with.

For entertainment, just replace "SEO" with "McCain."

jwesley• 18 years ago

If you think SEO is bullshit, you are probably isolated in web-app-make-believe-land and think the only way to build an internet business is coding an ajax heavy service, getting viral growth, and being acquired.

This is not the way most internet businesses operate. Most depend on search engines to deliver prospective buyers to their site.

If you think SEO is easy, or completely self explanatory, you have clearly never tried to get a site ranked for a semi-competitive keyword. The vast amounts money associate with commercial search terms makes ranking highly competitive and the constant updates to Google's algorithm make it a constantly moving target.

Maybe all this anti-SEO sentiment stems from jealousy. Good SEO sites can make millions and have a much higher probability of success (compared to web apps) when orchestrated by an experienced SEO.

axod• 18 years ago

I think you're being harsh there. SEO is a byproduct of creating a good website/webapp.

Think about your users first, and they will link to you. You'll get inbound links. Make your site easy to use and navigate, and it'll be search engine friendly. It's far more useful to spend time making a good product, than trying to game the search engines.

showerst• 18 years ago

I hesitate to wade into this, especially this late to the party, but what the heck...

I think a major fallacy of the crowd around here is to see SEO as primarily just code/content optimization. Good HTML, page structure, and tagging is a bit of an art, but business as usual to any top flight developer.

The elephant in the room with SEO is paid links. You may have a wonderful validating, user friendly page, but if your competition has 1000 backlink lead on you, you'll never see the top SERP spot for big keywords. Viral content can certainly help, but the unpredictable nature (esp of the links) tends to keep it in second place.

I think most programmers consider paid links 'beneath' them, and most marketers don't understand it (and technically it's grounds for a google ban, but that's only in blatant cases in my experience), but in reality:

1) Identifying proper backlink candidates, in your niche, and tracking contact info down

2) Crafting a non-spammy pitch, and following up on it

3) Making a deal, optimizing the link, and keeping it up to date

is not only a skill set to be mastered, it's a full time job for any site of large size.

Of course throwing down a technically sound site with good content is job #1 for any of us, but the idea that that alone will get you traffic, especially if your idea isn't novel/brilliant, is awfully optimistic. We all want to be Twitter, but somebody out there is getting rich selling wrenches, and the publicity/viral opportunities take real work to master.

Finally, many of the services good SEOs offer like advanced site analytics, integration with PPC campaigns, etc, can be major ROI gainers. They're not necessarily SEO, but they tend to fall under that community's expertise.

whew All that said, I too believe that 80% of the SEO experts out there are hawking snake oil, or black hat google-bomb of the month stuff that will have negative repercussions, but the idea that the whole industry is bunk comes from a large number of people that either all have a brilliant, novel idea, or are missing a serious ROI opportunity.

kajecounterhack• 18 years ago

Lol all this, and we all ask one question in return:

why?

lutorm• 18 years ago

What's SEO?

SEO is bullshit

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