Had a bit of an ethical dilemma this week. We were talking to a large company in regards to working with them for the SEO of their site, which was going to be undergoing a redesign. It was a company I knew of, as they are an important brand in their space and spend a lot of money advertising on radio and TV.
They sent us some preliminary info about their goals and what they were looking for with an SEO company, and I immediately saw a few red flags shoot up. The main thing that I saw as a potential problem was that they were mostly interested in ranking highly for one or two one-word keywords that were important to them. They know their space, and they do a lot of PPC and they know for a fact that these particular general keywords are great converters for them.
Their CEO had mandated that they become #1 for those keyword phrases, and now it was up to these in-house website folks to make it happen one way or another.
Considering the company and what they did, I am quite sure I could have helped them achieve those goals, plus many, many more. But, something inside me wouldn’t allow me to seriously consider the job knowing that the real goal was simply to obtain #1 rankings for those couple of individual keywords. Even though I was confident that we’d certainly get them to top 5 pretty easily with a redesign and good optimization (assuming they implemented things as we recommended them) I just couldn’t do it.
It was a strange one, that’s for sure. That wasn’t the only reason we bowed out…it was also partly because I have my seminar this week and wouldn’t have the time to really invest enough time into a good enough proposal, and they were on a fast track to choose a company. (I don’t like being rushed on these things either.) But, we certainly could have worked around that aspect if I felt more comfortable with the goals.
But I didn’t, so we decided to bow out.
Still seems weird though, becuase I really would have liked this one. I had it all figured out in my head exactly what to do, and I know it would have worked. Oh well…their loss. I don’t blame the guys we talked to, they were just stuck measuring things the way their CEO said they had to measure it, but I do wish we could have perhaps educated the CEO a bit.
In my last post here, I wrote about my experience with social drag in my offline world. I’ve just seen it happen in my online world as well.
I’ve been in SEO for what, like 10 - 12 years now, and writing about it for at least 6 or 7. Sure, I have been very outspoken about working with the search engines as opposed to against them in a way that makes the Internet a better place for everyone. And yes, I’ve said some pretty nasty things about search engine spammers over the years. I make no bones about the fact that I’m not a big fan of spamming the engines as I think it ruins them for everyone who is a searcher.
But it’s one thing to be a practitioner and teacher of best SEO practices, and another to be some kind of crazy pointy white hat supremicist zealot. Anybody who actually reads what I write, truly reads it, would know that I do not tout the lame white hat guinea pig SEO that a lot of others in our industry promote, and I never have. I’ve stated quite a few times that defining search engine spam is easy. All search engine spam is, is simply the act of deceiving a search engine into ranking your site when it wouldn’t otherwise rank it. Basically, using tricks to make the engines think something about the site that isn’t actually true.
That’s it. It really is that black and white, and there are very few shades of gray. With that logic, a ton of stuff that some white hatters call spam, is not spam at all in my opinion. Using perfectly legitimate coding techniques for the purpose they were intended to be used, will never be considered spam. But using legitmate coding techniques to deceive the engines is a different ballgame.
Tonight I read a post at Threadwatch from RCJordan in reference to me, that was completely and utterly false. Obviously, RC has never actually read what I have written for years, but instead has probably read what others have written that I’ve written. (Did I lose ya there?) If it were just this one instance with this one person, I would just shrug it off. But, lately, I seem to get this sort of thing a lot.
Perhaps it’s because I’ve branched out where I post now, so I’m reaching a wider audience of people who never actually read what I wrote, but what they thought I wrote. Even Rand recently seemed to have his socks knocked off by something I posted in my forum, and it wasn’t anything I haven’t been saying for years.
What do I have to do to shed this crazy image some people have of me? How much more can I write and how much more precise do I have to be with my writing so that it’s perfectly clear where I stand on all things SEO?
Let’s get a few things straight with what I believe and don’t believe about SEO and spam, since there are still a whole lot of people out there who seem to think that I believe a whole lot of crap that I don’t believe:
- I don’t believe that “good” code, or code that validates to some arbitrary specifications has anything to do with SEO, nor will it have any effect (good or bad) on your rankings. I personally wouldn’t know good code if it bit me in the ass, as you can tell by looking at pretty much any of my sites.
- I don’t believe that one should optimize for keyword phrases that are easy to get ranked for, but have very few actual searches. (Bah Humbug to the long tail.) If you’re gonna optimize, optimize for keyword phrases that will bring you real traffic. Nothing wrong with covering your bases with the 4 and 5 word phrases, but if that’s the core of your SEO, well…you suck. (It’s what I have been calling guinea pig SEO for many years.)
- There’s nothing wrong with buying links. Does it surprise you to hear me say that? If so, go to the back of the class, because I’ve certainly never said there was anything wrong with it. It’s ADVERTISING…duh.
- I don’t believe that my way of SEO is the only way. I just know it works, if you have the time and inclination to learn it and try it out for yourself.
- I’ve never felt that “good content” is all anyone ever needs to have a successful website.
- I’m not now, nor have I ever been a copywriter — SEO or otherwise. That’s waaaaaaay too hard for me.
- I believe in the separation of SEO and search engines just as I believe in separation of church and state. I don’t report sites, and I don’t ask for favors from search engine reps. In fact, I believe that a lot of what search engine reps tell us publicly is propaganda through and through. It’s what their ideal would be, but not what’s happening at the moment.
- I don’t think all search engine spammers are scum, nor do I think all “white hat” SEOs are ethical. In fact, I’ve seen the opposite to be the case far too many times. I try not to judge people at all, but when I do, I do it based on merit. I always assume people are basically good until they prove otherwise.
I could probably go on forever, but that’s enough for now. If any of those things surprised you, well then you really just never knew me at all!
I was just reading a post in Steve Pavlina’s blog regarding social drag, and it made me laugh because just yesterday, I encountered the very thing (even though I didn’t know it had a name).
According to Steve:
“Social drag is what happens when you undergo a significant personal shift, yet everyone around you still treats you the same.”
For many years, my online persona and my business persona have not at all meshed with my real life social persona. Online in forums and in my newsletter and articles, as well as with most clients, I seem to have this personality that is “bigger than life.” Yet in real life, especially with family, I have anything but a big personality.
I grew up very quiet and shy, and still prefer to stay fairly quiet in most group settings. It’s always seemed to me that people are always vying with each other to see who gets to talk the most, yet very often nobody is actually listening to anyone else. I’ve never wanted to compete for that sort of “non-attention” so I would just sit quietly and watch the rest of them duke it out. I never felt that I had much to add to the conversation anyway, as most people talk about stuff that I wasn’t very interested in (e.g., politics, sports, their latest medical procedure, etc.).
Expressing my true self online for the past 15 years or so in one form or another, has taught me about who I am as a person. I now realize that I do have interesting things to say, and that other people actually can learn from me. Speaking at conferences and becoming friends with so many people who only knew the online side of my personality, has enabled me to carry over some of that big personality to my real life. Even though I still prefer to be fairly quiet in social situations, I can and do speak up more if I feel I can add something to the conversation. But more importantly, I have a new found confidence that family members who I don’t see all that much have no idea about.
Take the purchase of my new bright red Mini Cooper. Those who know my SEO persona see it as a perfect fit for my personality. My Search Creative business partner has told me as much, and she knows me from real life, although in a business sense. Yet, I’m sure some family members (especially my husband’s family) have to feel like there’s a bit of a disconnect there!
So my social drag experience had to do with my husband’s family. For the past few years, one of his aunts has been having a monthly get together so that the family doesn’t grow too far a part. It’s been really great, because none of us would make the time to do that otherwise. The latest one was yesterday, and I was wearing a new shirt which had a martini glass embedded in rhinestones on it that I had purchased before the last SES conference in NYC. When I wore it in NYC during my off hours at the conference, it didn’t really get any comments other than “cute shirt!”
Apparently, to my husband’s family, however, it was out of character. I got comments such as “Wow, Jill, you’ve changed! Is this the new you to go along with your new Mini? That shirt isn’t like you at all.” I was somewhat taken aback as I wasn’t expecting that reaction, and simply said, “I guess you just don’t know me then!”
Since nobody reads this blog, this is probably a waste of time, but I figured I’d put in a little plug for our upcoming High Rankings® Search Engine Marketing Seminar.
It’s coming up quickly on March 30-31 in Walnut Creek, CA (not too far from San Francisco and Oakland).
Learn more or register here!
