Recent­ly, a con­ver­sa­tion with a client gave me pause.

“I’ve switched all my search­es to Bing.” the client said. “Every time I search Google, I see how the SEOs have manip­u­lat­ed the results. I don’t trust Google to give me unbi­ased infor­ma­tion anymore.”

I decid­ed to keep my mouth shut.

This occurred just after Pres­i­dent Trump accused Google of manip­u­lat­ing news results to high­light more left-lean­ing articles.

I wasn’t par­tic­u­lar­ly moti­vat­ed to get into a polit­i­cal dis­cus­sion spurred by per­cep­tions of Google.

But the con­ver­sa­tion got me thinking.

As SEO pro­fes­sion­als, we know that our “manip­u­la­tion” or the SERPs is usu­al­ly minimal.

Most of us are actu­al­ly very care­ful to make sure that the con­tent we opti­mize is a sol­id answer to the query.

Google is con­stant­ly work­ing to rid their algo­rithm of spam and infor­ma­tion that doesn’t offer help­ful infor­ma­tion relat­ed to con­sumer queries.

But Google is always play­ing whack-a-mole.

Every time a new way is found to exploit Google, it even­tu­al­ly gets out­ed – and every time it is abused.

Every. Sin­gle. Time.

Forbidden Fruit: Google ‘Hacks’ That SEOs Have Killed

I just searched for [SEO Hacks] on Google.

The sec­ond result is from a well-known “guru” who is some­what con­tro­ver­sial in SEO circles.

The arti­cle appears to be old­er, although it doesn’t have a date stamp.

The piece is focused on things SEO new­bies can do to improve rankings.

Most of the advice in the arti­cle is pret­ty benign – and there is actu­al­ly some good stuff in there.

But there is a glar­ing­ly out­dat­ed – or down­right bad – rec­om­men­da­tion in the arti­cle regard­ing what is fre­quent­ly called “com­ment spam.”

A long time ago, before the pro­lif­er­a­tion of major social media plat­forms, blog com­ments were a great place to gain easy backlinks.

I can tell you these links are pret­ty much worth­less these days.

If you can find a blog that still allows com­ments (many, includ­ing this pub­li­ca­tion, have turned them off because of spam and trolls), you’ll still see folks try­ing to game Google with hor­ri­bly writ­ten comments.

On sev­er­al of the blogs we run, I see hun­dreds of spam com­ments a month. Thank the lord for Akismet.

Recent­ly, Google’s John Mueller stat­ed that there is no truth to the fact that .edu links are more valu­able than oth­er links.

It’s impos­si­ble to know if this has always been the case.

SEO prac­ti­tion­ers are noto­ri­ous for grab­bing ahold of half-truths and out­right myths and pound­ing the tech­niques until Google cries uncle.

Is this Google cry­ing uncle on .edu links? Did they ever have more val­ue, or were they abused so much they became irrelevant?

We used to be able to get links and rank­ings from thou­sands of e‑zine and thin con­tent sites – most of which are now defunct.

We built a mul­ti-mil­lion dol­lar econ­o­my for these con­tent rags, and the Google destroyed it with a Pen­guin and a Panda.

And I would be bereft to men­tion the mil­lions (per­haps bil­lions?) of dol­lars that shady link sell­ers have made over the years.

Even though I haven’t bought a sin­gle link in five years, I’ve def­i­nite­ly spent sev­er­al mil­lion dol­lars on links in my career.

And final­ly, I believe the days of the pri­vate blog net­work (PBN) are numbered.

I hear from PBN oper­a­tors all the time – say­ing there is no way Google can detect a PBN if it is done right.

I call horse manure on that. Google can and will be able to detect most PBNs, and I bet that it hap­pens soon.

If you have all your mon­ey tied up in PBN set­up, I’d look to diver­si­fy. Soon.

The Psychology Behind SEO Madness

Why does every tac­tic that even slight­ly cor­re­lates with high­er Google rank­ings seem to get abused?

I think the main rea­son the tac­tic du jour is abused by many SEO pros (espe­cial­ly those with less expe­ri­ence) is because they put too much empha­sis on a sim­pli­fied cor­re­la­tion com­par­i­son when look­ing at what appears to move the rank­ing needle.

Renowned social sci­en­tist Don­ald T. Camp­bell dis­cussed the dan­gers of focus­ing on lim­it­ed quan­ti­ta­tive data points way back in 1979.

Campbell’s law, in a nut­shell, states that the more any quan­ti­ta­tive fac­tor is used for social deci­sion mak­ing, the more like­ly that fac­tor is to be abused.

Campbell’s law is fre­quent­ly used to cite report­ing fal­lac­i­es in edu­ca­tion (stan­dard­ized test­ing), law enforce­ment (crime sta­tis­tics) and many oth­er cas­es where a deci­sion is made based upon a quan­tifi­able per­for­mance indicator.

For exam­ple, if the crime rate is too high, just change what the def­i­n­i­tion of a crime is to make the num­bers go down.

In big data, Campbell’s law is often cit­ed as a pre­cau­tion to those who would use a sin­gle KPI to make decisions.

Focus­ing on the rank­ings of a small num­ber of key­words is a mistake.

Trust me, I get why this happens.

I can’t tell you how many times I have a prospect tell me they only care about a sin­gle keyword.

The client is con­vinced if they can rank for that one key­word, all of their busi­ness prob­lems will go away.

Accord­ing to Campbell’s law, once an SEO pro knows they are being eval­u­at­ed on rank­ings, they will work to manip­u­late that one fac­tor instead of focus­ing on what will real­ly dri­ve a business’s SEO success.

In my expe­ri­ence, more than half the time the key­word the client wants to rank for doesn’t pro­vide the busi­ness they expect, even when they rank at the top.

In fact, rank­ing for the “mon­ey” key­word gets you eye­balls that aren’t ready to buy. They are too high in the buy­ing funnel.

You’re bet­ter off diver­si­fy­ing the KPIs you use to deter­mine success.

Part of this is edu­cat­ing clients and deci­sion mak­ers on the fal­la­cy of rank­ings-focused KPIs.

The per­for­mance of an SEO provider should be judged on organ­ic traf­fic, lead qual­i­ty, and (in some cas­es) over­all sales. Not rankings.

Focus­ing on rank­ings caus­es us to lose where we should be focusing

How do we become the answer to the answer to the buyer’s ques­tions from ini­tial inter­est to the close of the sale?

If SEO pro­fes­sion­als will work this way, the indus­try will con­tin­ue to show value.

And maybe the peo­ple in our indus­try will stop grav­i­tat­ing to the lat­est shiny object, which then requires them to sell snake oil because they have noth­ing else to sell once the shiny object becomes tarnished.

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