Best SEO Blog|Launch your site.

If you’re going to contribute content to other Web sites, the best thing you can do is NOT offer them advice on how to improve their content, on how to market themselves, and how to optimize for search.

People like Larry Page and Sergey Brin have proven beyond all reasonable doubt that anyone can become a billionaire regardless of how little they actually understand the World Wide Web (and Page and Brin didn’t have a clue when they proposed PageRank, which ranks among the Ten Most Stupid Ideas On The Internet).

In other words, you may know better than the other guy how to “market” his stuff, but his passion, ambition, connections, and just plain dumb luck may accomplish more than you can ever hope to do for him. If Larry Page and Sergey Brin had asked for and followed advice from the SEO community they would be out of business today. Everything they’ve done with Google has flown in the face of conventional search engine optimization community wisdom.

Their front page is ugly, but ugly works.

They refrained from writing actual content for several years, and instead replicated everyone else’s content.

They waited a long time to monetize their site.

They left their site and content open to clear and obvious manipulation for years (in fact, it’s still easy to manipulate Google’s search results).

If Larry Page and Sergey Brin were to be judged for their search engine optimization today, they would be considered miserable failures and excruciatingly naive spammers. In fact, Google recently achieved the distinction of ranking third on Spamhaus’s list of top spam resources.

My point here is that if you’re going to participate in someone else’s Web site by contributing content, then the best thing you can do for yourself is to keep your advice to yourself. Unless the site operator pays you money for advice, don’t share it. Why? Because he may just prove to have the next best thing and he won’t need your advice.

100% of all SEOs offer ineffective advice at least some of the time. No one escapes from the curse of Being Inconveniently Wrong in this industry. That’s just the way it is.

Free advice is usually the worst advice. It’s given on the fly, with little to no research or consideration, and no real actual knowledge of what the Web site’s goals are. Maybe the site operator doesn’t know what his goal is. All he knows is he has a hot idea that he wants to work.

You should decide whether to contribute content on the basis of whether you like his site and not for any other reason. You should not be trying to boost his brain power. He may be smart enough (most people say Page and Brin are pretty smart guys). He may also be challenging some marketing assumptions. And his approach may work better than your tried and true methods.

If you contribute to someone else’s site, just let him run with your content and see what happens. You may find he can help you more than you can help him.