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The screaming and shrieking have reached crescendo volume. Search engine optimization’s dirty little secret — that highly experienced optimizers don’t like to divulge their “real” secrets — has almost gone mainstream. This perception is approaching the status of SEO myth — not necessarily because it’s not true (although it’s not) because it is being used in classic myth-like fashion to explain why the SEO advice people find on the Web seems to suck.

Why the SEO advice you find sucks — Really

There is certainly plenty of bad SEO advice being hammered into naive people’s heads and hearts every day but I think a more common occurrence is that people looking for SEO advice are just getting hammered for asking for help.

On the one hand, many people are willing to offer an occasional quick glance at a Website. Some SEOs do this regularly in an attempt to drum up business, I suppose. I do it so that I can see what is actually happening on the Web “out there”, beyond the circles of experienced SEO.

On the other hand, many of the most helpful SEOs resent being treated as a free service pack for some stranger’s Website. They get a little testy when they see a message like, “Hi, I just launched a Website. Would someone please review it and tell me if I’m doing this right?”

People looking for that kind of help are setting themselves up for failure. Experienced hands usually don’t like to give free SEO reviews, and the people most eager to provide such reviews in response to those kinds of requests usually lack the experience you’re looking for.

So while people like me will complain about bad SEOs giving out advice, the apparent dearth of good SEO advice is really not a dearth. After all, there are thousands of pretty good articles and blog posts still available through many archives.

All the SEO bloggers have stopped blogging about SEO

While it’s true that some people get burned out on a topic, most people in the field move on to something else. It’s a natural part of the personal evolutionary process. Many people who start out learning search engine optimization move into social media optimization and some of those folks move into Web business marketing and strategy. The pathways unfold in many directions.

But there comes a point where after you’ve proved your SEO chops on your blog you have to acknowledge that there is more to Web marketing than search engine optimization. Search is not the only source of traffic on the Web. It never has been and hopefully it never will be.

There are relatively few people in the industry who can keep saying something about search engine optimization without drifting off into another social media escapade. SEOs have coopted social media prerogatives in so many ways it could be argued that most of us should now call ourselves Social Media Marketers rather than Search Engine Optimizers. Many people have made that transition already.

I think a new generation of SEO bloggers is emerging and that group of people will flower into something brilliant. All it takes is time. There is still much to be said (and learned) about search engine marketing, but you’re probably going to have to look for the newer voices to find something that hasn’t been said before.

It’s not that all the SEO bloggers have stopped blogging about SEO so much as that there is a new set of SEO bloggers who have found their passion for the topic.

The times, they are a-changin’

It’s hard for me to remember which search year I’m in. Today’s search results look like the results from last year. Today’s grave SEO doubts about what is happening on the Web sound like those from five years ago.

Google is getting bigger, faster, pickier, and I can’t get my site to rank in Google and how many links do I need to succeed with Google?

With all the innovations in search that we’ve seen through the past five years, people still seem to grouse about the same old stuff: their sites are penalized, not indexed, not being crawled, not ranking well for all keywords, etc.

Search engine optimization is being called on the carpet every year for promoting smarmy sites. The SEO industry leaps to defend itself every time someone criticizes it. And we cannot agree on which methods are “white hat”, effective, or the best practices everyone should be using.

So why are the times a-changin’? Danny Sullivan is still running search conferences — he’s just using a different company to do that, now.

Rand Fishkin is still trying to get everyone to share their SEO thoughts on his site — he’s just got more money to work with now.

Todd Friesen is still having a blast with all his buds at the bar — he’s just living in the U.S. now.

We have no standards, no trustworthy certifications, and no means of reining in unethical SEOs.

I don’t see that all that much has changed in search engine optimization. We’re still batting away noisome flies with nothing to do and building Websites and planting links and looking at search results.

It’s the people that have changed, not the times, not the process.

Understanding that will help you cope with all the change you’re seeing today and tomorrow. Change is the only constant in this industry.

A client calls you up and says “I want to optimize for New Brand Name” and you say, “You’re doing a bad job of optimizing for Abused Brand Name“. How do you think that conversation should go forward?

If the SEO specialist is not paying attention to the client’s stated marketing objectives, then how useful is the SEO advice that the SEO technician has to offer?

Before you reach for your tattered old copy of “Classic Client Blunders In Search Marketing”, take a long hard look at what Bill Gates is trying to do. On the little SEO-stomping floater that pops up when you hit the site, Bill says:

I thought it would be interesting to share these conversations more widely with a website, in the hope of getting more people thinking and learning about the issues I think are interesting and important. So, welcome to the Gates Notes.

He doesn’t say anything about becoming a blogger or joining the blog community.

You know, there IS still a World Wide Web beyond the blogosphere. Bill Gates’ site doesn’t look like a traditional blog in any sense to me. I get the distinct impression he doesn’t want to be just another blogger.

So the fact that a lot of imposturous blogs are crowding a name space (”Bill Gates blog”) that Bill has eschewed doesn’t lead me to conclude he is doing anything wrong.

I have, through the years, criticized Bill Gates and Microsoft in many ways, but I have always lauded Mr. Gates’ marketing savvy.

His approach to launching his Website flies in the face of SEO expectations — and that is EXACTLY the kind of thinking the SEO community needs to learn from.

Just because every idiot with a Bill Gates Complex wants to rank for “Bill Gates blog” doesn’t in any way mean that Bill Gates should want to. In fact, that is the most compelling reason for Bill Gates to avoid the “Bill Gates blog” name space completely.

Sure, Bill could hire a search reputation management company to clean up the name space for him but he doesn’t need to. He has caché — an intrinsic value that ensures millions of people will follow his footsteps across the Webosphere wherever he goes.

Bill Gates can easily do what most people only dream of: build a query space. People will search for “The Gates Notes” because that is the name by which Bill Gates Website is being promoted.

Whether people find it using “Bill Gates blog” doesn’t matter any more than whether they find it by using “Bill Gates sucks”, “Bill Gates is evil”, or “Bill Gates should fire Steve Ballmer”.

The brand name the client chose was “The Gates Notes” and it was a stroke of basic marketing savvy — no one had made an effort to pollute the name space. Bill Gates scored a coup over all the illegitimate bloggers and armchair SEO advisors by deftly moving around the problem.

In fact, I am sure many people will link to http://www.thegatesnotes.com/ with the erroneous anchor text “Bill Gates blog” and variations on it because everyone thinks that all you have to do on the Web is create a blog.

If The Gates Notes is a blog, it must be a proposal for what 3rdGen Blogs should look like, because it doesn’t look like a blog, it doesn’t act like a blog, and it doesn’t have to be a blog if it doesn’t want to be.

Danny Sullivan’s very long-winded SEO analysis of the Gates site has undoubtedly earned far more links and commentary from news organizations and bloggers than this little ‘ole response will — so the public has been led down the wrong path once again by the good intentions of someone who forgot to apply the standards of the Web to the subject of his post.

Oh, wait. The Web has no standards.

In fact, neither does SEO — and if SEO did have standards we have no way of knowing whether those standards would have discouraged the shot across the bow that Danny lobbed at Bill Gates.

It’s unfortunate that someone so visible in the SEO community should go to such extreme lengths to offer what amounts to a load of hogwash — or, what we would call in more polite terms — very poorly framed SEO advice.

You don’t just run down the client and say, “Hey, Bub! More people search on ‘Bill Gates blog’ than know to search on ‘The Gates Notes’ so you need to change your title tags.”

That would be equivalent to telling Dial Soap that they need to change the title tags for their site to include the words “hand soap”, “bar soap”, and similar generic expressions.

How much money do you think you would make as an SEO offering that kind of advice?

Although “bill gates blog” is nowhere near as ubiquitous as “hand soap”, it’s still not the brand that Bill Gates chose to build. Should Dial Corporate start marketing its site as “tips on how to use soap”? What about “the best soap blog around”?

Before you go shooting off your mouth, criticizing people for not using obviously spammed out keywords in their title tags, stop and consider that maybe — just maybe — some people are a little more comfortable with the process of building a brand than the average small business and affiliate site owners.

The SEO industry really doesn’t get the full value of what it means to be a brand.

Danny Sullivan is certainly a very successful thought leader in our field — he could teach most people more than just a thing or two about search engine optimization.

But I really have to say, Danny, what were you thinking when you wrote that post — except that maybe it would be a great piece of link bait?

The SEO rarely if ever gets to pick the brand keyword — we just have to knuckle down and do our job to ensure that the right site(s) appear for the new brand.

THAT is what search engine optimization is really all about. It has nothing to do with calling out people for the sake of obtaining a few golden links.

Disclaimer: My use of “the client” is only figurative and not intended to mean that Danny Sullivan has a business relationship with Bill Gates.

So I need to say something about SEO-Theory.com here on Best SEO Blog. I’ve updated the SEO Glossary page to include new terms and to expand some of the existing definitions.

Two new expressions that I have found myself using are “micro SEO” and “macro SEO”. Coining a new meaning for a phrase other people are already using is risky but I have encountered a growing need to distinguish between site-specific SEO and SEO for groups of Websites. It’s just easier for me to use Micro SEO to refer to site-specific SEO and Macro SEO to refer to SEO for groups of Websites.

Some people might suggest that search engine reputation management covers Macro SEO but that’s not correct. SERM (aka ORM and SRM) is one aspect of Macro SEO. Optimizing for a network of satellite sites is another aspect of Macro SEO. Optimizing for a network of news sites is a third aspect of Macro SEO.

The new page provides a quick run-down of SEO theorems and principles that I have written about through the years. Sure, you can download the free eBook (SEO Theory Search Engine Optimization Quick Reference Guide) but that document is a little old so it doesn’t include more recent work from the past couple of years. In fact, the more recent stuff is more advanced so it probably doesn’t belong in the eBook anyway.

The SEO Theorems and Principles page serves as a good introduction to the laws and principles I’ve discussed through the years in a more concise format than an eBook. You don’t have to read the full articles just to see what the axioms are, but you can follow the links if you want to read the fuller discussions.

I also appended a list of 8 advanced SEO topics at the bottom of the page (one of which is actually just a link to the game theory category).

I’ve been wanting to document this information for a long time and just happened to find myself with enough time between meetings and projects today that it made sense to give it a whirl.

I hope you find the page useful.

Time has an interesting article about a Website called the Suicide Machine. I’m linking to the article rather than to the Website because the article deserves to be read (but visit suicidemachine.org if you want to see the site).

If you’re tired of your social media content, clap your hands — the Suicide Machine promises to delete all the content in your Facebook and Twitter accounts. It will also sever all your connections.

People get tired of the social media scene. Despite reports of tremendous growth in the use of social media, I have to wonder just how many of those accounts are created solely for promoting businesses (and/or scams). I would estimate somewhere upwards of 10% of all social media accounts are robotic in nature.

I’m tempted to say “perhaps more” but that would be repetitively redundant since I had already said “upwards of”. However, that is the way social media works. People don’t think much about how they say what they say when they say it socially. Heck, if you watch Ghosthunters or Ghosthunters International with any regularity you’ll hear them abuse and misuse the pronoun “myself” at least 10 times per episode (can no one muster up the courage to say “me” or “I” any more?).

My point is that social media profiles tend to pile up. You create them and create them and create them — and when you want to walk away (which no marketer would want to do) you cannot because the process of “closing” an account is so tedious. People need closure but you cannot obtain closure in social media.

So now we have the Suicide Machine, which gives people the closure they need because social media — at its core — fails to meet one of our most basic needs: it doesn’t let us say, “Good-bye”, “fare well”, “au revoir”, “sayonara”, “adios”, etc. Social media is fly paper and it doesn’t really want to let go of you. It depends too much on including you to allow you any real freedom to come and go as you please.

So in the end, when all the real people have figured out how to leave social media, perhaps we’ll still have millions upon millions of robotic marketing accounts blindly pitching carefully targeted crap products and services to each other, and the social media metrics will show that the services are still alive and well.

Meanwhile, everyone will join Todd Friesen for drinks at the bar, and they’ll all laugh at how silly they were, thinking they could just hand their real-world lives over to a computer network.

You’ll know who your real friends are when they cross the sentinel line and risk their lives to free you from the cold, hard grasp of the machines. Until then, at least you have inflated friend and follower counts in your social media profiles.

Good luck with that.

I often find myself investigating suspicious Websites. The corporate world is growing increasingly sensitive about where their trademarks are mentioned, and why.

Yesterday’s mushblogs, which once relied upon Markov-chained gibberish to slip past search algorithms and filters, are now providing much more sophisticated mashup text that often convinces the unwary eye that nothing is wrong.

However, people are growing more suspicious about blogs that randomly mention companies, products, services, and people. They are learning to use Copyscape and other tools to try to find unauthorized duplicates of Web content.

It’s the mushblogs that cause the most headscratching, however. When people bring them to me they are certain they are looking at suspicious content but they cannot put their fingers on why.

Why the content looks suspicious is that it still lacks the ring of human sensibility. The paragraphs do not flow together smoothly. Whereas yesterday’s mushblogs floated randomly disjointed sentences and fragments together — often glued to each other by inappropriate ellipsis marks — today’s mushblogs are mining blog and forum RSS feeds, even microfeeds from sites like Twitter, for coherent comments.

You may unwittingly be cited in a dozen conversations in as many different contexts all because you randomly use some expression that a spammer wants to target.

Black hat services like Syndic8 publish RSS feeds for use by scripts that compile these mushblogs for blog farms. These black services are the reason why I refuse to publish full feeds from the blogs I control. The black hats will have to scrape my articles manually (some do) or just make do with the summaries.

There is not a great deal you can do to prevent black hats from repurposing your content. You can stop publishing RSS feeds but there are drastic consequences for that. And marketers who count RSS subsciptions loathe the idea of publishing only partial feeds because they lose subscribers that way.

You might consider watermarking your paragraphs, however. One simple way to do this is to embed links back to your site in random words embedded in each paragraph. Of course, some people might fear building many links from black hat sites. Another way to watermark paragraphs is to embed your site URL as text somewhere in the paragraph, but that looks ugly.

Some people have taken to paginating their articles. I’m not sure what the RSS feed looks like for a paginated article but the user experience is probably not very pretty on the subscriber side. Are they doing this to fight the scrapers? I don’t know.

Some of the aggregation scripts strip out links but if you’re embedding links you might add some attributes to mix up the syntax, or change the order of attributes.

And while these measures offer some protection against totally unabridged use of your new content, they do nothing for older content — which I am increasingly finding in mushblogs. Quite possibly the various anti-scraping tactics have signaled to the black hat community that what they are doing is attracting too much attention.

So now I’m finding articles from 2, 3, even 4 years ago on new blogs. The articles are really snippets pasted together from multiple sources. You may or may not recognize your own work after 4 years if you see an entire article you wrote, but what if you see an article that only includes 1 paragraph from your 5-year-old copy?

This new spam technique now calls into question the value of older Web content. I’ve maintained archives of old articles on many sites. Should I now begin retiring that content before it’s scraped and mingled into repurposed mushblogs? Should we begin advising clients to stop publishing old blog content and feature articles?

Maybe it’s time to start walling off our old content and charging for access to it — a move that is sure to be the kiss of death to many a site’s long-tail chasing SEO content strategy. The news industry is struggling with the reverse of this method — walling off new content and only allowing free access to old content, if ever at all.

Content publishers need to start thinking about how to protect the integrity of their content while assuming that it will be scraped. It’s not a matter of if but when. If you can obtain some sort of branding value from the scraped content, the spammers may be reluctant to continue using your work.

Of course, this would mean reconstructing vast reaches of the archived Web. You would also, regrettably, have to close off some of our more cherished external sources of content recovery, such as archive.org. In order to protect the integrity of copy, textual watermarking may have to become very sophisticated.

For example, you may have to instruct your writers to start embedding variations on “here at best-seo-blog.com” in every paragraph. You may have to look at different ways to space out paragraphs rather than through traditional HTML markup (and give up on using DIVs and SPANs) so as to reduce watermarking text.

There is no doubt that Webspam is evolving at a fast rate. By the time we have developed fully effective techniques against today’s scraping technologies only script-kiddies will be using the mush-paragraph technique anyway. Still, I feel that we need to figure out a way to take some sort of action that will become a useful standard or best practice.

Otherwise, I’ll have a branding advantage over you as an increasing number of rogue Websites randomly mention best-seo-blog.com and seo-theory.com.