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We often associate the word “amateur” with negative connotations, as if something amateurish were less desirable or not worthwhile. But how many of us would want to fight the World Amateur Karate Champion, or play against the World Amateur Chess Champion?

Amateurity is contextually denoted with both respect and disrespect. In some contexts, particularly sports, immense respect is accorded to the amateur leaders and champions.

I suspect that many people in the SEO community secretly or subconsciously strive to distance themselves from “amateur SEO”. I can think of a few movies, however, where some bad guy who is big on brawn and martial arts sneers at someone else, mutters “amateurs“, and then proceeds to get his butt kicked by the amateurs he dismissed so casually.

Oft-times in real life the difference between an amateur and the professional is the type and amount of support or compensation one receives for performing a set of tasks, not for the quality of the effort one had made.

Many amateur SEO techniques may indeed lead to search penalties and filtration, but there are still good practices that non-professional SEOs quickly adapt. These practices are still used (and are sometimes refined) by the pros. Here are a few examples:

Writing – Just writing a few paragraphs of text on a Web page is sufficient to get started with search engine optimization. Some amateur SEOs are far better writers than many professional SEOs. A good SEO wants to improve his or her writing as much as possible.

Website Publishing – You have to throw your bread upon the waters if you want it returned to you a hundred fold. Some amateur SEOs just love to create Websites. Many professional SEOs sort of take to the task like cats take to water. Truth be told, you should try to publish as many useful sites as possible in order to hone your SEO skills.

Engaging in the conversation – The most successful amateur Website operators are tuned into the conversation in whatever topic they invest themselves in. They don’t just know who the players are, they play with the players, eventually becoming players themselves. These heavyweights of the amateur Web oftentimes cross over into the professional markets, but their expertise becomes stale if they don’t stay engaged.

Many of us old-time SEOs came into the professional markets from amateur markets that grew competitive as the Web figured out ways to monetize itself.

Treat people with respect – This is one of those intangible factors that affects everything you do. Some people in our industry try to make themselves look good by making others look bad. That approach only works with gullible and immature people. Eventually you hit the wall and can go no further with this tactic.

In the amateur side of nearly all endeavors RESPECT is the main currency of exchange. People who don’t treat their peers with respect rarely go far in amateur circles. Professional SEOs should not devote their time to trying to make other people look bad.

There is a difference between offering a critical opinion that may offend someone and going out of your way to attack other people and seek to destroy their credibility. If your professionalism is built on ridiculing or deriding other people in the SEO industry, you’re not going to earn much respect. That lost respect will cost you friends and allies who won’t be there when you need them most.

Link freely to sites without thinking about SEO – This is the hardest lesson for many people in the SEO community to learn. So much bad advice has been published that tells people they must go out and get links to achieve SEO success that people have given up all their SEO power to the sites that provide links.

You have the power to shape your own SEO destiny by deciding carefully who and where you link, but more importantly by just linking out without thinking in terms of PageRank, anchor text, and competition. Amateur SEOs often build really great resources because they don’t “know” any better. They lose that primordial power once they start to believe the link building myths that permeate the SEO community.

Be passionate – People who have lost their passion for a venture become dependent on the passion of others. Passive SEO is completely dispassionate and it leaves you adrift in a cold sea of heartless link moguls who are only interested in what value you’re willing to part with in order to obtain the links they control.

Your passion, whether you’re an amateur or a professional, frees you from the anxiety associated with link building. Your passion drives you to build the kinds of resources other people recognize, respect, and appreciate.

Do these things well, and people will find it more difficult to decide whether you are an amateur or a professional SEO.

Everything on the Web can be faked. Everything on the Web can be replicated. Everything on the Web can be reused or repurposed. As users of the Web, every day we make decisions about whom we will trust as a source of information.

Some people are more skeptical than others. Some people are more trusting than others. Numerous surveys have revealed that the majority of search engine users assume that the first results presented to them are probably “good content”, “trustworthy content”, etc.

Matt Cutts has on more than occasion indicated that he and his fellow search engineers feel compelled to meet that expectation by serving the best results they can provide for the user experience. Over the past year, search has evolved away from finding matching content toward finding trustworthy content.

It’s all about trust.

And so far our efforts to figure out how a search engine assigns trust have pretty much been fruitless. But I think the justification for reverse engineering algorithms has grown thin over the years, particularly where Google is concerned.

In fact, earlier today as I was thinking about the work I do, I realized I don’t really chase the algorithms any more so much as I chase the priorities. That is, a search engine may try several algorithmic approaches toward fulfilling a set priority. Hence, assuming one can figure out what algorithmic approach is being used, by the time you have resources in place to take advantage of that part of the algorithm it has moved on.

It’s a losing battle, as some people in the industry like to say. And chasing algorithms has become far less important to me than chasing priorities. I have to think about 6 months down the road. I look for trends that haven’t even yet emerged, working toward developing (or enhancing) an ever-changing model of what Web search is trying to accomplish.

In search engine optimization, people obsess over whatever part of the algorithmic picture they think they (need to) understand. For some people, that is “fixing duplicate content”. For others, that is “managing PageRank”. Some people obsess over page titles and URLs, domain names, and how often they should use keywords on the page.

The one thing we don’t obsess about is probably the most important factor influencing Web search: which sites we trust. We spend our days building links for ourselves and client sites but when we pontificate we casually link out to Websites we feel demonstrate our points or provide good, reliable information. Furthermore, we visit those sites more often than we visit other sites.

You’ve done many Web searches as an SEO. You’ve clicked on all sorts of strange links. You have developed an acute sensitivity to sites you want nothing to do with. Your red flags wave, your alarm klaxons wail loudly — your hand quickly takes you back or closes the browser window.

A Web document doesn’t have to be malware to be unacceptable. It can be boring, a duplicate of something you have seen elsewhere, outdated, a thin-content site covered with advertising, etc. You’re not likely to trust that kind of content for yourself. You would not recommend it to anyone else to use as a model for their own site or to visit.

Your examples of “bad sites” don’t have to resemble my examples in any way. There are too many sites out there that people choose to trust for us all to trust the same sites.

Nonetheless, using those sites you trust as a guide is one of the best practices you can develop for your SEO. Follow your nose, for your nose knows what stinks and what smells sweet. Instinct will tell you better what is safe to do and what is not — better than any list of criteria you’ll find published on an SEO blog.

We express our trust in many ways. You can easily quantify that expressed trust when developing models for Web sites, looking for sites to use as link resources, and in evaluating for sites you want to link to (you should always link out to good content that will be of interest to your visitors somewhere on your site).

We trust sites where we participate in the discussions.
We trust sites where we contribute content.
We trust sites we use as personal sources of information.
We trust sites we use for personal resources (extended search).
We trust sites where we make purchases.
We trust sites that we read on a regular basis.

We put faces with these sites, even if they are only corporate faces (think of Amazon) or collective faces (think of Ickipedia). We trust even sites we don’t like if we have found them to be useful on more than one occasion.

The trust you extend to whomever you meet on the Web is your best guide to:

1. What you are comfortable with
2. What works with you
3. What you know best
4. What you would most like to be associated with

In the final analysis, aren’t these among the primary criteria we use in deciding where we want to be and what we want people to think of us? The search engine optimization specialist who ignores his or her gut feeling is neglecting one of the best SEO tools we have available. No one can package that for you.

Think about it.

As Yahoo! transfers its search technology to Microsoft’s Bing platform, if my prediction of brand death for Yahoo! Search is fulfilled, many Websites will find themselves in the same undesirable position I am heading toward: dependence upon Google for search referral traffic.

Many people in the SEO industry have focused almost exclusively on Google search referral traffic to the detriment of their own and their clients’ interests. I can’t do anything about SEO short-sightedness but those of us who have maintained search referral diversity now face a problem of serious magnitude.

Let me illustrate with some personal data from Xenite.Org.

A year ago Xenite was receiving around 3,000 search visitors per month from Yahoo! search. In years previous Yahoo! used to send as many as 10,000 visitors a month but the traffic declined gradually over time. A couple of years ago Yahoo! was sending about 5-6,000 visitors per month.

Part of the decline was due to stale content on Xenite, a topic I’ve discussed in the past. I just don’t have as much time to create content for my science fiction network as I did 10 years ago. But we do still publish new content every now and then, some of it extremely link-worthy (such as a recent interview with Craig Horner, star of Legend of the Seeker, which drew in thousands of visitors).

So I know that Yahoo!’s declining search market health has been a real factor for many people. Nonetheless, I’ve never abandoned looking to Yahoo! for traffic.

Microsoft search, on the other hand, has always been a minor player for me. A year ago Xenite received about 1400 visitors from Live search. There have been times in the past when we’ve received as many as 1800 visitors a month from Microsoft, but I don’t really remember any higher numbers.

Last month Microsoft’s Bing sent about 2,000 search referrals to Xenite. Yahoo! sent about 2500. There has been virtually no growth in the non-Google search traffic as far as these two competitors are concerned. Microsoft is essentially leeching traffic away from Yahoo!. I expect that trend to continue, perhaps to even accelerate.

Our Google traffic is up over the past year, no doubt due in part to the occasional new content that Xenite continues to publish. Google typically sends us between 18,000 and 20,000 search referrals a month (NOTE: Technically, all these services send much more traffic — I’m just using data from the most popular referral URLs to avoid adding up long lists of referral data).

Although our search referral traffic has not exactly flat-lined, I don’t see much opportunity for growth in either Google or Bing. I mean, to increase search referral traffic we’ll have to add more content and, frankly, I don’t have time for that.

Yahoo! search referral traffic is dying so trying to improve my content’s visibility over there makes no sense, especially since they are now on a 2-year plan to phase out their algorithm. As Bing’s referral traffic grows, Xenite will certainly benefit from the diversity.

But what happens if, for some reason, Bing’s algorithm changes in favor of sites that compete with Xenite.Org? That pretty much leaves me stuck with Google.

You may feel good about relying on Google for your search traffic but I don’t.

Admittedly, search referral traffic only plays a minor role in our traffic building strategies. We get a lot of traffic from other sources. Still, I don’t like getting 85% of my search referral traffic from Google. Time was, back when I had time to focus on my own sites, Google drove about 50% of the search referral traffic.

If Google banned Xenite today we’d still get a lot of traffic but no one wants to take a 15-20% hit.

So what to do?

The only really viable search engine out there besides Google and Bing is now Ask. I haven’t tried to optimize for Ask in ages. We rank well at Ask but we don’t get much traffic from Ask.

Search optimization doesn’t just include ranking well in a search result. It also includes building a query space and enhancing a search brand’s visibility.

In other words, through the years, I have often advised people who struggled to match in Google what they were accomplishing with other search engine rankings to market their non-Google search visibility. This is a strategy that works very well, especially for sites that cannot rank in Google at all.

There are ways to promote your Ask search visibility. They can be as simple as telling people to “search Ask.com for Our Brand Name” or as complex as incorporating Ask search into your marketing efforts (keep in mind that Ask is a trademark so you have to be careful about how you refer to it).

Marketing goes well beyond advertising. It includes all your outreach efforts. Every communication between you and your marketplace can include reference to the search engines where you rank well. You can include Ask in those references and also give Ask special prominence in them.

The fact that Ask does a very poor job of marketing itself doesn’t mean no one uses it. Tens of millions of people use Ask search every month. You should make sure your sites are listed in and ranking in Ask. You should also make sure that people know how to find you in Ask.

Your goal should not be to take market share away from Bing for Ask. Your goal should be to increase your visibility to the people who use Ask.

And if you’re not marketing to Microsoft’s search visitors, you need to be doing that, too. I expect my Bing search referral traffic to increase substantially over the next 2 years. You should set a similar expectation for yourself and make sure you don’t do anything to prevent that from happening.

Maybe Google really does control 85% of the search market. I seriously doubt that (most searchers use more than one search engine). It’s easy to optimize for Google if you don’t obsess over links and targeted queries. It seems to be getting easier to optimize for Bing.

If you want to maximize your SEO efforts, then you need to think about ways of cutting inroads into substantial search market audiences you don’t normally reach out to.

Ask is the low-hanging fruit. It will take most of us 6 months to a year to gear up for Ask. In the meantime, we need to be casing the other search services to see who is coming up behind Ask.

Don’t depend on just one search engine. That’s the worst possible SEO philosophy. I’ve been negligent about my own sites but at least I’m still aware of where they get their traffic from. I intend to do something about resetting my search diversity.

What are you going to do for yours?

PageRank Sculpting Is The Badhat SEO Technique From Hell

PageRank Sculpting is one of those really bad concepts that just won’t go away. The PageRank sculpting model falsely suggests that, by hiding internal links from search engines, a Website can improve its search visibility. Since the idea was first proposed in 2007, no one has ever been able to show that it works. In fact, last year Google showed that it does NOT work.

You would think that after seeing Googler Matt Cutts come out and say “[Pagerank sculpting] isn’t the most effective way to utilize your PageRank” people would get the message that PageRank Sculpting IS NOT THE MOST EFFECTIVE WAY TO UTILIZE YOUR PAGERANK.

Nonetheless, some rather surprising people (including but not limited to Rand Fishkin and Eric Enge) have failed to embrace the immediately obvious fact that PageRank sculpting does NOT work. Remember, Matt Cutts told everyone that Google “figured that site owners or people running tests would notice [that PageRank flow affected by "rel='nofollow'" on internal links had changed], but they didn’t.”

Completely Failed SEO Analysis Misled The SEO Industry

All the people claiming they were working miracles through their PageRank sculpting had absolutely no clue for over a year that their “sculpting” had been negated by Google. The reason Google disabled the PR Sculpting “Off Switch” was that “some sites that attempted to change how PageRank flowed within their sites … ended up excluding … high-quality information….”

Based on that absolutely awful analytical record, reasonable people should conclude that SEOs would not be able to hit the broad side of a barn with a baseball bat — even if one helps them swing the bat in the right direction (e.g. Googlers consistently and repeatedly advised people NOT to sculpt PageRank going all the way back to 2007).

You may recall that one of the early and oft-cited justifications for attempting to sculpt PageRank in the first place was that “unimportant pages” were outranking more important pages in search results. Rather than fix this problem, people in the SEO community leaped upon PageRank Sculpting as a hot new idea that would impress the masses — thus creating an even worse problem to mask the original problem.

Proof That PageRank Sculpting Harms Websites Emerges

For months I’ve been monitoring requests for help in various SEO and Google support forums. Many, many Webmasters have come out of the woodwork complaining about lost Google rankings, sites not being indexed, etc. (And additionally dozens of Webmasters have privately asked me to look at their sites through forum-based private messaging.) In nearly every case where I investigated the sites’ structures and backlink profiles I was able to show that at least one of several factors was the probable cause of the Websites’ search invisibility:

• The sites were using “rel=’nofollow’” on internal links
• The sites were using “noindex,nofollow” in meta tags
• The sites were using “disallow” in robots.txt
• The sites were using 302-redirects or other odd functions on internal links
• The sites had few or no inbound links
• The sites had obtained many suspicious links (comprising 70% or more of their backlink profiles)

On more than one occasion when I suggested that suspicious backlink problems might be an issue, Google employees tacitly agreed with me without actually saying that was the problem.

By far, however, the most common issue I have found with sites that have lost search traffic, search rankings, and search visibility is that they implemented PageRank Sculpting by use of “rel=’nofollow’” or “noindex,nofollow” meta tags on their pages. By preventing major search engines from crawling and indexing their content, these sites effectively removed themselves from the long tail of search.

How PageRank Sculpting Harms Websites

And by preventing the search engines from indexing all those pages, those sites effectively deleted most of their own accumulated PageRank.

POOF! PageRank vanished simply because it was never allowed to flow through the site, not because it “evaporated” through “rel=’nofollow’”.

Of course link-poor sites don’t have much PageRank to work with in the first place, so preventing unique articles from attracting and passing on PageRank is anything but an effective SEO strategy.

*NEW* PageRank Sculpting Techniques Worse Than The Original

Notice that PageRank sculpting doesn’t simply harm your site through “rel=’nofollow’”. Any method of hiding internal, navigational or cross-promotional links from search engines will reduce a Website’s search visibility and reach. That means that all the NEW methods of “sculpting” PageRank will inflict at least as much harm, if not more, on the Wesbites that implement them.

So using 302-redirects on internal links, embedding navigation into inline frames, using encrypted Javascript links, embedding “noindex” on pages, disallowing robots from directories of user-accessible content — all the so-called “Google-friendly” methods of restricting PageRank flow through a Website (now being promoted by various SEO pundits, gurus, and bloggers) are just as bad and harmful to your site as merely using “rel=’nofollow’” on internal links.

The noindex and robots.txt methods pretty much ensure that you are taking a lot of content out of the running, making your site less competitive, less visible, and less likely to draw more traffic.

One Plausible-sounding Variation Does Not Justify Badhat SEO

Rand Fishkin did propose consolidating pages in the hope of combining PageRank into fewer pages. Of all the 2nd-generation PageRank sculpting techniques, this one at least preserves the indexability of content — but then he coupled that idea with the extremely bad and ill-reasoned suggestion that people who have already dropped tons of “nofollows” into their internal navigation links do nothing to fix that problem (to leave the “nofollow” attributes in place).

Remember that SEOmoz has yet to publish a viable, credible test or report that shows they know how to manage PageRank flow (or even just correctly interpret the data they collect). So the recommendation to leave everything in place should be ignored (unless you’d rather just work on other projects). You can still love Rand for being the great guy he is. In fact you should continue to respect him for being the fantastic marketer he is. Keep watching the videos SEOmoz puts out. Just don’t believe them when they say that PageRank Sculpting (still) works because they’ve never been able to show that it does.

(NOTE: In the comments to his blog post cited above, Matt Cutts did say to one questioner: “this is a change that’s been live for well over a year; if you’ve got a site that works for you and you’re happy with, I wouldn’t worry about going back to change a lot of work.” While I understand Matt’s reluctance to offer generic do this/don’t do this advice — I am sure his comment is considered justification for the Do Nothing To Fix The Problem Principle.)

Badhat SEOs Are Compounding Past Errors With New Trouble

PageRank sculpting never fixed the original problem (bad site design) in the first place. All the sites that turned to PageRank Sculpting to resolve that issue simply made their situations worse. They piled one bad design decision on top of another.

Any SEO who cannot get the root URL of a domain to outrank the “About Us” page without blocking crawlers is completely and utterly incompetent, in my opinion. Don’t do business with those people, if the best they can suggest is that you hide internal, navigational links from search engines in order to reduce the PageRank of the “About Us” or other incidental pages.

I noticed with some amusement that certain pro-Sculptors never said another word on the subject after Matt Cutts pulled the rug out from under their snake oil SEO technique last summer. I hope they quietly went back to their clients and got those sites to remove the internalized nofollow code because in my opinion it is professionally irresponsible to leave that kind of “solution” in place.

The real problem lately, however, is that some people continue to talk about PageRank Sculpting as if it works. They clearly are ignoring the memo Google sent out and they are advising other people to ignore it. That is REALLY bad advice.

Goodhat SEOs MUST Disavow PageRank Sculpting

PageRank Sculpting is the process of hiding internal navigation links from search engines. It doesn’t matter whether you do it with “rel=’nofollow’” or “noindex,nofollow” or “disallow” or some screwy Javascript encryption scheme. When you hide internal navigation from a search engine you destroy crawlability, you destroy index visibility, and you deny your content the PageRank it is rightfully entitled to.

Is this really the kind of “optimization” the SEO community wants to be known for? Because if this is the flag YOU want to wave for YOUR SEO expertise, you can count me among the people who consider you to be nothing more than scam artists, snake oil salesmen, charlatans, and amateurs.

It’s time for the SEO community to stop promoting harmful tactics that bring absolutely nothing positive to the table. You can love your friends and conference idols all you want. You can promote their blogs above mine in all the ways you can think of. I don’t care about that — but if I were one of your clients who had taken your advice to sculpt PageRank — and if you had not come back to me and advised me to take down the “nofollow” attributes — I’d be suing you right now.

I’m not advising anyone to file lawsuits against PageRank Sculpting SEO companies (lawsuits are expensive AND the courts don’t understand this stuff at all) — but this kind of repeat bad behavior is what leads to lawsuits and legislation. The SEO community needs to get out of the PageRank Sculpting business as soon as possible. It IS a scam. I want nothing to do with it.

No one in this industry has any excuse for promoting such a clearly debunked and discredited technique. To ALL SEOs who advocate sculpting PageRank I say: Swallow your pride, get over it, and shut up when you feel the urge to talk about “sculpting PageRank”. You cannot do it, you don’t know how to do it, and you have no business telling anyone else to do it.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are strictly those of the author and do not reflect the views or opinions of any other person, party, or entity.

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.