Hundred Dollar SEO

I am going to make a round-up of a few of my favorite bloggers:

• The highly popular SEOmoz – SEOmoz SEO Quiz
• The beautiful and talented Vanessa Fox, who I would gladly drinkbait – Critique of SEOmoz SEO Quiz
• The very opinionated Michael Martinez – SEO Visibility

The quiz has created a bit of a buzz. Largely around people touting personal best scores or contesting the accuracy of specific questions. It is a fun bit of linkbait and not worth some of the harsher criticism that has been leveled against it.

One of the best responses come from Vanessa Fox, who points out that search engine optimization is a great deal of art. So even if the test had been exclusively technical questions it would still be very temporal and subject to the effects of time. Even the basic technical points are fluid — over time the search engines have to change the way they work to combat the people who try to game the system at any given time.

But why is this quiz so wrong? Too many of the questions go beyond the science and into the art of SEO, where things are fluid and changing and open to interpretation. The quiz is more accurately a test of how much of your personal SEO philosophy matches that of SEOmoz. Like a match.com compatibility test. You and SEOmoz, sitting in a tree. Romantically optimizing title tags.

So that brings me to Michael’s article on SEO visibility which he defines like this:

What do you think “SEO visibility” referrs to? Does it have to do with which SEO has the most popular blog or forum? Does it have to do with which SEO generates the most news media attention? Does it refer to any SEO who speaks at a conference?

So Rand, Vanessa and Michael are all people that have high SEO visibility in their own right — for popularity of their online writing, conference speaking, etc. So each can produce a strong response. There is a certain level where Vanessa and Rand both have an implied authoritative statement no matter how much they qualify themselves. In the past Rand has even taken content down from the SEOmoz blog to avoid tacit support of scandalous statements. Even with his willingness to reevaluate, for example revisiting the Ranking Factors article, many people jump at the chance to accuse him of overstating his expertise. Or, in the case of Patrick Sexton to jump to his defense.

Attaining high levels of popularity necessarily entails a lot of attention and more analysis than can, really, be supported most of us are only speaking our opinion or, at best, our observations the majority of the time. Either way we are probably only partially right at the time me say it — and almost certainly wrong if you revisit it later. Describing how to build the perfect website is like telling someone how to catch the perfect wave, you are either looking at the wave or the person you are talking to.

Either way good luck.

Tags:   SEO1 Comment

Related Posts