People are totally clueless about SEO

I see it all the time on the forums. People popping up with rather stupid SEO questions. What is my PageRank? How do I increase my PageRank? Why won’t anyone trade links with me? Hello??? Have you not read anything about SEO in the past year???

The way I see it, there are two subsets of people here: the designer/developer types who don’t even care enough to ask questions about SEO, and the average webmaster types who for some reason have seriously inaccurate ideas about SEO.

Lets start with the first group. Why don’t designers and developers seem to care about SEO? Think about it. You’re building a web site, shouldn’t you be interested in how people are going to find it? But they aren’t. And that was me for a long time too. I didn’t build commercial sites so I just didn’t concern myself with the topic at all. And yet it is so very important.

True, if you build a nice, people-friendly site you’ve got a lot going for you, but I see a lot of sites from designers who don’t seem to know what to do to make their pages more search-engine friendly. They might have text in images, for example, or designs with very little text at all. Or bad page titles and no headings. But I won’t go on too much about this because I already sort of addressed it in my post about the separation between designers and marketers.

So lets go on to the second group. For some reason, there seems to be a big disconnect between current expert SEO knowledge and what the average webmaster actually believes. As I mentioned, a lot of them still think that page rank really matters, despite the fact that most experts would say that it doesn’t (well, maybe a little bit, but not for what people think it does). Or they talk about exchanging links or other ways to manipulate link value. Or, if you want one-way links, how about submitting to a ton of web directories? Riiiiigggggghhhhhhtttt…….

Have they not read anything recently? Do they not check the dates on SEO articles they do read? Or is it because there is still a lot of bad SEO information being circulated? SEOmoz wrote recently about the amount of bad SEO advice in the news. I’m sure I’ve seen some more bad articles floating around lately but I can’t seem to find them right now.

We also get a lot of people posting to the forum with the obvious intent of getting their signature links crawled. Right, and that’s really going to get you somewhere! Do they not check their linkbacks? Obviously not. In some cases, forum signatures are their only SE strategy. We recently added a couple of new policies to prevent people from doing this, including a vBulletin plugin that prevents signatures from being shown on shorter posts. We noticed a drop in post counts after that. There are many good reasons to have signature links, but posting pointless crap just so the SE’s will crawl them is not one of them (and it’s really just annoying to forum admins, as you can probably tell!).

So, I think there is a need for more credible, accurate SEO information in “regular webmaster” land. It seems that many of them aren’t seeking out the quality blogs and are often relying on outdated and/or low quality information. Unfortunatley, I don’t consider myself qualified to contribute to that. I hope some of the experts will consider contributing content to more mainstream webmaster sites. The Google webmaster guidelines should be require dreading for anyone who does web development, and SEOmoz has a great beginner’s guide. Notice that they spend about 3 paragraphs on PageRank.

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