Why “16 SEO tips” are just fool’s gold
I stumbled upon these 16 SEO tips on Yaro Starak’s blog yesterday. He reported a forum thread where Darryl Peddle, who claimed - legitimately - employment at Yahoo, gave some tips about SEO, add some comments (Maki added some). The “Yahoo” stamp on the Peddle post made it look valuable, but I became suspicious reading them.
Some well known tips about registering a domain for more than one year, avoiding dashes in url, link neighborhood and fresh content ? Sure. Felt like I was back in 2003. It sounds like good advice, but where is the gold supposedly hidden ?
Could Darryl Peddle be jealous of Matt Cutts and his aura ? Not that the Google insider ever revealed more than good SEO study could show, but he (Cutts) somehow managed to build the buzz about a vacant blog and a supposed knowledge about Google’s algorithms while being just a good spam hunter and an average blogger.
I strongly suspect that Darryl Peddle is not even a spam hunter for Yahoo, but just a good SEO guy. And there is an abyss between the SEO job and the Search job.
There is brilliant guys in both SEO and Search Engine fields. But, while SEO have to be better than average with reverse engineering, a very confident feeling about trends and some years of practice, Search Engineers are more like mathematicians, or semantic specialists, with a good view of how what a regular user is supposed to find useful. For them, the regular John Doe is their end customer, while SEOs have no one to convince but the search engine itself.
That being said, Darryl Peddle’s hints looks very like SEO tips and not like something a search engineer could bring off his hat (do search engineers wear hats, by the way ?).
So, don’t be fooled by the “Yahoo” stamp on the hints given by Darryl Peddle. These are no more valuable than any hint that a good SEO won’t give you - they know better. And, while he does works for Yahoo - and may be a good SEO, I’ll bet my grey hat he’s not been ever near an engineer from Yahoo Search.
2 commentaires
Darryl :
Hey there,
This is Darryl. And its been interesting to see how a singlep ost has generated some interesting conversation.
So.. i think its a good idea that i provide the context to Yaro’s recent post.
The post came from an internal forum where a non SEO entrepreneur was concerned that his google adwords campaign would somehow reduce his rank in yahoo…which of course.. is somewhat absurd and rightfully needed to be clarified.
This person clearly needed some basic SEO guidance and to understand how the search engines function.
I gave permission to Yaro to use the private post in his blog because the post was (and is) a general guideline on how to build a quality site with both the user and search engines in mind. It is SEO 101 for the new entrepreneur. Plain and simple…. nothing “insiderish” about it .. sorry
As for specifics, such as domain registration, pr announcements and related tips, again comes down to some common sense and best practices.
If you throw up a spammy dhased domain registered for one year and put out a free press release with no substance, quality or merit… then expect to receive the same low quality back from users (and engines).
In the end… you can apply the 16 tips ..and the hundreds of others that great SEOs provide on a frequent basis. The takeaway here… is sinply this… if you build something… build it right… and build it in a way that helps your audiience.
Commenté le 13/03/07 à 14:49» SEO ou SE ? Ingénieurs Recherche versus Référenceurs - Malaiac attack :
[...] et de ceux qui clament les connaitre . Le sujet est sensible, et rejoint mon post (en anglais) Why “16 SEO tips” are just fool’s gold, sur les supposés tuyaux fournis par un “Yahoo” sur un forum [...]
pingbacké le 20/03/07 à 04:33