Rob Hammond's Blog

Rand posted some link bait on SEOmoz about how focusing on users as an SEO is a bad idea. Entitled “Terrible SEO Advice: Focus on Users, Not Engines,” the post is a one-sided rant against so-called SEOs that argue:

tactics which are engine-focused … can be ignored

I could be wrong, but surely no such people exist who call themselves SEOs? Jason Calacanis may argue this, but then again he’s not an SEO is he?

The post now includes an update saying “users should absolutely be the focus of your efforts.” Again, the title of the post boils down to “don’t focus on users” which doesn’t really add up as far as I can see. The power that SEOmoz now holds over the beginner-intermediate market of SEO information puts them in a de facto position of responsibility in not spreading misunderstanding and misinformation through irresponsibly titled and poorly argued blog posts such as this, which present opinion as fact.

Forgetting the largely pointless and opinion-based graphs in this post, let’s examine the bullet points in detail (Danny also does a great job of this.) Rand argues that the following wouldn’t exist without SEO directed ’solely’ towards search engines:

• Title tags: We might still make them, but agonize over keyword usage and positioning, uniqueness and flow? I doubt it.
  Even without search engines, page titles are important in specifying a page’s subject. They are what’s shown in the title bar in a browser, and are the default text for bookmarks in the browser and in social media services such as delicious.
• Meta tags: Nope. No reason to even bother.
  By ‘tags’ are we talking about the meta desciption tag? Yes, the description meta tag is one of the few HTML elements pretty much only used by search engines, and I for one wouldn’t be very sorry to see them go. Without search engines, maybe the meta keywords tag would actually have some semantic value through not being abused so much.
• XML Sitemaps: I’m pretty sure no human has ever visited this file in an attempt to sort out the pages on your site.
  True, but I’ve never seen any benefit of XML site maps that couldn’t have been fixed by a decent website architecture from the outset.
• Webmaster Tools Registration: Without engines, there wouldn’t be any.
  Webmaster tools have been built solely for search engines, yes. However, if the update on this post holds true, nobody’s proposing a world without search engines. Even if there was such a world, we’d still have web analytics to measure a website’s performance (and probably wouldn’t be strangled by Google’s web analytics monopoly to boot.)
• Keyword Research: I think this practice would be more like advertising copy – think Mad Men.
  Surely we’re focusing on users when we’re doing research on what keywords users use when searching? What is advertising copy if not focused towards the consumer?
  
• Keyword Targeting: Why worry about keyword placement for anything other than conversion rate optimization?
  What’s wrong with conversion rate optimization? Surely with the broad expertise we have as professional SEOs we should be leading the market in conversion rate optimization?
• URL Canonicalization: No need – visitors are getting the content either way.
  How about when websites change and old bookmarks are broken? Index.asp becomes default.aspx and suddenly people can’t reach the website any more. People type in URLs without the ‘www’ and assume the website is down when it doesn’t resolve. I think that “cool URIs don’t change” by TBL stands true without the existence of search engines. In fact I don’t think it mentions search engines once.
• Accessible Link Structures: So long as you’re not worried about the >2% of visitors who can’t see Flash, go ahead and build rich applications to your heart’s content.
  Presumably that was meant to be less than 2%? What about disabled users, not to mention the DDA here in the UK which means that you can be taken to court for inaccessible content? What about the increasing number of mobile web users?
  
• Robots.txt & Meta Robots: No engines, no reason to direct engines.
  Obviously this is taking the subject to the extreme. Going back to the blog’s update, surely no reputable SEO professional suggests that SEO doesn’t require at least some specific actions for search engines. It is called Search Engine Optimization after all. “Focus on users” is very different to “forget about search engines.”
• Link Building: Unless it’s specifically to draw in relevant traffic, why bother?
  Surely drawing in relevant traffic is the definition of white hat link building?
• Creating Vertical Search Feeds: That’s going to be time wasted.
  See robots.txt above.
• Information Architecture: While there’s good reasons to do some of this for users, a significant portion of the accessibility and link hierarchy arguments are made moot.
  Really? You’re going to tell a librarian that if they put German history books in World > Europe > Mainland > Germany > History is more efficient and useful for their visitors than History > Germany? You’re saying that a library without signs (links) is an easy place to navigate? How are accessibility arguments made moot by lack of search engines? Have we completely forgotten about disabled users??
• Redirection: Without engines, we can use whatever method is convenient – javascript, meta refresh, 302 - it makes little difference to the user.
  Yes to a point. Maintaining multitudes of pages with javascript and meta refreshes over time will likely result in a pretty messy site architecture and may even affect server performance. What about users with Javascript disabled?
• Rel=”Nofollow”: Internally or externally, it becomes a pointless attribute.
  Isn’t it largely pointless anyway beyond the tyranny of Google
  

Forward-looking SEOs should be repositioning themselves as competitive webmasters, and looking at accessibility, usability, conversion optimization and ambient findability (for a start) as an integral part of the future of the industry. Anything like this post that’s backwards looking, implicitly stating that SEOs should be confined to only focusing on the narrow range of things that only relate to search engines (despite our wide range of webmastering skills), is damaging, and gives the engines themselves too much power over our destinies.

Comments welcome…

So there’s been a lot of talk about .com domains appearing in Google UK results over on Matt Cutts’ blog recently. Personally I’ve definitely noticed some very poor results from Google UK over the last few months, quite often seeing .au, .nz, .ca, quite a lot of irrelevant results from Indian .org and .com domains, and even .gov.jm (Jamaican) results.

Something seems to be scarily wrong with Google’s local algorithms, at least for the UK – Matt’s assurances that this is a .com boost or an unrelated experiment simply don’t wash as far as I can see. So much so that even Google reports a problem with Google UK…

The chart below shows Google Trends search data from searches originating in the UK, for searches including the keyword [uk]. This is commonly appended to searches when users don’t find what they’re looking for on the first try – for example [car rental uk]. People may even do this more often than clicking the “results from the UK” radio button.

It seems pretty clear that at some point in late March, something happened that caused searches including the term ‘uk’ to rise sharply, and this is backed up by the more detailed data at Google Insights. Not having noticed much jingoism in the last 6 months or so, I can’t think of much else that might have caused this – especially since seaches have been declining steeply for the past 5 years.

So is Google’s own data revealing a flaw in their algorithm or what?