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by franze 4862 days ago
thx matt and the google search team for doing this. it's nothing new for technically inclined people, but every little bit helps. helps for what? teaching people to worry about the right aspects of search and the impact on their business, instead of worrying about bullshitphrases that were planted in their head by a SEO agency key account or a blogpost from 2008. so well yes, thx for doing this. i will send it to my clients (and tell them to click on the bubbles, even though they don't look clickable)

now an anecdote (because i feel like telling one): this week started for me with an interview that finally got published http://werbeplanung.at/news/marketing/2013/02/interview-mit-... (it's german) in that interview i claimed that

* 80% of everything written about SEO and Google is bullshit

* that all the rumors, tipps and trends are actually hurting business

* that we should treat SEO as a numbers based craft of constant optimizations

* instead of the esoteric bullshit art it is currently

* and, if search traffic is important for the success of a business, they must rid themselves of external (agency) dependencies and develop internal structures

nothing to far fetched i think. everybody knows the SEO vertical is full of bullshit, i just took some time to estimate a number (based on a random sample of collected blogposts (that at least one person tweeted about))

yeah, i got a lot of angry emails, skype messages, linkedin messages, xing messages after the interview was published.

most of them mentioned at least one of these words

  * pagerank
  * whitehat
  * blackhat
  * grayhat
  * linkjuice
  * panda
  * pinguin ...
so yeah, thx google for educating people about search. keep up the good work.
2 comments

Your 80% is based on what exactly? A tiny sample size. Please if you don't have solid data don't quote percentages it just encourages people to spread the number like it's a fact, which it isn't.

If you read the right sources a majority of seo advice is correct.

Www.seomoz.org http://static.googleusercontent.com/external_content/untrust... Www.inbound.org (homepage stuff that has been voted up.)

>> If you read the right sources a majority of seo advice is correct.

That's a contradiction. If you have to read the right sources, then by definition the majority of advice is not correct.

Why does it mean the majority of advice is not correct? That is a myth.
Because the majority of advice is coming from the _wrong_ sources
You say majority like its fact. Its not.

Here is a list the top 100 seo blogs, find the BS in there. www.branded3.com/seo-blogs/

  "80 Prozent von allem, was über SEO geschrieben wird, ist Bullshit"
some things just cross the language boundaries.