This past week I gave the keynote presentation at Searchfest in Portland and I hit on a few themes that seemed to resonate with the audience, and with Rand. So I wanted to share them here. It’s what I have been passionate about trumpeting for some time now. And it’s that the "Good Guys" of SEO, the people who do the things like building great content and community are being made into two faced liars every day by Google. Every day we tell our clients to build good content and Google will reward them we know that it’s a white lie most times, because the other side of that coin is and ALSO build anchor text links so you can actually rank well, because community building is not enough of a factor yet.
Just examine for a second this backlink profile to a sub page for a competitor to one of our clients:
What does a backlink profile like that say to you?
I think the above image from one of my slides illustrates this best...I showed how a client of mine who is getting killed by a website who is just targeting tons of anchor text only links on GARBAGE sites and is KILLING my client in the rankings. This is a truth we are all used to by this point that is nothing new. But let’s take a look at Google's rules. Go to that URL and do a Control F for the word "link" - you will find three instances. None of them talk about link building as a tactic to help you rank better, just to be leery of having to link to an SEO company. While that is a good tip, there is not one tip that talks about building links as important, HUH?
A little more searching and I found this resource.
Notice here Google says: The quantity, quality, and relevance of links count towards your rating.
GREAT! They've admitted that the number of links, the quality of links, and relevance count - sweet!
But if you look at that screen grab above, do you see relevance, do you see quality? I don't, I see quantity and anchor text.
Later on Google says:
The best way to get other sites to create relevant links to yours is to create unique, relevant content that can quickly gain popularity in the Internet community. The more useful content you have, the greater the chances someone else will find that content valuable to their readers and link to it.
Hmmm, let's see how this plays out. But before we do, do me a favor:
Take five seconds to think of the SEO companies that you respect most, whom you consider to be constantly creating unique relevant content in this industry and whom you think of as thought leaders, and participants in the community.
5.....4...3....2...1..
Ok, now go type in SEO company, SEO consultant, or SEO agency on Google (unpersonalized) and report back on whether or not you saw one of those companies / consultants / agencies you hold in high regard anywhere in the top 10.
Let's take three companies with active blogs, lots of social engagement, and tons of high quality links and compare them to sites in the top 15. The companies I picked were SEOGadget, Distilled, and SEER Interactive (us) all come to mind VERY quickly. I am not mentioning by names of the companies I picked who where ranking top 15, but let's examine some differences
Looking at our site stats according to SEOmoz
- SEOGadget has over 50 pages with 10 or more linking root domains
- Distilled has over 100 pages with 10 or more linking root domains
- SEER has over 30 pages with 10 or more linking root domains (we got some work to do!)
The "other guys" never had more than two, yet they are killing us on the rankings.
I knew putting this data in a chart form would illustrate this best:
First I looked at RSS subscribers, by going to Google Reader and searching for their blogs like this:
Wow that description sucks, I gotta work on that...anyway...
Half-Truth #1 - If people subscribe to my blog, that will show Google that I am writing good content and people want it, and that should help me rank, right?
Reality: Not even close pal. The four mystery SEO companies have seven subscribers to their blog combined.
Half-Truth #2 - If I engage with people on Twitter and social channels - that will show Google that I am engaging my audience, and I'll be rewarded with rankings, right?
Reality: Nope. Connecting with people on social can get you links in many ways but if you did that well and didn't get anchor text, you'd probably fail.
Half-Truth #3 - If I engage with people on Google+ and get added to circles, Google can DEFINITELY see that - that will show Google that I am engaging my audience, and I'll be rewarded with rankings, right?
Lastly, I looked at Google Circles (obviously you can buy Google accounts to add you to circles, but I am hoping Google can see more engagement not just counts), here is what I got:
Reality: Not yet. But I sure hope it comes.
What message does this send to SEO providers?
OK Big G - We are all playing by your rules, building community, working our tails off on social, and getting our butts kicked, why are you recommending I tell clients to do those things if they aren't helping us?
It's sad to think that if I wanted to rank well for keywords in my industry, writing this post, getting comments on it, and engaging in the community by answering questions counts LESS to help us rank well for targeted competitive keywords than me getting 20 anchor text links on a tag page? A freakin tag page! So when I spend time doing the HARD work, I get fewer rankings than those who take the lazy way out?
Is that really the message Google wants to send?
Think about the daily high wire act every one of us undertakes, too much anchor text – you win temporarily and risk getting banned too little you risk your reputation as an SEO company and are likely to be branded a snake oil salesman.
But let's also think in the same way we consult with clients, we tell our clients every day that people "Google things" and when they perform searches, they make sometimes make purchasing decisions, based on those searches, right?
So when people search Google for "SEO company" and they find this smut outranking the goog guys of SEO...Google is perpetuating the cycle they want to end.
They are "letting" the bad guys rank, which only gets them more clients, and pollutes more of the web with crappy sites that have over aggressively linked. Let's also act like noobs for a second - if a client is picking between SEO Gadget or Outspoken Media and one of the companies who ranks on page 1, then guess what they might say to Richard or Rhea? The prospective clients may say that they don't have the social proof, which would be true. It's logical to say, well Google MUST like what company X is doing because why else would they reward them with such high rankings?
People don't think about "algorithmic weights" and "over optimization" they believe in what they can see, and what they SEE is that the company ranking #1 or #2 has the social proof that maybe SEER or Distilled does not when it comes to the rankings.
C'mon Google! You are perpetuating the problem.
REAL SEOs wish that we NEVER had to worry about anchor text, we are the people who care about this industry and want to do the GOOD work. The real question is why does Google make us into liars everyday in the eyes of our potential clients? If we follow Google's rules to a T, we will likely never get the rankings, and if we don't get the rankings, we are branded as snake oil salesman.
Personally I can't wait for Google+ to start impacting results more. I want to see our TRUE industry leaders rankings to FINALLY be rewarded by our hard work in the community and I bet a LOT of others are with me!
If you are saying Wil help me get anchor text in a better way, then I want to give you a few ideas on how to get your targeted anchor text:
- Include the keyword in your domain name, so consider that when registering domains or microsites
- Include the keywords in your digital assets, so whether it is a scholarship or a whitepaper, just the "suggestion" of titling a scholarship or whitepaper with your target keywords will help
- Link internally with targeted anchor text in blog posts, when people copy your posts or scrape them, they will pull in your anchor text and you'll have a chance to get links
Hoping the good guys get rewarded soon!! Or we'll all be selling snake oil!
Great post, Wil. Part of the issue that you've identified is the overabundant trust that SEOs are placing in "social-signals-as-ranking-factors" without any reproducible testing. I don't think Google's algorithm has changed as much as some have been led to believe, as evidenced by the kind of backlink profiles that are still producing high rankings.
SEO's like to sell social signals as ranking factors because social media marketing is an easy product to deliver while collecting good profit margins.
The fact that it doesn't work... doesn't seem to bother those people.
The "good guys" in the SEO business aren't the people who parrot Google's lies to a wider audience; the "good guys" in the SEO business are the guys who make their clients money.
Thank you! Every time I see one of these "white hat" SEO posts about how "the REAL SEOs" are using these signals and metrics, I laugh, and get a bit frustrated.
The REAL SEOs are the ones ranking their clients. Not by spamming or cloaking links, or redirection, or other methods, but by simply understanding that the game is weighed towards link building. Any "REAL SEO" that tells you otherwise, like the author of this post, is either willfully ignorant, or just doesn't understand the way the system works, and is therefore not a "real" SEO practioner. It's as simple as that.
Do what works; don't be unethical, but get your clients the positions they need!
I think Wil's point is that Google is telling usto do one thing, and rewarding something else. His admonishment is to them, that if they don't change this, they can expect more people to follow the anchor-text path.
Very tactfully and clearly stated! Wish I could have "liked" your comment more than once... because it deserves a 2-thumbs up for bringing readers back to the main point of this article.
When looking across our multiple client web analytics and comparing monthly data (SERPs, traffic and conversions) and assessing trends, we see conflicting anomalies - especially across differing industries. On one hand, we reflect on the client's SEO budget that may have held us back with some SEO efforts, but we also place various questions in the other hand:
1. What are their online competitors doing?
2. Has the economy impacted their industry?
3. Are newbie channels (Local, Mobile and Social) starting to weigh in on the SERPs?
4. How are Google's algorithm shifts affecting the mix?
While we can check out the competitive scene (#), the other factors are much more elusive to assess.
One last observation: While all of us seem to agree on the value of quality link-building, there's still so much more that can make a difference, such as writing and publishing original, relevant, user-valued articles, posts and blogs on other sites... and about 100 other things that can collectively differentiate ranking #20 versus #1 or #2 on Google for highly searched KW phrases. Hmmm? Instead of whining (poor me, Google lied), start working on the things you can impact more effectively. Geez, people! Get a life!
To say that Wil is ignorant is maybe too strong, don't you believe?
oh snap...now you went and did it. i really want to jump into this debate, but it's a weekly source of contention in my office so i'll just sit back and watch the fireworks from a safe distance. where's my popcorn?
Totally agree here. There is a ton of talk about how social influences rankings, but I think the talk is confused with proof that "social" directly influences rankings. As Scott said there is no proof that social affects SERPs, it's the community effect that influences links. Social links, tweets, and shares dont move the needle, rather sharing and talking about pages, products, and services gets people talking about it and therefore links are created. The actual link from social sites have nothing to do with it. Assuming you have a good social presence, social promotion will result in more people talking about your product and site and therefore linking to it from other domains. I think there is a great deal of confusion surrounding this topic in general.
I think it count for a certain time. Like old news doesnt matter and count less.
This is actually not true. Social links *do* move the needle. They have been confirmed as part of the algorythm by both Duane Forrester of Bing and a Google Search Engineer here at the DFW SEM meeting in November. Now, the degree to which they impact the movement is the debate, and I think you and I can both agree on "very little".
Totally agree with you, Cameron!
As an SEO marketing strategist, it's about helping my B2B clients use social media to communicate, contribute and build relationships with their customers. This results in brand awareness, building trust and presenting themselves as solutions providers (not hardcore, in-your-face salespeople).
I'm totally convinced of the value of quality Alt and Title tags for linking purposes (internal, outbound and inbound). But really, folks, this needs to be integrated into your other optimization tools... It's not a one-shot solution to top rankings! AND, not all social sites have link juice follow-through turned on. Same with blog sites.
RE: social media metrics. I tell them straight-up that the focus is not on magical social metrics. (I'm totally the opposite when it comes to website SEO metrics - BTWj.) In social media, their focus must be about being passionate about their products/services, talking to customers, being consistent and committed this for the long-term.
The majority of their B2B customers are people who want to do business with people they trust, which begins by listening, responding and connecting in real time. I'm there to help them optimize their content; interject attention-getting keywords and phrases; identify trends in the social channel(s); among other proactive support-type things.
B2B clients understand this "latent" selling because many of their existing customers were initially snagged through an on-going "decision-making process". These often evolve into long-term customer relationships. From my experience, professional social media channels are an excellent complement to the socially-inclined B2B bloggers, marketers, etc.
How would you respond to Rand's tests with Twitter, that showed improved rankings directly attributable to tweeted links?
Yeah dude, I agree, I say give me a remotely competitive keyword and how me someone absent of anchor text ranking well, it just doesn't happen. I wish it wasn't the case. I mean sure if you are a HUGE brand with PR behind ya its one thing, but if you are the other MILLION businesses, its tough.
Did you see my study (done from a different angle here: https://www.zdnet.com/blog/seo/are-you-placing-too-big-of-a-bet-on-social-medias-direct-impact-on-seo-rankings/3874)
I thought you had done a similar write-up recently, but didn't want to mention it and end up being mistaken. Thanks for posting that.
What I'm waiting for (because let's face it, I'm lazy) is the same kind of comparative weighting data we have for traditional on-page and off-page factors. I know a title tag is worth more than an H1, all things being equal. Where is the equivalent for social factors, e.g., network types, sizes, etc.?
Scott,
Until Google gets out of the "We're going to give disproportionate weight to G+ because that way we can force people to use it" business, I don't think we'll see such a weighting data set for a long time.
The fact that Google and Bing BOTH use social data is really a bad thing right now. Even though social as a factor is in its infancy, the reality is that at this point, as many people as there are using social, the pool of data is corrupt.
Here's an example - Site Z ultimately has the best content, the best products and the best offerings in the market. Except Size Z doesn't have a properly evolved social plan. Maybe they can't afford it, or maybe they don't know better yet. Either way, for all the people in the social sphere, nobody's talking about Site Z there because of it.
That factor alone means that relying on social signals is a flawed concept.
It's no different than the fact that Google actually relies on Chrome data to influence things. Seriously. Chrome. The browser has such a small tinly little fraction of just one sub-set of a geek based market share that it's bogus junk data to then extrapolate that "If Chrome users lean this way, then surely the rest of the world does".
Which goes back to the longer standing problem related to companies that rely on flawed data will always only do a lousy job of coming up with quality resuilts. It's true with all the ranking sites as well. Compete, Alexa... Seriously. Who uses Alexa? And how is that isolated and myopically narrow user base really going to reflect all of society?
No - even when social becomes a bigger factor, it's still going to be a flawed factor. Which means that as soon as X, Y and J become "the top three social signals to optimize for", the search engines will once again realize that's producing flawed results.
So they'll have to come up with yet another hack trick to figure it all out. Yet to get back to my point, we're probably still a couple years away from even seeing what X, Y and J are. And by the time we learn it, things will have changed even more, in ways we can't even comprehend.
It really is rocket science. And as far as Wil's post goes, his biggest point is one I totally agree with - Search engines have to learn how to stop the bullshit.
Personally, I think the latest "we stopped using a signal recently" buzz from Google has to do with anchor text. They're going for proximity more than ever - relevance page to page specific to topical focus. The better they can get at that, the sooner crap links will become worthless.
@Alan:
[quote]
Seriously. Chrome. The browser has such a small tinly little fraction of just one sub-set of a geek based market share that it's bogus junk data
[/quote]
Alan, you cannot be serious.... Chrome browser has gained > 20 % market share in 2012. Most of my co-workers use Chrome right now. Many of my website visitors use Chrome. And it will only grow more. By no means it is "tiny little fraction" of "bogus junk data". You should really open up to 2012 realities.
Are you saying that 20% of the internet users (although the most tech savvy obviously) - are you saying that that is not big enough data sample to make a conclusion about site quality based on usage stats obtained through Chrome?
In my opinion, this is the best data sample one can ever wish... Try to fool that huge usage sample provided by tens of millions Chrome users. That is much harder to fool compered to spreading the spammy links in blog comments etc.
It is in fact their BEST BET to fight the spam and evaluate SERPS quality ... The real usage stats from millions of users.
Besides from evaluating the quality of sites already ranking at the top 10, it could also help propogate hidden gems otherwise undiscovered and lost somewhere in the top 50 or so. Consider the following scenario.
The Google could have reserved the last search result spot on the page 1 (i.e. the SERP #10) for testing and keep on rotating the SERPS from #11 to say #50 and TEMPORARY placing them at the spot #10 and then measure the click through and time spent on that site being tested. Imagine them doing this and suddenly they would find a GEM at the spot #29 that (when placed TEMPORARY at the first page at #10) would get above the normal click through rate and would get a lot of reading time, so the Google would know they have to move it UP from #27. If no rotation, it would never be discovered until people would somehow start linking / tweetting about it etc.
Of course, for the sites already ranking at the top 10, if anyone is getting below the normal click through rate or below the normal reading time, then obviously that particular SERP is not satisfying to the users and could be pushed down.
In fact, I beleive that the ability to measure site usage stats was one of the sole reasons for Chrome existance. Well, together with better tracking of the useres between various sites of course.
So in my opinion Chrome usage stats will become a MAJOR factor in determinig the site quality and relevance to particular search query. And it will happen in 2012.
You will NOT need to tweet or link to the quality site. You just need to naturally use Chrome browser, and it will tell the Google everything they need to know.
OKay I can gladly retract the most inflamatory words related to market share. I will not, however, step back from my perspective. 20% share. Except even you admit it's a narrow band user type that likely surfs with Chrome. By that admission alone, it validates the perspective that I hold - 20% of the market should not have the ability to directly influence the experience the other 80% have. It's just not a valid basis for making decisions that impacts such a large share of the market.
Alan, just wanted to point out that socialogists are able to predict political election results within 1% accuracy based on surveys of just 2,000 people out of 10 million voters. That is like 0.02 % (1 / 50 part of 1%).
So in statistics, 20% is a HUGE HUGE almost unknown of sample and trust me Google will get all they need to know from the sampe of 20% searchers. Also it worth nothing that my site sees not 20% but 35% visitors using Chrome, and there are estimates that Chrome market share could reach as far as 50% by the end of 2012 (I personally think it would stick around 30%)
alex12, I cheked your profile and you are a technogeek, and an SEO who uses certain tools, which is why you and your fellow workers are using Chrome.
In the real world, it is less used.
If you think back about 10 years, everyone hated Microsoft because they pushed people around, set their own standards and were very opaque. Google is doing a brilliant job of creating their own enemies, who will never use their browser.
My site metrics show that Chrome browser users have the attention span of a flea, so I'd hate to see our search world determined by a statistically significant, small group of pimply faced ADHD boys from California, New York, Texas and Florida.
Lies, damned lies and statistics?
Not surprisingly, it was the same white hat brigade that's highlighted in this post that were the biggest and most vocal proponents of social signals.
That's actually a sentiment that I referenced in my latest blog. This talk about social signals was just rhetoric to strong arm webmasters that were hit by Panda to use Google's social network. https://www.entrepreneurialreflexions.com/2012/02/panda-demand-for-google-social-network.html
My favorite SEO quote of all times is from 2005 Wired magazine by Greg Boser - "Spam is any site that ranks higher than mine." https://www.wired.com/culture/lifestyle/news/2005/03/66893?currentPage=all
I Think game recognizes game, when someone outranks me and its good SEO, I can respect tehir hustle. I did in in my latest video where I was talking about bodybuilding.com kicking my clients butt, just so happens a guy from bodybuilding.com was there and I told him, congrats! He was putting in the extra hard work my client wouldn't.
There's another post for you, encouraging clients to put in the extra hard work (or cash) that their competitors are investing in... :)
That was at Affiliate Summit East....Great Keynote!!!!!
I used to work in-house for a niche ecom store -- our owner used to always complain about Amazon always beating us in the rankings saying how spammy their product pages were
SEOmoz finally getting in tune with reality.
A "good guy" is someone who takes their clients money and gets them the best rankings possible.
A "bad guy" is someone who just regurgitates all the crap that comes out of Google without thinking about the responsibility they have to their clients or the people who are reading their blogs.
Sure it's frustrating but that is the game.
But to the OP : you don't think Facebook, Twitter and RSS aren't just as easy to game as link building? They're way easier.
Exactly, a good guy can see Google's true intentions and not just blindly follow along.
Thanks, Wil - this really struck a chord with me. I recently met an acquaintance for lunch because he wanted to get into SEO consulting and wanted my advice, and when we met up he reeled off a list of techniques from link buying to content spinning to article submission and blog comment spam, all of which he was using for his clients. The worst part was that I couldn't dissuade him from these techniques (not even by saying "you're ruining the internet!") because they were getting him results. Le sigh.
Hey Ruth, thank you for dropping by the fun! You are (ofcourse) completely dead on. The issue is what it says to businesses, its a risk to do this even though it works, but businesses are hurting, a lot arent thinking long term (and given the economy, I don't blame them) - so people like you and I speaking to doing the hard work and building value to protect rankings for the long haul will not resonate most times, they have businesses to run and I respect that.
I really do hope Google gets their act together this year. My main job is on an ecommerce website and in general we rank fairly well for products, but just some of the keywords you know equate into sales are so full of companies with backlink spam. I haven't seen any of our competitors do an ounce of SEO to improve their rankings, if you see a jump it's always backlinks spam.
I'm honestly having the same conversation with my boss every 3 months or so trying to comfort him we are making the right choice not going that route.
I find google as a whole company is really broken right now. Not doing their part but trying to play god. We've had to stop using Google Adwords because they keep adding products we carry. We are in the sports supplement field and recently Google has informed us the amino acid Glutamine is in the same category as steroids, any one who even knows what Glutamine is realizes it's natural occruing and you can get it from eating certain foods. I'm waiting for them to classify Vitamin B as a narcotic and condoms as tools of murder.
...and it would be nice if they provided a complete list of the products they have issues with instead of playing the "and here's another hoop to jump through" game :(
I have a client with the same problem
Sha
Moondog, can I call you that? LOL!
This is exactly the problem!!! All of us who are trying our best to follow the rules have little social proof to take to our bosses / clients that says, hey look see how these guys have NO anchor text links and by doing social well are ranking well. Does anyone have an example of that in a remotely competitive industry?
That strikes a chord with me Moondog. I lost a PPC client over the exact same policy. Absolutely ridiculous that Google is defining ethics.
1st - Why would you listen to ANYTHING Cutts or Google says about SEO? It's like asking the police how to properly sell drugs. They don't want people to rank or know how to rank so what kind of reasoning is behind listening to their "SEO tips"?
2nd - What exactly is "good guys" in SEO? Is that code speak for the guys who don't actually rank for terms or build backlinks?
3rd - Everyone knows building "quality content" doesn't pay off 9 times out of 10, yet people still do it. Why? Because Matt Cutts said so? You can clearly see that backlinks, no matter the source, is what works. So why then do you not do it? Do you not owe it to your clients to do it? What's the worst that will happen? Google will discount some of those links? Oh noes.
"It's like asking the Police how to sell drugs"
Hahaha. Great analogy, although slightly not accurate.
Speaking of that, we could have a real ethical discussion regarding SERPs. Consider what elements of these queries are "good" or "bad":
Abusing drugs is bad. It's a bad habit, and maybe you can argue that it's bad always. OK. I can understand the argument that it's not actually a legal issue, but certainly it's a medical and family issue/burden. This seems to invoke ethical arguments. But if selling drugs is ethically bad (whether it's legal or not), is it Google's ethical responsibility to not return results for this query, or are ethics outside of Google's jurisdiction?
I would argue that Google neither defines ethics or has any responsiblity to determine what our ethics are. I realize the second argument is philosophical (and maybe political) so maybe not relevant to the discussion or even this site. My point is that Google is neither the law nor a determiner of ethical rules. It's also that Google can do whatever they want, and that's OK too.
First, let me say that on the whole I agree with the frustration expressed by Wil Reynolds regarding the somewhat baffling is simplicity with which some sites seem able to manipulate search rankings to their favor. I by no means want to sound as if I endorse these methods, but I can't come to the conclusion that Distilled or SEER or even my company Virante should rank for these terms. The companies Wil lists are the Benzes and Bentleys of the SEO world. Our companies are useless to the droves of small and medium sized businesses who are looking for basic SEO assistance, which is largely the reason why I don't want Virante to rank for these terms. What these SMBs need are experts in low-competition SEO who, by their very nature, are probably not experts in high-competition terms like SEO Company. Those that are experts no longer need to attract clients who search for things like SEO company. This phenomenon is likely not entity Google's fault.
Yes, I completely agree in regards to SMB. Forget trying to take on the big boys directly on search terms they have bought/rigged for themselves. Instead, SMBs should take a common search term and add one or two (at the most) differentiating terms and build the campaign around that.
Good point Russ. Not that it's completely wrong, but the assumption that those resuts are "bad" isn't necessarily correct. Also, the tool itself is only telling on links, and even then only those in the OSE index. Does Google use Open Site Explorer for it's link valuing? I didn't remember reading that in their guidelines.
More importantly, even if OSE were very very close to Google's evaluation tools, we can assume that even "caught" bad links simply don't contribute much towards your ranking. On the other hand, it's quite a leap to assume that you are going to be penalized for having low quality links. Someone like Russ can probably give a better answer on when those penalties might actually be applied, but it only makes sense that Google would be conservative about penalizing negative links in profiles vs rewarding good links. The opposite approach would encourage gamers to spam their competitors with negative links. Links are somewhat outside of the average webmaster's direct control, and unwanted links are spam (by definition). For ranking purposes there is no reason to distinguish between spam links and low quality links, if you just don't pass much value through them. The only purpose for that is to detect gaming attempts, which it seems like would be part of a totally separate analysis.
That all said, exact anchor text linking works way too well, and is certainly not a "natural" behavior.
"Personally I can't wait for Google+ to start impacting results more. I want to see our TRUE industry leadersrankings to FINALLY be rewarded by our hard work in the community and I bet a LOT of others are with me!"
have you seen how cheap G+ Likes are on the blackhat forums? 2000 for $10. So I am not sure how G+ is going to help the situation. In the end the blackhatters will manipulate anything and everything, even G+. While google relies on it's "all powerful" algorythm and no real human input, the gaming will continue. Google is a big group of smart people but the blackhat community is an exponentially bigger group of smart people.
This is a great article, and great point. Funny, I have a client with the exact same issue and I could honestly post nearly the exact same backlink report...all spam, paid-for links that are of no quality and you know the rest. They have a huge budget, buy literally hundreds of links every single month for about the last 5 months, and own quite a few of their own sites for linking purposes. It's insanely frustrating to build quality links with great content doing white hat seo while your competition is beating you with black hat techniques.
With that said, you have to stay the course, which is why I love SEOMoz....always great white hat SEO techniques. And I can say that while doing the 'right thing' my client has been slowly moving up the rankings and is finally about to get on that first page. It takes longer, and takes far more work, but I still believe that white hat is the only way to go and will pay of in the end.
You know, I couldn't be a bigger fan of Wil's but I think this post misses the mark high and wide
As much as we want to rail against the 'crapola' tactics that drive linking, I think we over-estimate our own moral superiority. To use an indelicate saying, it's like a bunch of call girls criticizing the prostitutes down on the street
Do spammy links have too much impact on rankings? Probably.
Will using social signals and twitter engagement as quality indicators improve the matter? Absolutely not. Think of it - should Nike's or Foot Locker's rankings for [sneakers] hang on how much they interact with people on Google+, or how many blog posts they publish? Of course it shouldn't.
Does that mean you banish your inner spammer and spin articles to your heart's content? No, but we need to get out of this good/bad dichotomy that doesn't do anyone any good.
I agree, I love Wills post but I downloaded the backlinks to his site from open site explorer. The top 5 or 6 anchor text used to the site are VERY keyword rich. They do use their brand a lot but its not like they are not using keyword rich anchor text just like everoyone else. Just look at their backlinks you can tell exactly which keywords they want to rank for. Google needs to improve for sure though.
These are counts from open site explorer (not root domains)
search engine optimization company 156 seo company 435 seo services 117 seo consultant 80
Hey dude, I like our backlink profile: https://www.opensiteexplorer.org/links?page=1&site=www.seerinteractive.com&sort=page_authority&filter=&source=external&target=page&group=1
Lost of quality sites on the first page. But I am SOOO glad you broguht this up.
Let me tell you, when I first started SEER, no one would work with us and no one would let me speak or guest blog. I had attended SES's since 99, I had worked on some of the biggest sites out there, but I couldn't get a speaking gig. So how was I to get the word out about SEER? I optimized our site (ofourse). I wanted to be able to stand in front of small businesses like Rizzieri Hair Salon or Agilecat PR and say, SEER is NOT snake oil, look here's the proof that we rank #1 for Philadelphia SEO.
That helped us to get clients indeed. It was social proof. It helped us close deals. As we closed deals, I could afford plane tickets. So that allowed me to buy flights to conferences, and since none of the search conferneces would let me speak I started speaking at the affiliate summit instead of an SEO conference. They then allowed us to upload videos to our youtube channel and 3-4 years later I was able to start speaking at confernces, I was able to guest blog, etc etc - there was video (social proof) that I was a decent speaker and the data too (that the Aff Summit saw) showed that people reacted well to my style.
But how was I going to rank for Philadelphia SEO keywords back in 2005? Blogs? Twitter? Facebook? NOPE. I needed anchor text links, so I got them.
Fast forward to today, do we need to rank well any more to prove our worth and what we can do. NOPE? Why? Because now people know about us. Bt without building my company's rakings early on and having that social proof I might not be here today.
Let me say one more thing...we re-launched our site and our rankings tanked a bit, and guess what its not a big deal, why? Because we have more of a reputation, and that is TRULY the value of SEO. Helping great ideas and great companies to be found. But if those companies are truly great, at some time in the future they will take such great care of their clients (often attained through SEO) that next time that clients needs that service they will NOT go to google (unless they type in a branded query, which is OK). Think about it, when I buy shoes I go direct to zappos, but at some point back in the day I found them through a search. That is the value of using SEO to get exposure, but then doing such a great job that you no longer need it as much (at least in consulting businesses like mine).
And unfortunately for many of us to get the chance to get ideas and companies found, begins with a base layer of anchor text links, and I (like you) are hoping someday that is not the case.
I disagree a bit, I want every one of our tactics to be something that helps marketing, when we get anchor text links, there is NO marketing value for many of the anchor text links. I do agree 100% that the good guy / bad guy approach migh not be the best naming system. I just want to someday be able to say to a client (with confidence) that yes, if you can do great marketing, build community, and build great content / digital assets you will have just as much of an opportunity to compete with the hardcore link builders who just use text. I'm fine with anchor text working, I just wish that the harder / more time consuming tasks had just as strong a chance of ranking today.
Thanks!
Great answer
I totally dig that you want to tell a client that "if you can do great marketing, build community, and build great content / digital assets you will have just as much of an opportunity to compete with the hardcore link builders who just use text."
My question would be, why the desire to say that to a client?
In my experience, most of the sites building great content are already being rewarded in the SERPs. As for the great marketing and community building, how is that any better as a ranking signal than anchor text links? On some level, doesn't it come down to personal preference?
Excellent insights as always, Wil. Appreciate it. I totally agree, so the question I have is - we know Google has the resources, brains, and technology to fix these problems and truly provide a fantastic user experience, but what exactly is their motive for not doing so? Money and power?
I actually think its harder than it appears to us, seriously. If it's that logical to me...the PhD's have to know whats up. It must just be that hard, which is shocking but probably true.
^As an SEO who's also a programmer, I agree with this completely. It can't be remotely easy to create a set of rules that works for everyone, despite a huge, almost universal interest in gaming that system. It's honestly nothing short of incredible that it works as well as it does. Search engines will continue to get more sophisticated in their ranking methods; but you've got to really question what the ROI actually is in doing that (compared to advancing products like AdWords/AdSense, where I'd say their place as a monopoly/ologopoly isn't necessarily so firm).
It's pity but it's the bitter truth... Sometimes Google makes me cry.
Priorities...
organic searches are going deeper in the Serps for most commercial queries, pushed down by Adwords, Google verticals properties, Google+ inserts...
And the tragic is that not techie people are fine with it and don't feel our concerns... at least if are true the feedback pools about the satisfaction levels of the users of Google.
I get so FRECKLING irritated when I see these scummy little sites with garbage links hogging search real estate that I'm working hard to acquire.
Why do people do it... obviously because IT STILL WORKS. "Oh don't worry those people are only thinking about short term gains". That's what i hear all the time... but please enlighten me... when will the SHORT TERM finally finish?
The majority of us want to be ethical and do good by our clients but when you see this junk many must think... I need to give it a try to see if it works. Personally I have never and will never get into such tactics but I have no doubt more and more people are thinking about doing it DAILY!
I checked out a guy through a linkedin group we share... he looked respectable... contributes a lot... so I took a look at his portfolio. OMFG-ROFPTG (Rolling on the floor PUNCHING THE GROUND!) hundreds of bullcrapola links are connected to his portfolio sites. I want to scream... I want to call him and ask why he does it... but I know I'll get one of two replies...
A. beep... beep... beep he hangs up.
B. "Cause it works bro"
It sickens me.
We cannot exactly categorize these as problems. The Ranking game was always based on figuring out the big Gs algorithm and trying to make things work that way instead of making our own way and wanting Google to work according to us.
I agree is there anybody that really can say for sure how Googles algorithms work? I think it is constantly changing and maby there is a reason why the "BAD GUYS" win all the time... but in the end of the day posting shitty content with shitty links wont help much for your conversion rate and people will end up clicking on your site if it has the relevent info with Good links and therefore your site should have a better conversion rate. It is sad though that the Crooks that takes the short cuts always seems to win for some reason or another...
This is the one point that I don't agree with from Wils post. Google owes me nothing and if you think they do... that is exactly what they want you to think. Google ghas an algorithm the activity to game it is such that is is simply unrealistic to put it on them... or if you should be able to then... IMO, they fix this if they could in a way that made economical sense.
Nope it is up to us to leave the philiosphies at the door and do what it takes to rank. Not do it beccause you can do it .. cuz ya have to. Only do what others are doing in the space when they get trampled guess what your good shit is unsctheed and you rise because you had a plan and did what was needed.
Just a few short years ago (2008/2009) there was heavy “spammy” anchor text being built by Wil for SEER on the same SEO keywords he mentions in the post. Wil describes them as “GARBAGE”, but utilized them heavily none the less, and not so long ago.
I found the below examples as 301s from thinkseer.com to seerinteractive.com. It seems SEER profited for almost a decade from the same tactics Wil now criticizes. This is fine, we all must mature, but would SEER be willing to terminate all clients who found them through these keywords in the past decade? If so, that would truly be an act worthy of this post.
... and many more
Hi Mikes - first off, edited your comment to make the list more legibile - our comment CMS isn't great about supporting carriage return spacing (sorry about that).
Second - SEOmoz has tons of "spammy" looking links pointing to us like this, but we certainly didn't build them intentionally. Tons of good, totally white hat marketers see spam links like this point to their sites all the time - not sure what makes you think these are intentional efforts from Wil or the SEER team. Just try clicking to page 30+ on this list (https://www.opensiteexplorer.org/domains.html?site=www.seomoz.org) and virtually everything looks like the links you've shown above.
Hi Rand,
Thanks for the personal reply! I wish I had 1/3 your bandwidth and ability to get things done. I don't know how you do it all. You're amazing!
I've give you my top reasons why these particular links stood out to me (maybe a few others in the community could double check my research & weigh in if I'm on or off track).
1.) All paid directories:
https://www.voisd.com/submit.php ($34.95)
https://www.incrawler.com/cgi-bin/dir/addurl.cgi ($24.95)
https://www.directory-empire.com/submit-url.php ($19.99)
https://www.worldofdot.info/submit.php ($11.00)
https://www.fawang.org/submit.php ($8.00)
https://www.urozope.org/submit.php ($15.00)
https://www.submitweblinks.com/submit.php ($8.89)
> Definitely not scrapper sites and these would really start to add up to be some $$$
2.) Timestamps on submissions:
Date Added: Aug 10, 2009
Dated added: 11/6/2008 12:52:54 PM
> In general the submissions were 2008/2009. This would make sense if the business was immature and then hit maturity after this time.
3.) "Hand rolled" anchor text (with attention paid to theme) in the paid directories
Think Seer SEO Company
Search Engine Marketing Companies
SEO Company
SEO Consultant
> Looks like a pro wrote them. Most people are so lazy they just do a cut/paste & definitely not a scrapper
4.) "Hand rolled" directory descriptions in the paid directories
'SEER Interactive is a highly experienced, proven search engine optimization firm that guarantees results and analyzes ROI for every seo project.'
'SEER Interactive is one of the Philadelphia-area's fastest growing search engine optimization firms and a national leader among SEO companies. Our experienced team of web marketing strategists, analysts and SEO consultants have the expertise to get your site ranked for terms that matter in your industry. Our team guarantees rankings and analyzes ROI for each campaign.'
'SEER Interactive is a highly experienced, proven search engine optimization firm that guarantees results and analyzes ROI for every SEO project.'
'SEER Interactive is a Philadelphia SEO Consultant and considered one of the area's top SEO firms. We guarantee rankings and tie them to ROI.'
> Looks like a pro wrote them. Most people are so lazy they just do a cut/paste & definitely not a scrapper
I could be wrong but it seems like paid directory link building 101.
It looks like Wil from Seer has been pretty active in the comments so maybe he can weigh in with a ("Yes" we built or "No" we didn't).
Hi Mikes, I'm a newbie finding this discussion very interesting so jumping in with my opinion.
Let's assume Will did intentionally build these in 08/09, and that he has 'matured' since then. I still don't understan why in order to prove his point/intentions he should be " willing to terminate all clients who found them through these keywords in the past decade". Furthermore, I wouldn't even hold it against him if he had continued to do this, because unfortunatle as it is (and everyone here seem to agree that it is), this is what it takes, and at the bottom line we're talking about business & livelihood here.
Hi Roeesa,
Happy to hear that you're interested in this thread too! I've been waiting for a "yes" or "no" on the pay for a "listing" links that I listed above too.
Well, it's kind of the implication that got me fired up beyond the links.
Seer = Good company & people
Companies that rank for SEO company, SEO consultant & SEO agency = Bad companies & people
Example of a direct quote "Hoping the good guys get rewarded soon!! Or we'll all be selling snake oil!"
So when I do a search, these guys that rank really well are the "bad guys" & "snake oil guys"? Come on, most of these companies look legit and I'm sure they have some good people working at these firms trying hard to help their clients.
Companies that rank when I do a search:
Qualified Impressions
SEO.com
SEO Company
Teknicks
LoveClients
Ephricon
seoconsultant.net
Shimon Sandler
So my question to Wil at Seer was IF my research is correct, would he drop the clients he picked up when he was involved in the "snake oil"?
Not sure why this thread died. Therefore, at the risk of throwing someone under the bus, is there a reason that Wil has not replied to this accusation? Surely being accused on hypocrisy warrants some type of reply no?
@Loco66 Agreed. I'm perfectly happy if Wil at Seer comes out and tells me that my paid directory link building research findings are all wrong. . .The longer that no one replies, the greater the chances that this thread is being avoided. Maybe Rand or Moz team can help?
I believe this post went straight to the main blog, then The TAGFEE Code "Transparent and Authentic" should apply - https://www.seomoz.org/blog/what-we-believe-why-seomozs-tagfee-tenets
If Wil or someone from SEER doesn't give some sort of explanation for this I can't help but think you guys are shady and not practicing what you preach.
Seriously?!?
I thought this stuff happened on other communities but the SEOmoz community was supposed to be different.
The facts:
1.) Paid directory links were found pointing to Seer
2.) I personally emailed some of the owners of these websites and they all said all links/”listings” are PAID and there is no other way to get a link
3.) It has been 2+ weeks and Wil at Seer has replied back to 14 other thread questions but not mine personally asking if Seer built them
4.) Wil Reynolds is an Associate of SEOmoz and falls under TAGFEE Code "Transparent and Authentic" - https://www.seomoz.org/blog/what-we-believe-why-seomozs-tagfee-tenets
So where is the pledged transparency to community members?? Where is the promised authenticity to community members???
Hi Mike, I think you have touched the right point. I don't believe there are "blackhat" or "whitehat", I can say most of the reputated SEO leaders are all used some type of the blackhat technique, because a "pure whitehat" technique won't work well for most of the time. They are always looking for blackhat techniques, I know this because we developed SEO software, we always received calls from our SEO consultant clients to ask if our software support "blackhat" SEO techniques.
Also, the idea to give high ranking for the "industry leaders" does not make sense. If this is the case, it means that only high ranking web sites will be the company with $$$ and human resources.
I think the revolution of Google ranking should be a concept similar to Adwords: the top ranking web sites need to rotate and change dynamically, this will give more chance for different sites to rank on the top, also make it harder for blackhat SEO to manpulate the results.
Hello SeoMikes,
What is the wrong in this thing. Seer interactive is promoting his top keywords via directory submission which is just a simple off-page method which is working for every website promotion company from old age SEO Time. Google is still not declined the importance of directory submission which is still worth.
Dear Mike If you say that above links are in spamming than what would you say total 1222 external links on this site
https://www.tigblog.org/group/issueeducation/post/761059
Straight from Google...."Buying or selling links that pass PageRank is in violation of Google's Webmaster Guidelines and can negatively impact a site's ranking in search results."
Directory submissions are the epitome of paid links, especially with the anchor text used in the above examples.
Hi Sourabh. Thanks for taking an interest in this post too!
My issue is that it appears that Seer built the same links (Paid Directory) as the other firms they are calling out as "Bad" SEOs and framing themselves as a "Good" SEO firm = They are total hypocrites.
It’s been 2+ weeks and Wil at Seer has replied back to 14 other questions but not mine so it’s basically a given that they build the paid directories and have chosen to ignore my "call out" research.
That’s why I always do my own research, it helps you spot phonies who are writing a post to make themselves look good and putting other firms down.
100% agreed. Many reputated SEO leaders have purchased our "blackhat" SEO software as one of their SEO technique.
In 1961, at the Guangzhou China conference, a former Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deng_Xiaoping) uttered what is perhaps his most famous quotation: "I don't care if it's a white cat or a black cat. It's a good cat as long as it catches mice."
So, in my view, there is no blackhat or whitehat, as long as you can get a good ranking, you are a "good hat".
Agree with you @sourabh_gravity
They killed their competition, and they don't NEED to work more urgently than they are. So long as they do stuff like Panda and this upcoming update against spammy link building, they are doing their job, without sinking all of their revenues just for the sake of a good cause. ("Fantastic user experience.")
In my opinion SEO is essentially manipulating search results to benifit us and our clients. The age old white hat saying about "write good content and the links will follow" to me is a nonsense. Yes you need good content, but sitting there crossing your fingers will get you nowhere.
For me the key is understanding how black hatters are gaming the system and how to replicate these results in a manner that doesn't get your sites in trouble.
I don't think there will never be a day where google ends rubbish spun article 1 page emd sites ranking, their algorithm is constantly evolving. Black hatters are doing exactly the same. Once a method is dead, they find another, and another. This is their industry.
I don't go for outing people, but looking at some of the services people are offering claiming white hat is the way, they look extremely similar to many of the packages you can purchase on the forums I frequent. Directory submissions, web 2.0 properties, social book marking, article submission, blog posting etc etc.
The only difference I can see is that it is manually done, on a much smaller scale and is 10x the price. What some are doing is essentially the same as what many of these black hatters do just on a much smaller, more expensive scale. Making properties and links that eventually point to the homepage to increase the sites rank for certain keywords. Im sure that's a Google no-no.
You need the diversity of a whole assortmant of links, tiers, socials, anchors, articles, 2.0s, shares etc etc all pointing to each other and to your awesomely informative, well written, fast loading, up to date, nice looking website. It gets to the point where for this to be managable it has to be out sourced and/or automated.
Sitting on either side of the fence will get you nowhere. It's a bit of a balencing act but you get a better view on top.
#greyhatforlife
Excellent post Wil, right behind you all the way with this one.
However...i do question how much blame we can realistically put at Google's door here. I wonder whether or not the main reason why the 3 agencies you mention aren't ranking is because, well, we have no need to. If Seer suddenly decided that your main priority was to rank 1st for "SEO Agency", then i'm sure that over time, you could make that happen - but would you even want that?
The kind of enquiries that would typically come through from search queries would typically be low level, small budget, small projects. At distilled, i know all of our business comes through referrals and recommendations - and that's a good thing. We want the high end projects, with good legitimate companies and these guys don't pick agencies off the back of a search query. Therefore, we haven't bothered to target the SEO agency related keywords. infact, we haven't really bothered to SEO our own site at all.
That perhaps, is one of the main reasons why the crappy agencies are the ones that rank for these terms. It's their whole business model - they put the time and energy into doing SEO (albeit spammy SEO) for their own sites rather than doing it for their clients.
I LOVED this post Wil! I am relatively new to the SEO scene. I've been learning the ropes for 2 years now. My philosophy all along has been "build great content and the links will follow." In some instances, this can work, but not always!
Now, I have a business site in a competitive niche and I'm finding that simply building great content and promoting it is not enough to compete. I can see how people fall down the slippery slope of falling to the dark side.
I started to do some guest posting and pointing some anchor texted links back to my site and I'm noticing that it's helping. Now, guest posting is something I'd consider white hat, but I can see how it could spread into other things. What about guest posting on a totally non relevant site? If the guest posts on PR2 sites were helping then perhaps purchasing a donation link (i.e. paid link spam) on a PR5 site would help more...and heck, if that helped, maybe I'll search out other similar paid link opportunities.
The problem with a philosophy like this is that as Google gets better and better at figuring out which links are a true vote for my site as opposed to a self made one, I'm likely to get slapped. What if I spend 6 months building spammy links and I am number one and then suddenly the algo figures out how to detect my spam links? I've just lost 6 months of work and my business suffers.
So now I'm caught in a tough spot as a relatively new SEO. I'm seeing that self made links are currently effective, but I'm told (by SEOMoz and the like) that creating great content is the best way to go. But, my natural content is simply not gaining links. Ah, the dilemma!
You have hit the nail on the head!! And we are all on a tightrope where we want so badly to do the right things!
And the corollary is that if you do 100% white hat and nobody links to you, then you may get no traffic at all and your business may die, because your SEO customers fire you. You are damned if you do and damned if you don't.
Hi Wil,
Thanks for the post but we really need to ask one question -
Do we live in an ideal world or a practical world?
At the end of the day it’s important to realize that a Search Engine Robot is a software. It does not have the intelligence that we human beings do.
Taking the example of the SEO Company, if you check the link profile of the companies that are ranking in Top 3 it will be very harsh to say that their link profile is not good. I am not saying it’s excellent but at the same time not poor also
Let me take a simple example, if an SEO company actually goes and asks their clients to place a footer link as follows - Digital Marketing by SEO Company Company Name with "SEO Company" as the anchor text.
In an ideal world the clients will not belong to the category of SEO, so thinking that way we should not even get link value. In fact some people might even say that the website should be penalized.
But now let’s think logically and apply semantics, the very fact that so many websites are placing link on their home page suggests that the SEO company is trusted and the anchor Text "SEO Company" only helps the search engine spiders to make an informed decision. Not to forget the 500 odd more signals that the "SOFTWARE" will have to go through. Bigger the brand, (ideally) bigger will be the brand value.
I am not saying that one should not generate good content but at the same time generating Good content all the time is also not the solution.
Every Good SEO agency tells two things to their client -
The very mention of the second statement scares the clients. Now if the ideal platform was put into picture the word "Slow" will get converted to "Slower".
I think everybody appreciates the concerns that you have shown but all i am trying to say is that we need to be practical as well, after all what is the point if we only talk about great content and no client comes to us.
- Sajeet
Yeah. What Sajeet just said...
I thumbs up'd this post so hard. Here's hoping someone on the spam team takes a timeout from G+ and gives search (you know, your core business Google) some much needed attention.
Unfortunatelly this is not only a Google problem.
This crappy site seo4vancouver.com is ranking pretty good for "seo vancouver" using link building super-brilliant techniques like https://corporatereputationmanagement1.info/your-internet-marketing-services-vancouver-making-mercy-how
I guess I'm going to be opening a tapas bar somewhere north Yukon and quitting SEO
Ani, great point. Thank you for bringing this up, its definitely MORE than a Google problem, and maybe someone will come along and fix it. Think about it before links mattered it was all onsite triggers that helped Altavisa and Yahoo, right? Then Google came along, innovated and changed the game. Maybe that might happen to them. After all history is LITTERED with companes who were a front runner for years, even decades and then basically collapsed.
This is issue is getting gradually worse, and is not getting much attention from Google. While I'm sure they recognize the problem, their efforts are elsewhere: social data integration, better real-time results, rich snippets and specialized search results for specialized queries. Fighting link spam is not a priority at Google. So, while they are very clear about the rules, that doesn't mean they have the resources dedicated to enforce them.
Excellent post (Rant) Wil. I believe we are all frustrated with Google's "follow these rules" game. This is a perfect example of why every SEO expert out there should always be testing and analazying everything they hear or learn. We take for granted the LAW of Google by just reading a post or a comment.
Test and Analyze, Test and Analyze, and do what works until it no longer works. If link building works, then still do it, but don't forget to adapt to the new techniques.
I believe 2012 will be an interesting year to watch Google and Social signals.
This post goes perfect with Rands experiment last week. https://www.seomoz.org/blog/buying-links-is-shallow-buying-blogs-now-thats-a-strategy
Thank you for the research.
Test and Analyze - I couldn't agree more.
Absolutely, Wil. We are left telling our friends that we're the Good SEOs and that the meek will inherit the earth, but in the meantime our competitors will stomp on our SEO...?
Now you know how Christians feel... Patience.
The Christians have been patient for over 2,000 years now. Hope the "Real SEOs" don't have to wait that long. ;-)
..and Christians did a lot of "bad" in the world too, just like Wil. ;) Just kidding. That comment is not fair to Wil, since what he did isn't really bad, or even evil.
Since this discussion is purely philosophical let's go for some clarity on the premise presented here. What is "Good SEO" as defined in here?
It sounds to me like there is an expectation that Google not be a black box, and be open (like Lucene). Unfortunately for that viewpoint, it IS a black box. Google is notorious for NOT telling you what ranking signals are or more than hint at the algorithm. There is no sign that Google is planning on changing this policy, nor were there any arguments presented here on why they should.
So, does a "Good SEO" know what works, or do they just know what Google tells them works? The latter just needs to read the Google guidelines, which most everyone can do. So why would a company pay this person? Interns can read for you...and write a summary...or give advice on the Google forums. However, they probably can't get your site to rank...
An SEO's job is to know what works and then get organic traffic customers to our site(s). To test, and innovate and test some more.
There are no hats. Maybe you can argue that it is unethical to try to rank for terms you aren't relevant for, but the ROI there is minimal anyway. Probably what's unethical is arbitrage and fooling users into clicks on PPC ads on these spam (not relevant) sites. Ethics has a lot to do with intent, but also with awareness of consequences. In that vein, giving users a site experience they don't want is unethical.
Nevertheless, TACTICS themselves are not unethical. Does Google care if Verizon, or Sprint, or ATT rank #1 for cell phone from an experience standpoint? I doubt it. So, who's ethics are being violated if one of them uses an outside of Google Guidelines tactic? This is unethical if the Google Organic Search Algorithm is your God, or definer of ethics. Google's search engine is just a digital billboard software for searchers. Maybe the most popular, but certainly not a barometer for your "marketing ethics". I tend to also work along the SEOMoz way of (so-called White-Hat) thinking, and I believe very strongly in ethics, but they have hardly anything to do with Google's Guidelines.
In defense of Google's official stance, and probably what is intended by the misnomer of "Good SEO" here, IF you do produce a great product and offer good content and value for your customers you WILL perform better as a business and that will affect certain signals that help you perform better in search. However, judging "quality" is difficult. It's difficult for most humans, so expecting an algorithm to agree with your definition is a high expectation indeed. Your long term interests are always going to be served by offering value; by running a great business.
It seems to me like a "Good SEO" is one who understands "quality" defined by the site's customer base has AND as defined by Google. Of course, then there is the issue of being able to deliver a web site (and link profile) that caters to both. "Knowing is half the battle" - GI Joe.
It may be wrong but sometimes I just want to throw my hands up in the air and say: "I am a search engine optimizer; therefore, my job is to optimize sites for seartch engines--period. So, if that spammy crap is what works, then I have done my job as a search engine optimizer if I employ those tactics."
On the other hand, sometimes I thing Google is fully aware of everything that's been talked about here, and for years they've been creating and perfecting a hush-hush algo change that will wipe all the spam away in one huge sweep. Call me paranoid, but I think it's in the works. Google has their hands in everything; they know what's going on. And then all those black hatters are going to be sorry. Hey, it could happen!
It would be really good to just know how things work and are going to work, it would make things so much easier.
And the moon could be made of cheese and the little red men on Mars could be waiting for us. LOL.
The problem is the black hat guys don't care.
They throw away domains and move to the next thing, but you can't just throw away a brand.
I agree entirely! Black hat methods may deliver quick results (which clients expect), but Google has the power to push your site right the way to the bottom of the rankings if your site is seen to be benefitting from black hat SEO techniques.
The benefits of methodically using white hat SEO and good practices is that (generally speaking) you won't have to worry about updates being made to Google's angorithm because your site is doing well thanks to organic search engine optimisation.
Like to add another frustration (*ahem* ...challenge) to this, and that is selling and delivering results with white-hat SEO to someone who got screwed by black hat SEO (but had a good three months taste of unbelievable results while it lasted).
I recently took on a client who had a few sites rankings extremely well from tactics just like this. One still does, yet another has fallen off the map. He's in an industry similar to SEO, where basically the entire first page of G is sites with thousands of spammy links; exact anchor text, forums, directories, blog commenting (even comments on SOUNDCLOUD! ...get out of here, people are spamming SOUNDCLOUD - some guy's mixtape has comments about acupunture, insuarnce and dentists?!)
Another issue with all of this is, while the client wants to go "white-hat" and do long term sustainable SEO - he's had a good taste of these temporay but fast unrealistic results. This is quite the challenge, to come up with a way to WIN and not jeapordize his businesses again, yet somehow explain that "real" SEO is sometimes a tougher hill to climb and he may not see results like that again for at least a few months, if ever, even though as Wil says, we're doing things the "right" way.
Excellent Post! You highlight a number of frustrating issues I have experienced over the last few years. Google often comes to the table to preach best practices yet they reward those that SPAM and still provide black hat recs. Recently I even witnessed someone proving how keyword optimisation in a Meta Tag actually influenced their rankings too.
Cheers for putting some documentation behind this.
Another Good Guy,
Phil
Wow, if Googlel is ranking based on meta keywords, they really are getting sloppy.
Meta keywords, or meta Title and meta Description??
Let's be honnest Wil,
Social never mattered in SEO (non personalized results), nofollow links always did though, making social have a tiny effect on SEO but it's NOT because it's social, because twitter links, g+ links, public facebook links are crawled and nofollow links do get sites ranking, why do you think people spam blog comments or pligg sites to death?
Google never lied though, they never said "social is a ranking factor" they said "social matters in rankings" which is clearly a play on word and idealists like Rand and other white hat thought leaders did take that information and misread it for a bit over a year now which generated a lot of sales and buzz in the white hat world simply because it looked like a light at the end of the spam tunnel but appears now to be a lure (I don't believe the guys that did promote that idea did it on purpose, I think they truly believe what they preached).
Now the questions is, should Google count social as a bigger factor?
If you think about it for 5 minutes you'll say yes, however, if you google buy +1s, buy facebook likes, buy twitter followers etc you'll see that the social ecosystem is even more fragile than the linkgraph one because owning a website has a cost, owning a social profile has none, allowing spammers to create thousands, tens of thousands of social profiles for the price of a captcha at most. And if social had to carry any relevant weight in rankings then you'd see DOZENS of account creation/auto friend/fake inter profile interaction to emulate social activity script flood the market and this would start all over again, just much cheaper for spammers. creating profile farms could truly be easier than link farms.
What the world needs to end spam is a true, scalable, identity check system on the web. Something where people would log using their real name and make them responsible for their actions online. But this becomes very political. Some people will want to keep the internet anonymous but the sequel of that is spam, others will want to regulate it but the sequel of that is a loss of liberty and privacy.
Would love to exchange with you on the topic at the end of this month at Linklove London.
It's so tough. One of my client's competitors has an even dirtier link profile than the one you showed - I'm convinced that competitor bought a pre-used domain not knowing what it had been used for previously and it's just plain awful.
I would never do it, but it must be so tempting for some SEOs to do things the wrong way as someone quoted 'because it works Bro'.
Now I would never argue that the ends justifies the means but there's no wonder people who don't promote consistency and quality still make a living because they get to see 'results'.
Admittedly they are still taking HUGE risks for their clients but while it pays off who is going to argue with them?
We will still do things correctly, sustainably and not go for links that may damage the client in the long run. Will we lose business in the future? Wouldn't surprise me, but doing things RIGHT has to be our first focus.
I am pretty sick of matt C's mantra of content is king. Someone else here at Seomoz said content is queen and backlinks are king. Well I don't think content is even queen anymore. It is some lowly little earl in an obscure fiefdom at the edge of the interwebs. I mean type in tablet pc, or android tablet or something. most of the results are shopping sites. That is good content? oh well such is is the google monster.
Incredible post!!!
Its seems like I address this issue a lot internally and to clients.
Me - "The competitor seems to be ranking well, but they are using dark grey/black hat tactics (often link farms and spun articles), we don't agree with using these tactics."
Client - "Should we use these tactics?"
Me - "No we strongly advise against them as it's not ethical"
Client - "But they are winning more and more work"
Me - "When Google changes it's algorithm I would hope to see them drop significantly"
Client - "When will that be?"
Me - "Soon"
If I'm your client, I say- "you're fired". so I'm gonna sit around and hope Google changes so the "bad" guys drop off? That's your answer? "soon" The "bad" guys are just doing what Google is saying works.
The topic of this article is the price you have to pay based on how much publicity you guys recieve around SEO. You have to incorporate certain tactics to really compete, yet you can't since you are held to such a high quality standard, mostly brought on yourself.
scottcowley - I completly agree with you on the social signals. I would add that no one should take what Google (or anyone that works for them) says as fact. Google cares about one thing: high quality, relevant resutls showing up so their market share will continue to rise and they will make more money in paid search.
Remember JC Penny? It took a huge ammount of press to penalize them manually. Why? Google publicly said they knew about the tactics and did nothing. Why? Relevancy in the search results. What user is going to complain if they see JC Penny rankings for "girls dresses"? Zero, hence why there is no reason for Google to address it. They will only address issues if the site ranking doesn't add value for their users.
Everyone please put your business caps on for a second. Imagine you are running a business. Let's say it's SEO Moz and you are trying to sell more PRO subscriptions. So you run a promo: Free 30 day trial. Image a bunch of potential customers sign up for your free trial, awesome. Then all those people cancel on day 29 and don't turn into paying customers and you make ZERO dollars from them. Would you continue to care about those consumers who add ZERO revenue to your business? Would you shift your focus to something that increases your bottom line?
Google is a business and they make ZEO money from SEOs directly. They have no reason what so ever to support or care about SEO. As long as they serve relevant search results and continue to have 80% market share this will be the case. Their job (and Matt Cutts job) is to keep irrelevant search results from appearing for high CPC queries. Nothing more. Why try to complicate it?
this blog post is an epic failure in the grandest of proportions and i am surprised not many people realized that it is.
it is like a painter crying about how he could not paint his own house straight, and blaming the paint company for it.
stop being owned by google and crying like a baby. they employ the best programmers in the world. surely they built this system that heavily rely on backlinks, it is their choice and this is how people react to it. that does not make any of them "bad guys" - neither you a "good guy" because you are not reacting to it. people care about results, not where you acquire links from. if you can not deliver such results for your web site, do not sell anyone such services.
wait a minute: if i search for SEO i find SEOmoz and Seobook on first page (with wikipedia and google itself). are these bad guys then?
The query was "SEO company", not SEO... https://www.google.com/search?pws=0&q=seo+company
yes, i read the post before commenting ;)
but that wasn't my point... which is, just to be clear: there's always a good reason for a good ranking for a competitive keyword.
see what gianluca said, I WISH the results for seo company were like the query seo.
A hidden tidbit in this post: If you are presenting at a conference, leverage your presentation content by blogging about it! Great stuff!
Let me qualify my comments by saying that I'm a total freshman to SEO (about 6 months working on a hobby site), but I'm amazed that this post turned into such an 'us vs them' issue, as if you have to choose sides. I've experimented with both white-hat tactics such as linkbait and black-hat tactics such as anchor-text blog commenting. So far I've had much, much more success in ranking with the black hat stuff.
That's to be expected, but the flipside is that ALL of those black-hat links are totally replicable by my competitors. It seems to me that the major benefit of white-hat links is that they're harder to replicate, and therefore more conducive to sustainable competitive advantage. But it's harder to build those white-hat links if no one knows who you are, and a big part of that is getting ranks and traffic first. Black-hat builds rank, rank builds social proof and trust, and this (among other things) leads to white-hat links.
I'm totally comfortable using grey/black-hat tactics because a) I believe in the quality of my site, and b) I intend to follow-up my short-term black-hat strategy with a longer-term white-hat strategy (with a lot of help from SEOMoz articles) once the rank-building phase of my SEO campaign ends. Ideally, this will be done as quickly as possible, a 'shock and awe' tactic intended to minimize the time my competitors have to replicate my black-hat links (and in the process kill my ranking before it's proven useful).
If I were comparing SEO to the construction industry, then I'd consider black-hat to be the scaffolding and cranes (temporary), and white-hat to be the I-beams (permanent). That's why I can totally respect what Rand, Wil & Co. do while at the same time lurking around more black-hat sites.
Black and white are two sides of the same coin, like yin and yang, and you can't build a skyscraper without either one.
Totally agree - quantity always wins out (at least to start off with) - I reckon Google will target those people using the same exact match anchor text next - in fact I'd be really surprised if they don't stop using anchor text as a ranking signal altogether in the next year or two. Google+ will be very interesting however they'll have to roll it out slowly so it doesn't make the users lose confidence in Google.
Respectfully disagree. It is clear that Google has recently made a bunch of decent changes to combat link spam and MFA sites. Specifically, they have
1) greately reduced the importance of "exact match domain" or EMD for SERP ranking, which is a right thing to do;
2) so many people report that blog commenting and forum profiles links are no longer working as they used to - that should reduce incentives for black hat webmasters to drop spammy links;
3) they have busted a number of "blog networks" like Build My Rank and few others which was a source of paid links to manipulate the rankings;
4) they have changed their Privacy Policy so they could share the data among product lines so Chrome websites / usage samples and also Android websites usage samples could be used to judge the sites quality / relevance in the main SERPs.
So Chrome and Android will eventually provide enough data so Google will not need to rely on Links to determine how do users "vote" for the specific sites quality - Google would just look which sites and how long users have visited / stayed on. No need to wait until some webmaster / blogger will put the link to the site - you could much faster just see how Chrome users react to that site when presented in SERPS.
Bye bye spammy links, welcome Chrome usage stats. Try to fake that on the scale of millions.
Bye bye spammy links,
- That would be a very good thing.
welcome Chrome usage stats.
- I really don't like that idea, because I don't think the logic holds up.
So So True wil - we all feel this everyday. -Google can't change the monster they created because if they flipped the magic switch and only looked at quality the results would change to much and upset to many people so instead they slowly push in this direction. Look how much panda rocked the search world and that was a mild update in comparission. We need bing or somone else to bring us a new search engine that works on real signals to scare google into making a radicial change.
I sort of understand your viewpoint here, and if you are right about Google being afraid to "flip the magic switch", then I don't know why they are. Google does not owe anyone a living and no-one has a divine right to be anywhere in the rankings. Google is simply there to provide its users with the most relevant and useful information going by their search term. If it feels that a dramatic change in algorithm will help it achieve this, I see no reason why it should hold back.
I was having this conversation yesterday with a coworker. I also feel like if Google were to flip a "magic switch" and turn off anchor text, the results would go absolutely crazy. I'm sure they would have been doing a lot of testing on it, but it would be way more drastic than even the Panda update, which was a HUGE algo change. Combine that update with the many they've done since, and the algo now looks much different than the algo a year and a half ago.
I'd love to get into Google's sandbox and pull some levers, though. It would be interesting see what happened if you DID turn off anchor text, or title tags, or site authority, or page authority, or any other of the large metrics.
I don't get it. Noone "makes" you a "liar". It's your choice if you want to propogate what you know to be half truths. I don't see how that makes you a "good guy", or better than an honest spammer.
Why not just be straight with you clients? Tell them the truth, the full truth and nothing but the truth? How would they feel if they read this blog post? And how is ineffectively farting around with Google+ any more legitimate than engaging in tactics that you can see are working for your competitiion?
[edit for spelling]
On an added note: I had the opportunity to do SEO for two different sites that happened to be in the same niche. On one, I employed all white hat strategies--blogging, guest blogging, social media, HARO, good directories, ect. On the other, I did automated directory submissions, article spinning, paying for links, dofollow blog commenting, ect--just to see. Do you want to guess the results?
The site with the spammy SEO tactics skyrocketed in the SERPS. It's now #11 (top of page 2) after being on page 50-something. I stopped employing this tactic; it's hasn't moved since. I think if I'd kept going, it would be higher.
The white-hat-strategy site dropps a space every single time it gets crawled--I am still working on it.
You would think this would convince me to go black-hat. But like I said before I think for years Google has been creating and perfecting a hush-hush algo change that will wipe all the spam away in one huge sweep.
Fantastic post Wil and no doubt it resonates with every SEO on Moz. We lost a client as they weren't climbing fast enough after 2 months! They chose the #1 for two SEO related queries and proceeded to increase their SERPs (on the back of some of our quality work I'd like to think). The recent updates saw them take a hit and the #1 [SEO mystery search] has also dropped significantly on the two queries.
You try to warn people that #1 doesn't necessarily mean the best, but if Google says #1, they must be the best - afterall that's where we're all trying to get our clients!
Unfortunately, people can buy G+ as well.... just like facebook likes and all that stuff...
Google's algorithm encourages SEOs to be at least gray hat...
I agree - it seems not matter what, border line black hat techniques still work. I have 3 sites still first page google that I started 8 months ago with very "GREY" techniques and the rankings are still there. Weird thing is - I am doing nothing to keep them up anymore.
With all that being said, is it worth building quality content and having a long term and holistic strategy?
Companies and brands that have huge budgets to buy links and pay for all types of paid campaigns from search ppc, cpc and display will have an advantage right?
I guess it doesn't hurt to create great content because of the long tail effect but mostly for primary keywords, it appears its a numbers game for anchor text links.
It begs to question Google algo because the likelhood for long tail keywords (4 or more) being anchor text targeted or for paid is slim thus its much more organic in nature. The balance is tipped in these primary keywords that are highly competitive skewed by spammy anchor text links and paid search results.
Its a fine line to walk for SEO's if optimization is all your do. However, if your only focusing on gaming search engines, your missing the point to marketing.
I agree with you 100% here too, I guess this is exactly why Rand & Others are more focused on moving us as an industry to inbound marketing than just SEO. SEOs are missing the point of marketing so often, but clients are hiring us not for overall marketing (yet) but hopefully the times are changing enough that we'll have more invluence than just on SEO. I think Mike kings post about don't be a kanye, helps us get there as an industry.
Great post. While I didn't have time to read all the comments, I felt the aura of venting come off my screen as I scrolled. Here's to hoping Google (I smiled when I read Big G) sees this and feels a nudge.
First off, I did enjoy the post, but the tiny violin playing sad music in the background was a bit distracting...;)My big question is, what would be the consequences, both short and long term, if Google just removed the anchor text qualifier from their ranking algoithim? Would the entire thing just break, setting the actual results years behind in both organization and relevance? Or would the effects be minor at first but then drastic over-time? If this is such a clear cut way to make spamming techniques less effective, why hasn't Google done it?
I agree..kill the anchor text..and base the link on the relevancy of the overall site..this would kill the spam link racket. consequently this would force those spammers to seek out sites or pages that are relevant!.
It's depressing reading this article...that Google has essential leading SEO's up the garden path,When Joe public catches on, its only going to hurt Google's reputation.Searchengineman
This post has had more comments than any other post I have read so far. It is a testimony to the amount of passion this subject generates.
Even CNN and Fox knows that divisive issues generate traffic and engagement. And as Brian says, this article is further proof on that. On that note continue your SEO campaigns.
As mentioned above, a real SEO will do what he/she needs to do to get their pages to rank. Period.
Easily, the single most important decision I have made in my SEO career was to stop worrying about what Google or Matt Cutts or this or that SEO 'guru' says I _should_ be doing.
Do your OWN due diligence for YOUR clients and figure out what works for THEM. The hat color of your techniques is IRRELEVANT in today's search landscape.
Strategize, test, review the results, tweak as necessary. If it works, keep it. If not, try again. Use multiple methods (both on-page and off), don't make Google look stupid, and you will get the results you crave.
Stop running around screaming white-hat generalizations while your rankings suck it. It's time to get a grip, accept reality, and get the rankings you and your client's need to prosper.
Anyway, just my $0.02.
Two aggressive algorithm updates and a psych-ops campaign (unnatural links notices) later and the SEO Agency results are still not the thought leaders you'd have expected.
What's more, look up Viagra. There are three sites with "this site may be compromised" notices that rank on page one. One is an .edu site that redirects to a sales site. Isn't that a bit off the beaten TOS path?
"Google is perpetuating the cycle they want to end."
Well that line just sums it all up.
A big high-five and an AMEN!
"They are "letting" the bad guys rank, which only gets them more clients, and pollutes more of the web with crappy sites that have over aggressively linked. "
And this is why I get clients that I have to turn down because they've been "taught" black-hat practices as the norm and won't accept any type of organic methods as truth.
Panda just made it a lot easier and cheaper for black hats to buy links. My 10 year old content site lost 50% of its google traffic and the remaining traffic is non-converting crap so earnings plunged 80%.
Now I no longer automatically delete the emails from people asking to buy links, in fact I recently sold my first text link ever. I think there are many website owners that were hit by Panda who will now be more open to selling links.
I never thought I would sell text links but now I feel I have nothing to lose.
I can't help but feel Google no longer care. They've already got the best search product. Their efforts now are on:
They're clearly having problems removing the anchor text issue else they'd have done it years ago. And who can blame them? It's a quality signal at heart in terms of raw correlation. It just happens to be relatively easy to game, too.
This post made me smile. Thanks Wil , Im off to build some more quality back links.
PS partial match anchor is kicking arse for me right now :)
Oh yeah second thought nah :P
Good post. I remember watching Matt Cutts videos and reading their guidelines everyday assuming he was telling us how Google "ranked" sites. What a waste of time it was... :) 12 months, all unique content and all investment on content, but still ranking way lower than competition who updates the site once a week but builds thousands of backlinks...
Wil - This is one of the more helpful posts I've read on SEO Moz. Unless the links in the screen shot are atypical of some legitimate (authorative & relevant) links that are omitted, this confirms much of what I have observed but do not have the time to experiment with. I believe there is a lot of room for improvement in the algos if they'd weigh authorsip and locality (for goods or services that are local). Unfortunately, the better organic becomes, the less Adwords and other stuff G can sell.
Hello and welcome to the world where there is no such thing as "white hat" and "good guys" - there are only things that can hurt your client and things that don't. I'm really curious what so many people treat "Google Guidelines" as laws - you should stick to them as much as you can, but you should follow your goals.
Great post btw
I'm going to frame this blog post, put flowers round it and pray to it every morning. Well... I'm going to give you a thumbs up at least. You have summed up all of my frustrations with my competition.
I'm going to 'out' someone - I know it's not ethical nor is it particularly nice of me, but their SEO isn't ethical so what the hell. Have a look at the backlink profile of these guys, especially the links they're placing for 'payroll': https://www.12pay.co.uk
They rank number 4 in google UK for 'payroll' - they have ranked higher than my client, and sometimes still do, depending on the latest shuffle.
Now tell me that Google Panda has eliminated splogs and 'thin content'... There are plenty of other payroll providers lower down the rankings not doing this, why aren't they up there?
Grrrr.
I understand the frustration, but I don't think you picked the best examples. Google has never dismissed the role of keywords in SEO, and none of the reputable sites you've listed are trying very hard to be relevant for "SEO company", "SEO agency", or "SEO consultant". If these are terms you want to rank for, then make yourself more relevant for them (try including them in the page copy for starters)! There is a difference between these terms and while we see Google guessing intent all the time (for example by accepting "attorney" in lieu of "lawyers" etc.), if they could understand perfectly what everyone is implying by the words they use, we'd all be out of a job.
When the people at Google tell us to focus on great content, building communities etc, they aren't telling us to forget the fundamentals of SEO. So in the first example you used, how well does your client use the keyword? Are you sure that is the only signal tipping the scales? I don't think we need to get crazy about others' use of anchor text - I'll bet there are gaps in other signals too, not just the anchor text. There's a good chance that much of that anchor text isn't doing much good anyhow.
Its our job as SEOs to keep a cool head and educate clients on what is making a difference and what isn't. SEER Interactive, Distilled and SEO Gadget are probably getting a lot more value from the community building and great content you've created anyhow.
Your SEO company example is a perfect illustration of what makes you question whether above board is always the best way.
I work with a client whose webmaster gets page 1 ranking on a highly-coveted popular keyword phrase. When I was doing an analysis of that company's SEO, I discovered hundreds of junk links, similar to your illustration.
I advised the client on several content issues to make the site more 'sticky', and told the CEO of the black hat tactics. Admittedly, I advised them of the risks, but also not to abandon the links. They would have been off page 1 in an instant. I did that because the risk is pretty remote. And they did not hire us to destroy their traffic.
It makes it difficult to ignore what paid links can do.
Hi Wil! Thanks for capping off SearchFest with such an excellent keynote. I have had "outhelp" on my mind ever since.
I always loved doing competitive research. On one hand, I told clients to work on less quantity, more quantity. On the other, I had to tell them that all the sites ranking above them had the worst link/spam profiles I had ever seen. It makes "quality" a hard sell indeed.
All I wanted to say is spot-on brother! SPOT-FRICKIN-ON
I've seen both my competitors and competitors of my clients outrank with shameful tactics, esp crap-ass anchor text baclinks by the droves... and their efforts are rewarded with (as you stated) more clients and elevated rankings, further purpertraiting bad reps.
what is shameful is that you continue to accept payments from you clients and are not doing what it takes to beat the competition.
Google is being very clear and telling you what works...just because it doesn't fit your strategy, doesn't make the other guys tactics shameful.
They are just doing what Google is saying works. So why are you hating the guy that is doing what works? Hate Google for being vague and misleading. I'm sure if your white hat only tactics worked, then we would all be doing them and reaping the rewardds. Blame Google not the SEO guy that is ranking high.
This post, along with all the followup comments, is one of the most valuable pieces of content I've ever read on SEOMoz. So many good arguments, so many good examples, so much of the daily plight we SEOs deal with encompassed in one post.
There's no doubt that the industry will be better off the further away we can get from anchor text. Until that day, I'd like to point out the very first sentence of the Abstract for "Backrub", presented by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page at Stanford University:
In this paper, we present Google, a prototype of a large-scale search engine which makes heavy use of the structure present in hypertext.
The anatomy of a search engine: https://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html
It does seem to me to be the case that Google is saying one thing and doing another with their search engine algorithms. I'm sure that a lot of this has to do with the complexities of the algorithm. I took a few programming courses in college and I have nothing but respect for the people creating search engine algorithms as a consequence of that. Though I agree, it does lead to some interesting "gray area" in search. In Google's ideal, only real, organic links from reputable sources should count. However, due to the fact that they're still in the process of making that work, it's easy to get beat by spammy links.
https://www.myrevsource.com/blog/bad-romance-a-bit-on-link-building
I wrote a blog in direct response to this blog that goes into more detail, if anybody is interested.
Will, your post made me feel sad. I'm sick of Google rewarding spammy sites whose backlinks are clearly full of junk. Makes me wanna switch to the dark side.
I agree with a lot of points in this post, I think Google is still too reliant on links and anchor text value.
With RSS feeds but I can see if that was an important factor people would be selling 1000s of RSS adds, wouldn't they?
I think in 2 years Google+ could potentially be overtaking all the current crap, hence why brands need to wake up now like H&M they are really dominating the space currently.
[edit] mis-post under wrong account... apologies
I Completley agree with this post although it makes me sad to think that this is exactly the reason why SEO's eventually break down and turn to "bad guys", i dont think that "good" and "bad" are the right terms to use here.
We all know that big G are vague when it comes to their updates and guidelines and this is how they are keeping us in the dark.
I think that a company which is not honnest and clear with me cannot expect me to follow their rules. show me the right path and i will hapilly go there but as long as this path is dark and vague i will probably have to take my chances and find shortcutts.
Usually, its not my strategy but this post just made me think or maybe......turned?
So content is no longer king? I guess links are now :\
Links always were. 'twas ever thus
White hat techniques are sometimes hard to stick to and often take a while to kick in but in the end websites that do SEO the "white hat" way will tend to rank better overall in the long run.
I would argue that content is and always will be king, because at the end of the day content is what turns visits into leads. The flip side of that is, eventhough you might have great content, if your website has low domain authority or doesn't have a good ratio or internal / external links then it will take longer for your site to rise to the top of the search engines.
I'd say concentrate and think of keywords you want to use for your site on a per page basis, and then think about adopting some good white hat backlink strategies to help get to to the top a bit quicker.
Would this really be the change?
https://venturebeat.com/2012/03/17/not-so-fast-seo-google-has-plans-to-punish-sites-that-are-overly-optimized/
i doubt it
Over-Optimization doesn't mean the same thing as poor quality content. This is certainly a strange announcement. Hopefully this applies to boilerplate aggregated content where keywords are just substituted in for each target. Of course there are services where this makes perfect sense for a website too. So, yeah....that sounds scary.
I believe Google's stance on overly-optimized sites is their attempt at FLAGGING us that we should be paying closer attention to the content we publish. Relevant, concise, engaging, clearly written copy - you know... the type of information that online visitors would actually read because it's what they want or need.
Two phrases that have always helped me run a reality check on my clients' web content:
1) "Most people are lazy" - so make sure online visitors' efforts are shorter and more rewarding (not frustrating or longer than necessary). Example: This is especially true for forms and shopping carts.
2) "Don't make me think" - so make sure you provide clear, intuitive navigation and directions. Example: Be engaging and persuasive with clear details so online visitors can make logical, informed decisions.
But that's my opinion - based on what I see in customer search trends and SE algorithm shifts.
Great post. I see these lame directory links outrank me all the time.
What most of you guys are saying make 100% sense to me, but changing one little thing must affect their entire algorithm and creates unnecessary risk. I agree that the most of what they lead on is complete bs.
Hi Wil,
I've come to the conclusion that it isn't really as black and white as "this works, but that doesn't". More like white hat works, but success comes more slowly.
Unfortunately, in a world where instant gratification is expected, this isn't easy for many to swallow.
I think perhaps I have a little advantage here because I am a little older - I grew up thinking it was the coolest thing in the world to make something happen and to watch it grow and change over time...before I could type "salt crystals growing" into a search engine and watch someone else's video of it happening. The truth is, I found it a whole lot more satisfying to do it myself, the right way, and see every little nuance of what was happening along the way.
I look at this issue with a healthy dose of the same attitude. Yes, it's slow and sometimes frustrating, but actually very cool when you see the results :)
Of course I'd like it to be easier and things to make more sense, but I remind myself often that something built slowly & carefully with a great foundation is less likely to come crashing down with one shift in the landscape. Speaking of which ... I can't wait to see if "Link Evaluation" and "Spam Update" in the latest list of changes from Google will finally bring that change in the landscape ;)
Fingers crossed.
Sha
These are exactly my frustrations recently......thanks a bunch for reading my mind and putting it on paper. x
I wish I could thumbs-up this 1,000 times. This is what I've been saying all along - we live in this fantasy world as an industry where people honestly believe Google rewards you for playing by the rules and doing things the "ethical" way.
Newsflash: Google something. ANYTHING local. Look who ranks. Is it natural?There's your answer. Stop ignoring reality.
So yes, do your content marketing, do your ethical work. But do it knowing that you're playing a game where the rules are only suggestions and keep your fingers crossed on the pending Googlepocalypse where the good sites rise up like the rapture.
A question: if all search results were quality, who would click on ads? Who would pay for them?
thanks wil for clearance what actaully Google works in order to measure everything ! really excellent job!
Fantastic post Will - completely agree with you. Some interesting discussions in the comments too!
Great article, from what I can see nothing has really changed. In our line of business black-hat still works for our competitors, Penquin had no effect on their rankings. I think that those who have said the penquin was just a ploy to force a fast pay-for-click revenue increase may have been right after all...
Is it black hat or too shady to get those same basic throwaway spammy links your competitors have and use that a base to build off of. You can say look I have all the same crappy links my competitor has, now I'm going to buid quality relevant links on top of those so my power will be above an beyond what they have. I think we can all agree that as shady and black hat as those links are, Google is still counting a certain percentage of them. It may be only 5% or it may be 50% but they are helping the site rank by sheer link volume and domain diversity, not by link quality. Rand mentioned a similar tactic in one of his Whiteboard Fridays not too long ago. This way you have all your bases covered at least.
Wil, here's the real dope i got out of this article and out of the linklove conference. If i have a client that is really really long-term then I can afford to invest in doing RICH CONTENT plus strategic links. And if i don't have a long-term client then i've got to stick with what works in the short-term while encouraging clients to take a long-term view. One of the flaws i found in LL presentations was the idea that rich content is enough. It's simply can't be the case because if you have 30 keywords that drive results for example, that would require investing in 30 different infographics to keep it simple. that's just way too costly when a couple of well placed content pieces can accomplish much more. I welcome some advice on how to bring the two competing tactics closer together - especially when the situation is not 30 keywords but 300 keywords. how can i establish a popularity drive to cover 300 phrases?
I'll admit I'm a bit late to the game on this one, and with 176 Comments I was only able to skim, so maybe they has been mentioned. But in the case that a client is being dominated by this stuff and quality isn't trumping quality what do you do? If an entire niche is defined by this, do you just lie down with the dogs and use crap-hat tactics to keep up with the Jones's?
Or do you stoop to low level tactics for part of your efforts and then continue your strong "Good" SEO efforts to balance it out? It's a tough call and one I battle daily in the search space I work. We are looking ahead, focusing on local, microformats, social, content etc. But the link farms and junk links beat us a good portion of the time. My fear is that if we stoop to crap-hat tactics it will eventually come back to bite us...
That being said, I have been in this search space for a few years now and have only seen one large competitor get slapped for their tactics and they are slowly bouncing back using the exact same tactics.
What's an SEO to do??
Every algorithm can and will be gamed. Has been like that and will be like that. Google wants to make money as well so they give everybody the option to "buy in". Looks like this is the only alternative there is in competitive areas besides spending hours of work with an unclear outcome. Don't get me wrong - I love SEO. I just don't see any sense in crying over it. Of course there's a lot of propaganda involved. On all sides. Just think about it for a second: would there be need for SEO in a world that always returned perfectly relevant search results? It's evolution: adopt if you want to survive (or rank better). If you're convinced that your tactic is correct than stick with it and see what happens... Maybe you will be rewarded soon. Or others will. It's like doing a rain dance :-)
Very thorough and insightful way of putting, what we think on a daily basis, into words.
Google has 2 problems it must solve.
First, as was mentioned, it is hard as heck to develop algorithms that sift the high quality content from the spammy chaff that is most of the pages out there.
But, let's assume they did have the miracle algorithm. They may very well choose not to use it for profit reasons. Using better algorithms can fail in two ways. Such algorithms will require more processing to implement. At Google's volumes, they are going to prefer "pretty good" algorithms that are cheap to computer versus "awesome" algorithms that are extremely expensive to compute.
You also have to wonder about the subtleties of monetizing search traffic. Start with the obvious of how the spammy sites monetize with AdWords and how badly Google wants to put a stop to that. At the more subtle end, I look at Bing and my own site, for example. Big delivers better search results to my site--they have lower bounce rates and they are more likely to convert when they arrive at landing pages. I take that to mean they're using better algorithms and visitors arrive to find something closer to what they're searching for. Just one problem--I get far fewer visitors. In fact, it is much less than the relative market shares of Bing vs Google would suggest. So I look at those incoming volumes and wonder whether Google wouldn't rather deliver a lot more visitors even if they're not quite as good a match (e.g. a little higher bounce rates, a little worse conversions) just because many sites will be so attracted to the volumes.
Cheers,
BW
LOL this is pretty sad but true. I know that, in my niche at least, the new Panda updates have actually made the SERPs a whole lot worse. Perhaps they want to make successful SEO so shameful and gross that the Whitehats have to switch over to Adwords.
About Time!!!
Wil said exactly what many of us have known for such a long time, but was afraid to say. We all hope that Google will start living up to the standards they have set for the SEO industry to follow. Never the less, like many of the Black Hats, Google is concerned with their bottom line and nothing else.
With the upcoming IPO of Facebook, Google is scrambling to reinvent themselves in the social media arena. I believe that Facebook will come full circle and challenge Google in the arena of Search. As a result, Google has begun to focus on their Social presence as Google+ will be a huge piece of the puzzle as we move into the new millennium.
Therefore, the Good Guys of SEO will win in the end... Right???
If Google doesn't stop drinking the Cool-Aid, none of the Good Guys will be around to see the light of day. Wil has been very proactive in fighting the good fight and carrying the torch of great SEO will win out.
Now, Matt Cutts needs to consult with Wil and get this fixed immediately.
Hello fellow cranky SEO good guy! You have hit on a couple of my bigger pet peeves - SEOs who linkspam like its 1999 and the unfortunate overweighting of anchor text in links
Maybe I am overyly optimistic, but I want to believe that the anchor text thing will get better. I've seen a couple of competitors whose entire link profile was based on anchor text spam links go down recently, so there is hope for the good guys.
Yeah, this is exactly why “Black Hat” or even “Gray Hat” SEOs laugh at “White Hat” SEOs and it really pisses me off.
But the truth be told, this has always been the case. What happens is Google makes a change to get rid of the crap, then the crappy people figure another work around and it takes another year or two to get rid of that crap. And it seems that even when they get rid of the crap, there is always still some stench lingering around :-)
Wil,
Great post.
Guess what people who rank on page 1 for those terms tell their clients as to why they should hire them? They tell them that they walk the talk.
But, Google has always said that links matter and their algorithm is getting better and better. Sure, it's not an ideal one, but then what is perfect in life?
I agree that SEO "walk the talk" is difficult without engaging into link manipulation (considering how other SEO's do it and we have nothing to show for it).
Thanks for this thought provoking post!
Thanks Wil - great article. This sentence is so important...
"People don't think about "algorithmic weights" and "over optimization" they believe in what they can see..."
IMHO, the problem is not Google but SEO experts which are trying too hard.
Maybe "other guy's" site had more natural grow, not forcing etc.
Everythign that is too unnatural is probably penalized by Google. And I like it that way.
Great post, and absolutely true. Creating great content and hoping that it simply makes its way to the top simply isn't enough.
Plus, I don't believe Google would make many friends if they simply discounted the value of inbound links and anchor text. They'd put a lot of SEO's out of business, and would turn Google search into an autocracy with "good" content controlled entirely by them...which is kind of against the whole concept of net neutrality.
I don't know. Something seems not quite right here. Are you trying to say that the three good guy seo companies you checked didn't have any anchor text link building? Considering that anchor text link building was pretty much "the main thing" for many many years, why would those companies be devoid of any evidence of it? It was only considered black hat to do it in a spammy way - on hundreds/thousands of completely irrelevant sites.
Surely the very high quality anchor text links that the 3 good guy seo companies were building for years and years must still be there, no?
Great post! thank you for sharing!
Hi Wil, great presentation you got here. I believe that quality links is more important that quantity links. For me, the best way to get other sites to create relevant links to our website is to create relevant and unique content that can quickly gain popularity in the internet world. The more useful and unique content we have, the greater the chances someone else will like and link to it.
If all search results in google were quality high click through rate sites, who would click on ads? And who would pay for ads? SERPs have shown more and more news, supposedly out of relevancy, and educational material, which leaves commercials the option to pay for ads (Wikipedia, anyone?) Then again, Google has been challenged on market share by the other engines, and the only way to have it both ways is to show commercial sites only when there is intent in the search query and otherwise showing news and resources.
Now, remember that every industry has different natural behavior online, not every industry is naturally very active online and so Google benchmarks the results to the competition on that industry and keyword. So if the benchmark is a bunch of bad sites, how can they get punished? It would have to be done manually, which is a cost center for the engine.
Great post Wil. Totally appreciated. 5 seconds test proves the whole story clearly.
oh man. this post. best ever. Thank you for spelling out what I've always known.
Didn't we learn anything from using exclusiviely one side of the force? you will limit yourself, unless you incorporate both light and dark sides. May the force be with you!
SEO is a lot like using the Force. I just force choke my competitors.
Great writing Wil,
perpetuating Yes!
why? Because they want to take over from any and all SEO companies.
This year has been the worst year, I like you have spent 15 years in this industry and I decided that any business built on or relying on Google is built on quick sand.
They are now biting the hand that fed them for so many years it won't be long before they fall from favor.
They are actively wrecking the SEO industry to suit there purpose. My advice get out now before you get trashed by
them.
SEO is an art. It`s a way of life, like Kung Fu. It`s all about distributing your resources in the most effective way.
Content matters.
This article is creating some sort of false problem.
First: "a good Seo Company" is like saying "do you guys know any good meteorologist that could predict the weather tomorrow?". Nobody knows exactly how Google works (except maybe the guys at Google Inc.) and everything is based on assumptions.
Second: seomoz.org's description says "seo software. Simplfied. | Seomoz". Search for "seo software" in google and seomoz is on pos. or 4 (on my browser , no preferences) , search for "seo" and seomoz.org is on position no. 7. I would say that there are some very good positions for generic keywords that I assume seomoz.org tries to rank on. Google does a good job in respect with "seo" and "seo software" since seomoz.org is really about seo and seo software.
Third: if you check with any free back links checker tool, Distilled.net does a very bad job in anchors and backlinks so maybe this why they are not ranking so well on keywords like "seo, ppc" and so on.
Conclusion: google does a quite very good job in bringing relevant results to users searching for various keywords. If one internet business sells laptops and wants to rank on "buying dolls" keywords than maybe it can complain a about not ranking well...
Note to author: learn some proper common sense SEO before showing tons of charts and stats that could explain why you failed in doing some SEO for your clients and also doing this on a site (seomoz.org) and blog (/blog) that really ranks well.
Great post! But its the bitter truth.
p.s. andy2012, I somehow agree with you... You have a point here.
Excellent post. Maybe the reason some of these sites are ranking isn't because of the spammy link to their site, but it is the quality links that they have to their site?
I love this statement - those "bad guy Scenarios" make me disappointed every day. And I have the impression that in the last weeks and months there is more and more complaint about it. I still hope that big "G" will start to penalize black hat behaviour.
Its great to see more people are coming up with complains about how Google is treating them, which I think Google is listening & hopefully makes necessary steps in improving their search results.
With this kind of results it get really hard to explain people the difference between black hat & white hat seo, but this kind of post definately help in educating people about the issue with Google & make them understand Google is still a program not a real human.
You've always been one of my favorite conference speakers. I remember you telling everyone to reverse engineer the link strategy of black hat SEOs, and find a way to beat them at their own game.
For example: maybe all of the links going back and forth between the top SEO companies look to Google, like a link network (Maybe not, I'm just being hypothetical.)
Maybe the reason the other SEO companies are ranking well is because their link profile is extremely diverse (even though their diversity is limited to low quality links….it’s still diverse.) So, maybe having linking root domains from websites outside the common SEO link circles will carry a lot of weight.
Again, I’m being hypothetical, so don’t stone me. I’m not suggesting we should stop linking to other SEO companies… I’m just trying to encourage people to think about how to beat black hatters at their own game.
-Bryant Jaquez
@bryantjaquez
Thanks Bryant! Let me go back to the lab on this...I gotta focus HARD on how to get links with anchor text in new ways that isn't spam, if I figure it out I think I'll be onto somethin big! But most ways are pretty well documented. I'll try tho.
Thank you for the post! We are one of those SEOs in Germany who do not try anymore to be on the first SERP with "SEO"...
Allow me a question. You say: "... I can't wait for Google+ to start impacting results more." On the other hand there is no G+ button on this page which links to SEOmoz on Google Plus https://plus.google.com/112544075040456048636 . Why not?
I think most of the websites linking back to your competitor's site are related to maths, software, programming so would'nt that mean that the backlinks are highly relevant?
Using Open Site Explorer has been a total eye opener on how a myriad of anchor text links from (mostly) directories helps companies gain ranking for competitive keywords.
Thanks for this post its extremely timely and one I intend to show a client in the same boat (they have great PR, getting regular mentions in national UK press and on mashable), a well ranked site (scores well with SEOMoz' tools) and Google blatantly ignores his site in favour of his competitors who have gone out and purely bought a score of paid cheap directory links (all using anchor text) - guess who is on the 1st page and who is not...
Great Post Wil... I am on the same side hoping the good to update its algos and use some very common factors (as mentioned above) to determine the quality and rank it accordingly.
I feel a bit low here but I have to admit that in the Internet Marketing industry (with reference to rankings) if you play by the rules you will end up eating the regular food but if you want some great food you have to either go against the rules or at least bypass some rules... for example quality over quantity.
I think Google now have to re-consider the ranking algorithm or else in the longer run people will end up building anchor links instead of building communities which will create junk in the whole eco system.
Its time, where Google have to change!
Completely agree with this post, working alongside a Blackhat SEO they seem to always get far better results which can be extremely frustrating. I guess the only good thing about quality content is that you do see a spike in visitors to your site?
Another thing that really grinds my gears is how much of a weighting Google places on domain names. This is making it hard for us Inbound Marketers trying to do the right thing.
My strategy for most clients starting out is buy a new domain name if you haven't got one of your targeted keywords in it.
Thanks for this post, Wil. I see examples of this almost every day--spammy, black hat, or less-than-honest sites who rank extremely well. I recently spoke with a colleague who was working on a very competitive keyword and noticed the #3 ranking site was using every black hat trick in the book. It's discouraging and frustrating to say the least, especially when we see people who are doing what Google asks get hit by updates while others remain the same.
It's discouraging to hear from people who say that the only way they've been able to produce results for their client and be successful is to use grey and black hat tactics.
I would love to see posts from people who have been successful using only white hat. Let's start talking about our wins and prove that ethics work.
When you actually dig down to this level, it becomes apparent that google has a lot more work ahead of itself to really deliver quality serps. A lot more! I don't think this is about any sort of conspiracy theories that they make more money with low quality serps but it is like trying to hit an ever moving target.
I would love to see Will do the smae study post Penguin to see if anything changed. Very curious. C'mon lets see it!!!!
Well I agree with you in a sense that we try to keep our hats white but blacks are winning the race but I believe these all guidelines that Google provided us are not only there guidelines but their Goals too. Although they have not yet reached that level but I am sure they are working hard on it. And when they will achieve those goals white hats will be the winners.
We see every day Panda updates that are targeting spammers. The good thing for being as a white hat is that whenever Google do any algorithm update we don't have to worry about the consequences. I also believe that Google has to consider others business benefits too such as the SEO companies and business benefiting from the search engine.
Pant! Pant! It took me most of the day but I finally read this article all the way through as I could see there was a lot of quality content in the comments. I am another that believes Google will one day remove the black hatters and that the white hat sites will rise like cream to the top. I also believe that content is king because I get most of my traffic from my content (seo or graphic tips) and people link to it every day so I rarely have to go looking for links. Those pages are not my main keyword focus but they bring me enough business regardless. And I advise the same to my clients and for "them" to do their own social networking.
There is no way I could bring myself to practice black hat tactics like non-relevant-mega-spam-link-buying as I can't gamble on client sites and I don't have any of my own I want to throw away either. While client sites aren't ranking as well as I or my clients hoped, none of my sites or my cients were hit by Panda or any other Google update in recent years either. And so I wait and hope and pray Google wins the spam-battle some day soon.
I was under the impression Google has massively devalued anchor text as a ranking factor this month in the Panda 3.3 update. i forget where, but one other SEO blog was talking about Google saying there was an old link factor they would be disregarding.
I have a client who was on page one for a relatively competitive term in the past six or so months. Because the client is fussy about their content (it's a corporation) I had no mention of the keyword within the site's content, only a mention on the title tag. I gained their original ranking, I am afraid to say, largely through anchor text links. In February they've slipped out of the top 100 for that keyword. This is in Google.co.uk
You might say this is my comeupance for a slightly dodgy tactic, but as others are saying, the fact is that linkbuilding with anchor text has been working. And you could argue the good guys are the ones getting their clients results. Google changes and so must our tactics. We have to do what works now..
While social signals and such count and Panda shows us content is a factor I have seen nothing so far that indicates links are not the dominant factor when Google calulates rankngs.
Some day that may change, but until then things like social media will be just one more thing we have to do while we continue to stalk those elusive quality links.
Excellent post.Realmente this is what has been sucediendo.Nada more real than what we observe it in our practical work.
I'm just waiting for an algorithm change. I think when social hits it will be interesting. Google is already using it on YouTube at least it's trying, but then comes to question will they be able to seperate the fake social accounts from the real ones? And how will that effect rankings. I think Google still has work to do. Don't even get my started on Yahoo...or Bing they both rely heavily on links still as well I wonder if they'll change it when Google does? Should be a fun year.
Wil... nice post only if you were building only good content and not seeing it get where you believed it should and just blamed Google then... you did your client a disservice.
I know you fairly well and know like me you found out all those many years ago that just building good content was not enough because the pipes are full of shit so you have to use the least deplorable of the other tactics as support/drano for the good content making sure it doesn't jeopardize its trust and repuatation.
Dave and I try to figure out who the competitor SEOs are and the time you came up in our profile I was impressed by not just the quality content but moreso what you did to support that content. It actually made the link proile look more natural. I saw that and knew I had to interview you!
It is not either or it is actually all of the above required to get the rankings needed to fulfill the site goals. One trick pony promotion has not worked for ages and those who sold it... knew it and should be ashamed. The other point that you made in a roundabout way is that Social isn't moving rankings(beyond persoanlized search) all your metrics show all these things mean diddly in comparison to anchor text and IBLs. Social are at best verifying other signals or triggering QDF related verticals beyond that it is foolish to think signals that give spammers stiffies could ever be seriopus ranking signals of signifigance.
Hi Wil,
If Google will continue this startegy then they will loose the trust from people and people will go with other search engine like yahoo, bing, ask etc.
I'm also late to the game, but I need to vent. I'm so sick and tired of these so called "Good SEO" guys calling the SEO guys that get results for their clients unethical and shady. Let me ask you something mr. white hat, pompous ass SEO guy... When was the last time Google cut you a check for your lilly white SEO tactics? Is Google your client?
Do you think it's Ethical to collect large setup and monthly fees from clients without delivering results and then hide behind your white hat seo mantra when you fail to deliver? I stopped feeling guilty long ago, once I realized my job is to deliver ROI for my clients and do what is necessary to help my clients rank on Google. As an SEO that is your job!! If you're not doing it, you'll get fired and they will hire someone who will get the job done. And who can blame them? You are more interested on what Google thinks than doing what is necessary to help their business.
Do you really think that Joe business owner cares that you spent a year writing good content and patiently waiting for content to naturally link, in order to maintain a good standing with Google? He doesn't have the time, patience, or budget for your utopian white hat mindset. Get me results or you're done.
Again, I'm just sick and tired of these so called white hat guys looking down at me for adapting and doing my job for my clients. I do what works period..end of story. If it works, Google is validating my techniques. Why else would they reward me? If they don't, I'll adapt and do what works.
So I say, you're the unethical ones..I'm blown away by some of the comments here by "the good guys" who are happily getting paid from clients, but aren't willing to do what is necessary to get their clients the results they deserve.
...and I'm so sick and tired of reading comments here from people who show absolutely no respect.
I would suggest you spend some time reading the SEOmoz Community Etiquette Guidelines and TAGFEE Tenets.
Having done that, if you find this community too "Utopian" for your liking, you have the choice to either respect the rules or make a graceful exit.
Oh...and you might want to start thinking about that adapting thing ... to quote a little universal truth from a long time ago:
"don't speak too soon
For the wheel's still in spin
And there's no tellin' who
That it's namin'
For the loser now
Will be later to win
For the times
they are a-changin' "
Sha