SEO Isn’t Killing Content Quality — a Response to David Diamond

Over the past few months, I have started to find an increasing amount of content opposing search engine optimization that ranges from claims that search engine optimization is dead to claims that SEO destroys good content. This weekend, as I took a bus to Boston, I encountered an article from David Diamon of CMSWire arguing the latter. David, this response is for you, but I hope that others who oppose SEO will take a moment to understand SEO from the perspective of someone who optimizes websites for a living.

While I agree that SEO can corrupt search rankings by encouraging websites to write content that appeals to search engines, your article paints a narrow-minded picture of SEO. The issue at hand is much smaller than search engine optimization as a whole. Rather, this issue pertains to some of the strategies that are being used for website optimization.

You start by saying that search engine optimization sacrifices quality of content in order to improve search rankings. This is entirely inaccurate. The #1 search ranking factor is content — some will argue that the top ranking factor is external links, but the best way to gain external links is to write great content, so I choose to view quality of content as more significant. I always tell my clients to write great content first, and optimize second. A great example of this is Grace Lilly’s article about what Taylor Swift can teach us about social media. Grace wrote what I would submit as an outstanding article, and then proceeded to optimize the article afterwards. Four out of every five SEO-related articles that you read will use some variation of the phrase, “content is key”, and those that do not are typically written by disreputable sources. As you indicated, there are commonly used SEO tactics that sacrifice quality of content in order to improve search rankings. Adding keyword-rich text is a great example of this. An article that contains the phrase, “search engine optimization” ten times is likely to receive a higher ranking score than an article that uses the phrase “search engine optimization” three times, and, chances are, the article with ten uses of the phrase is, by nature of its keyword reputation, probably lower quality than the latter article. However, with the 2013 Hummingbird update, Google introduced once facet of the future of search engines: semantic search. In essence, this update indicated Google’s intent to provide their search algorithm with the ability to understand the intent of an individual’s search. While I won’t delve into details — Rand Fishkin, one of the thought leaders of SEO, provides great analysis on this topic — search engines are now beginning to categorize relationships between keywords. For example, Google is starting to understand that “hamburger” and “cheeseburger” are very closely related phrases, and thus, may pull up a place that claims to have the best hamburger in New York City for someone who searches “best cheeseburger in NYC”. What does this mean for the future of SEO? The blog article that mentioned “search engine optimization” three times could still receive a higher ranking score than the other article by using other related terms like “SERP” or “inbound marketing”.

Next, I want to address the second and third points of your article, about depth of content and content recycling. While it is true that a 250-page book about inbound marketing will rank lower than a 250-word article about the same topic, the intention of this is to provide the reader with very specific information on their search enquiry. Most people who have a question about the best dog food to buy do not want to find an entire book on dog food — they would rather find one article that specifically talks about one or two dog food brands.

This brings us to the topic of keyword research. Articles that are written about very specific topics (ex. best pizza in New York for under $3) will often receive more search traffic than generic articles about pizza. This is due to the fact that ranking for a phrase like “pizza” requires your article to be one of the ten most relevant pages on the Internet about pizza. While this phrase, on average, receives 673,000 searches per month, your articles needs to be deemed better than 99.9999 percent of all pages that talk about pizza, or your article will never receive a search engine visitor who searches for that word. On the other hand, the first term about affordable NYC pizza may only get 100 searches per month, but to receive any website visitors, your article only has to be better than half of the pages about this topic. To tie in my issue with your point on content recycling, those who write articles about top tips for SEO are writing about a topic that has been so broadly covered that they are unlikely to get any organic traffic from it — believe me, I have written an article sharing my 5 SEO tips. Those who do rank for these terms are the original authors of that content, because in most cases, they are the authoritative source that all of the content recyclers look at. Content recycling can be useful for social media purposes, but has minimal benefits for search engine rankings.

To address your point about websites today being “optimized” to include “no useful content”, this is entirely inaccurate in terms of being a method to improve search rankings. While including a strong call-to-action on your website — an email signup form for those who want your e-book on social media tips — can be a great method to capture emails, Google’s search algorithm is still at a stage where including large amounts of content on your homepage will boost your search rankings over those with minimalist homepages focused on design — this is actually a major issue for websites who choose to have a simple homepage, with content buried deeper in the site. When you speak of these websites receiving high search rankings, are you referring to paid search rankings? If so, I will keep this simple and say that paid search results are not ranked the same way as organic — or unpaid — search results. To add to this, websites that truly contain “no useful content” will not rank highly on Google, unless they draw a significant amount of page authority from another channel (i.e. getting a large number of visitors from social media), but this is rare. As for hiring optimizers to write content focused on improving search rankings, this is also a common tactic for improving rankings. However, what topics will those optimizers be talking about? The topics that the website is about. Furthermore, we discussed the issue with recycling content above, so the best SEO-related strategy is to have the website owners write great content, and then have the SEOer optimize that content.

You argue that, although it is not their fault, the Google search algorithm is at least partially responsible for this manipulation of search rankings, due to the nature of their algorithm having not yet been perfected, and seem to view SEO as nothing more than a way to manipulate flaws in this search algorithm. However, any smart businessperson knows that, in any industry, the industry leaders are not focused on where the industry is, but rather, where the industry is going. Rand Fishkin briefly touched on this point in one of his recent articles, in which he joked that 40 years from now, the Google search algorithm will be a mind-reading drone that perfectly places a searcher with the appropriate website. Joking aside, Google’s search algorithm is becoming more intelligent by the day, and as it becomes increasingly intelligent, webmasters who engage in these manipulative, black hat SEO schemes are being discovered and severely punished. Those “SEO experts” who try to increase search rankings by incrementally staying one step ahead of the Google search algorithm will eventually be discovered. These “experts” are the reason that many people, yourself included, have an issue with SEO. However, this is not true SEO. True SEO — sometimes called white hat SEO — is writing really good content, and then jumping through a lot of hoops that improve the user’s experience on your website. Every update to the Google search algorithm moves us in the direction of better search results. The job of an SEOer is to look at these signals and determine where Google wants their search algorithm to be, not try to trick it.

DISCLAIMER: this article has been optimized to rank higher on search engines.