Whalespeak

A lot of SEO is about putting the cart before the horse. Traffic before content.

Recently, some SEOs have been creating fake stories and articles as a way of increasing eyeballs on their product or service.

I think this has got a bit backwards.

SEO used to be about stuffing keywords and amassing links by any means necessary. But as these things have become less important and filtered out by the important search engines, the internet marketers have turned to linkbait and viral campaigns.

The reason Google doesn’t want your ability to crank widgets to affect the ranking of your website is that it makes Google useless. It’s not that they are promoting ethics necessarily, they just want to build a tool that provides useful, relevant, interesting or timely content to users. And they want to do that because (drum roll) that’s what users want. Users like you and me.

When it gets to the point that SEOs are creating fake content to lure people to their sites, isn’t it just a whisker further to get that content to be real? Or at least relevant?

The cart before the horse is this: you’re trying to get higher traffic so you create something that will pull in the numbers. Wrong. You create something useful, relevant, interesting or timely and you will get traffic. And the great thing is, for as long as search engines are around, that will always work.