… Top 2009 SEO Smackdowns … the countdown continues …

#3. Rand v. Whalen: Is ‘Focus on Users, Not Engines’ Terrible Advice?

Rand Fishkin

The provocation:

“the old adage Do what’s right for users and engines will reward you with higher rankings … [is] utterly false and tragically misleading.” — Rand Fishkin, Terrible SEO Advice: Focus on Users, Not Engines

The counterattack:

[Rand's article] “could potentially set SEO back at least a decade” — Jill Whalen, Is Choosing Search Engines Over Users a Fatal Flaw in SEO?

The above claims are exaggerated, but there’s a significant conflict brimming beneath it.

Getting past the linkbait and hyperbole, here’s the argument:

Rand: “SEO is a task that requires paying close attention to the needs of both users and engines.”

Jill: “… SEO tactics that Rand claims are for search engines are actually for users as well. And until people start thinking that way [that is, of "SEO tactics" solely from a user POV] they’ll continue to make bad SEO decisions for their websites.”

Jill gives examples such as how and why to do keyword research:

Jill Whalen

“make sure your website fits the searcher’s original search query (those pesky keyword phrases you researched) to a tee. After all, you’re not doing keyword research for search engines as Rand suggests, but because you need to get into the mind of your target audience.”

As for the things Rand says he wouldn’t do at all if he were solely focused on users, Jill simply says don’t do them:

“On the other hand, XML sitemaps and the use of Webmaster tools or nofollowing internal links for PR sculpting are indeed things that one would do just for a search engine, and offer no value to a human visitor. But guess what? They aren’t, in my opinion, any value to SEO either (other than as diagnostic tools).”

As usual, Danny Sullivan’s comments to Rand bring things together pretty nicely:

“I think you forgot about the more typical webmaster out there …  the very last thing you want to do with that group of people is introduce them to SEO by talking about XML sitemaps. Or worse, quadrangular link buidling. Or zebra pages.

Telling them to do things that they think will please humans is EXCELLENT advice for the confused novice. …

Where the user advocates go wrong is overstressing this as a good, fundamental piece of advice and being all hardline that you never act as if there are search engines. Of course there are, and of course you do things specifically for them as well.”

I’ll go with that. Jill makes strong points. ‘Focus on the user’ is an excellent starting point. But I think Rand’s right that it’s often naive to stop there. Speaking personally, whenever we consider a change to the site that might affect SEO I double check with another SEO Expert. And sometimes we figure out a better way to make the change that won’t hurt (or that will even help) our SEO.

Ultimately BTW I’m guessing this is part of  a larger worldview issue. If you believe in KISS, and that doing what seems like the right thing will lead to success, you’ll probably side with Jill. Those of us who believe that chaos and complexity rule the world are probably closer to Rand.

For more on this issue, including a case study from Answers.com, see Rand v Whalen: Focus on Engines or Users?

The Top 2009 SEO Smackdowns:

#5: Barone v Godin

#4: Arrington v Demand Media

#3: Rand v Whalen

#2: Barone v Scoble

#1: Sullivan v Powazek

Focus on Users?

Rand Fishkin started a nice debate when he attacked the old canard “For SEO: Design for Users not Search Engines.” Rand blasted that as terrible advice. Search Engine Land attacked this twice: Danny Sullivan took Rand on in the comments section, and Jill Whalen blasted him in her weekly column, saying that Rand’s piece “could potentially set SEO back at least at decade.”

Danny’s argument with Rand was more limited, and IMO they’re both right around the same place on the issue, but they differ over which side’s extremists scare them more. Danny makes a good point IMO that the first piece of advice to a novice is to first focus on the user experience, and not on advanced SEO tactics. Danny’s last paragraph I think largely restates Rand’s point without Rand’s dogmatic and challenging (read: linkbaiting / comment-baiting) tone: “Where the user advocates go wrong is overstressing this as a good, fundamental piece of advice and being all hardline that you never act as if there are search engines. Of course there are, and of course you do things specifically for them as well.”

Jill Whalen, perhaps playing the same linkbaiting / comment- baiting  game as Rand, paints Rand as the extremist and takes the other extreme herself. She misrepresents Rand as saying “he called putting your users first, ‘utterly false and tragically misleading.’” when in fact Rand admitted that “SEO starts with the user (of course).” Rand’s central point is “SEO is a task that requires paying close attention to the needs of both users and engines.” He does not claim, as Jill suggests, that SEOs should ignore the needs of the user. Jill then really goes hyperbolic when she worries that Rand could have set SEO back a decade. No offense, Rand, but if you want to set SEO back even a few weeks you’re going to have to do a lot better than this.

Rand presents nice charts but I’d like to focus on a case study of my company, Answers.com, because this is an issue that I grapple with daily. I’m sorry Jill, but it’s not as simple as you make it sound, and I’m glad Rand started a discussion on this issue.

Here’s where I agree with you, Jill:

• Probably the most important driver of our company’s success is the first experience  of the user who arrives from a search engine. If that user bounces back to Google too often and too quickly Google may frown upon our fine site. For the same reason, if a Google engineer role-plays as a Google user following a Google link to our site, I need him or her to be satisfied with the experience.

That may sound the same as “focus exclusively on your users” but it’s far from it.

First, you need to think through the actual flow that’s driving your business. Note in the bullet point above I only mentioned the satisfaction of the user who arrives from a search engine, and even there I’m most concerned about his or her first experience.

A funny thing follows. On the UGC portion of our site, that user’s experience is primarily determined by the quality of the content on the page he or she lands on. It happens that to increase the first experience of the Googler I may need to compromise the user experience of other users (or users on other pages) to drive those users to improve the content that the Googler is going to land on.

Let’s discuss our Category Pages. Googlers rarely land on them. So they’re effectively optimized for 2 things: driving users who land there to improve the content that Googlers do land on, and to get our content pages indexed and ranked. Similarly, our home page and our internal search results pages have trade-offs between the user satisfaction on those pages, how those pages’ users can increase the satisfaction of the users who get to our content pages, and (in the case of the home page) how that page drives page rank to our content pages.

Even on our content pages, we’re most concerned with the key driver of the user’s satisfaction, the quality of the content on that page. But what about the footer, for example? When Matt Cutts announced at SMX Advanced that Google had changed its approach to internal NoFollow, I knew we were going to have to reconsider our cool new footer. Did we really need 4 separate links to Legal pages? Separate links to our different downloads and webmaster tools? Should we just have faith that the tiny percentage of users who would appreciate the extra footer links would provide sufficient benefit to offset the cost of diluting our flow of page rank? Sorry, no.

Finally, if people think we can get 5 million Answered Question pages and millions of reference pages indexed just by focusing on the user and letting the SEO take care of itself … I’m sorry, but I think you’re being naive.

In summary, I think most of the SEO community is on the same page. The first law of SEO is to satisfy the search visitor. But you’re being simplistic if you think it ends there. Shameless plug: also see my YOUMoz post on the Zeroth Law of Writing for SEO., currently #2 in Rocking on YOUMoz.

What do you think?

Image courtesy of http://www.flickr.com/photos/cdharrison/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

YOUMoz just published a post I wrote a month ago The Zeroth Law of Writing for SEO.

YOUMoz is the Guest Post section of SEOMoz, a leading SEO site started by Rand Fishkin (disclosure: who has done some consulting for us). Got to hand it to them, they’ve really nailed this UGC angle. They have a big enough readership (and a big enough SEO base) that authors and consultants who want to establish themselves donate the content in the hope of getting discovered. They also allow live links in the post, so you can get some SEO value for your site. This is the kind of using links as currency that Google seems to accept.

It’s funny, I’m involved in one of the world’s most successful UGC sites (WikiAnswers) and I’ve been writing on this site, yet I get goose bumps whenever I think that other people are reading and commenting on my thoughts. So SEOMoz, you’ve built a nice win-win-win where you, your readers, and the guest authors all benefit through the social creation of quality content. Nicely done.

If SEO is part of your life and you missed Rand Fishkin’s session at SMX Advanced a few weeks ago, you now have their must read Updated SEO Policies Based on Correlation Data (where Rand says the comments section is now also filled with important info) and a video where Rand essentially interviews one of the numbers guys behind the study, Ben Hendrickson (whose bio page is worth skimming if you’re into geeky deadpan humor).

The real story is the study. AFAIU SEOMoz has the most link data of any site besides the search engines themselves. And they’ve been working hard to see which factors correlate best with SEO rankings. The post is well written.

Some thoughts on the video:

• Funny how just showing their numbers guy made me believe their numbers more. Like those old commercials with the actor in a doctor’s coat, except for real. Believe the messenger, you’ll believe the message.
• I love watching people who are passionate about numbers and statistics. Too many people (generally the people that aren’t good at stats) think that you can either have a heart and soul or understand (and even enjoy) stats.
• The best way to tell a real stats guy from a fraud? The real thing can’t help repeating the limitations of the numbers. Correlation doesn’t prove causation. They use cautious words like “presumably” that drive many salespeople batty, but one of the marks of real statisticians and scientists is how they acknowledge and even embrace the limits of their knowledge.

Ben was funniest when he said “Google doesn’t actually use MOZRank (SEOMoz’s formulaic approximation of Google’s Page Rank). If we changed the MOZRank for SEOMoz, which we can do since we produce the number, it won’t actually help our site show up higher in Google.”

Sorry to pick on Ben, but I also laughed when he referred to antidotal evidence, a nice new Bushism or verbal typo that I guess means a piece of evidence that fixes a poisonous problem. I think he meant anecdotal.

Anyway, great study, good video.