Chris Garrett’s Personal Blog

When people are faced with an experience they try to explain it as best as they can. People need a cause and effect. For any apparent effect we will search for a cause. Unfortunately many systems are not fathomable with a small amount of data, particularly systems as complex as a search engine result.

A magicians job is to hide causes or plant apparent causes in plain view so that the audience is baffled and believes the magician really did pull a rabbit out of a hat. A search engines job is to give the best result possible while hiding the exact algorithm so people don’t try to subvert it for their own ends.

When an SEO tweaks their meta tags and gets an improvement in results they think “a-ha, I have unlocked the secrets of Teh Google, woohoo!”, or when they add too many keywords into a page title and their result drops they think “oh-no, penalty”. Or maybe when lots of sex related blogs drop. That kind of thing.

In famous experiments scientists have determined that based on purely random rewards people will come up with their own superstitious explanations and behaviour. For example in the 1987 Wagner & Morris “Kids” experiment a mechanical clown randomly deposited marbles. Discovering the marble and not seeing any visible buttons or levers the children believed they had caused the event some other way and so began to construct “strategies” for getting more marbles such as smiling, pulling faces, jumping up and down, etc. While the behaviour had no connection with marble delivery, coincidental re-occurrence re-enforced the behaviour and the kids believed in the illusion of control and stuck to their winning formula (superstitious ritual).

I know many people disagree and “the death of SEO” has been trumpeted
falsely many times, I do wish people would listen to people like Brian and stop looking for SEO secrets, tricks, voodoo, and start tuning into search marketing instead. Yes I know some professional SEO experts base their tactics on more scientific method, most do not however.

Make your content worth while and appealing, construct it in a clear and memorable way, get the word out. If your stuff is remarkable people will remark on it. That means links and traffic.

Simple advice but still many SEOs are doing the web equivalent of jumping up and down or trying to charm a robotic clown to improve their search results.

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This entry was posted OLD on Thursday, January 4th, 2007 at 12:47 pm and is filed under archive. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.