The Transcript

Three Misconceptions About Modern SEO That Confuse Content Marketers

Brian Clark: Hey everyone. Welcome to the show, as always. I’m Brian Clark, founder and CEO of Copyblogger Media and today we have a very special guest.

I’m really excited that not only was I able to convince this very busy, smart person to appear at our conference, Authority Rainmaker in May this year but as a little bit of a warm up to that, we are going to have a conversation with him today about search, SEO and Google. He is one of the most knowledge people in the work on all of those good topics.

Danny Sullivan is the founder of Search Engine Land, Marketing Land and is Chief Content Officer at Third Door Media. That’s right Danny, isn’t it?

Danny Sullivan: That’s right.

Brian Clark: That is correct.

His Search Engine Expertise Dating Back to 1995

Brian Clark: I’m just going to kick it over to you a bit because you have been doing this for so long, that I think a lot of people don’t realize how early you started paying attention to search engines. So take us back a little bit.

Danny Sullivan: Sure. I was actually a newspaper reporter back in the early 90s and had left to go and start doing web development with a friend of mine because we had seen the Internet and wanted to be part of it.

As part of that, in 1995 we had clients that we would list and get put out onto the web and we would promote them to the search engines but nobody really understood how they worked. And one client, was like “Why am I not at the top of the listing?” because I didn’t really know and no one actually knew. So I took some time to go through and do some research and try to see what had some of the common things were that caused people to rank tops or not rank tops and published all that out there, as what I called a Web Masters Guide to Search Engines.

I did this to try and help people understand some of the common things that they should be doing and it just rolled along from there and I’ve been doing it since.

I am the founding editor of Search Engine Land, where we try to cover everything that is happening in the search marketing space, and we also have Marketing Land, where we expand on covering digital marketing because they are not so separate anymore. People who are search marketers a lot of the times want to know what’s going on with digital marketing and you have digital marketers, who need to know search marketing. So we wanted to cater to the broader audiences as well.

Brian Clark: Absolutely. I think a lot of people are familiar with your conferences, Search Marketing Expo (SMX) and I think I spoke at the Marketing Land conference, which was really excellent. What else does Third Door Media do? Are there other lines of business?

Danny Sullivan: It’s primarily conferences and we have the SMX shows that you were at. And thank you very much for that.

We do one social media oriented show that runs in the fall in Las Vegas and we also have our MarTech (The Marketing Technology Conference) series that launched last year, which covers the marketing technology space. And then of course, the two websites, Marketing Land and Search Engine Land.

We also have a marketing services division, which is where we have contacts of people who are wanting to get in touch with different people, if you are an advertiser or whatever. So if you’d love to reach people who are involved with SEO and what not, then you can go through our marketing services division. They look at our audience to see if there is a possible match. For example, we can get messages out to let people know that you have a white paper that you want them to know about and if those people choose to say, “I want this specific information,” then they can get it.

Brian Clark: Excellent. So with the MarTech conference, Scott Brinker is working with you guys on that. Is that correct?

Danny Sullivan: Yeah.

Brian Clark: So that’s coming at the end of March, so let’s make sure that we point that out. Do you have the details on that? Boston, right?

Danny Sullivan: The first one we did was in Boston. The next one is happening in San Francisco, right at the end of March and that’s going gangbusters. It’s a big, huge exploding space where people are interested. You know, there has been talks about the idea that the next CIO will actually be your CMTO (Chief Marketing Technology Officer) because things are merging together so much.

Brian Clark: It’s so important. The tools are getting more powerful. Often the complexity, the application or execution require that hybrid of technologist and marketer. We’ll make sure we link that show up in the show notes.

The Biggest Misconception About Google and SEO

Brian Clark: :Let’s get to the topic at hand and as someone who’s been trying to make sense of it all for 20 years, you know better than most, that SEO, search, Google, is all a big mess of confusion to a lot of people. We have a lot more people commenting on what works, what doesn’t, what’s the best approach to SEO, so I want to focus on that with you. And really let’s drill down into the stuff that people are getting wrong because there is a ton of things that we need to do to do things right but if you are coming at it from the wrong perspective from the beginning, it gets really difficult to do well.

In your mind, what do you think right now, post Hummingbird, is the biggest misconception about Google and SEO?

Danny Sullivan: You know, it probably hasn’t even changed in pre-Hummingbird and for a lot of people for years and again, it will depend on who you are. If you are an advanced SEO, this probably doesn’t apply to you but if you are somebody who maybe thinks you are an advanced SEO and you are not, or you a playing with it, then it may do.

And that’s the idea that, “I am going to somehow reverse engineer the algorithm and I am going to go and find the exact right formula. I’m just going to manipulate the hell out of it, and rank number one.”

I think that’s a misconception because to me, SEO has never been about trying to outwit the search engine. It’s been about trying to understand what the search engine likes and make sure that you are friendly to it. And those may sound to some people as being exactly the same, right? Well understanding what the search engine wants, isn’t that outwitting it? And I would say, no.

Search engines, if you go back through time and you try to look at all the changes they have done and all the signals that they want to reward, they are consistently trying to do one thing, and that’s figure out what human beings like about websites and reward the ones that are deserving of it.

And so, as an SEO, the more that you are trying to create a side that is not natural in that regard, or you are trying to do things that go beyond what a human being would like, the more likely I think that you are going to get yourself into trouble and you are going to miss the point of SEO.

So good SEO is doing things that humans want. That means like, when you talk about why you want to make sure your site is crawlable, in part it’s because a human being might want to find a page that you have on your website. If a human being can’t find the page because you don’t have any obvious links to it, then the search engine itself isn’t probably going to find the page for the same reason.

And therefore, it’s either not an important page or there is something wrong. So then the wrong SEO move to that is, “I’ll create a site map and I will make sure that the site map is all a bunch of hidden links. Then I will be able to feed it all these pages that I want the search engine to know, but I don’t want the human beings to see.”

Where as better thinking SEO is, “Oh no, this is an important page. I want to make sure that there are visible links that go out to it, so that people can locate it.” Having said that, there are ways for you to provide the actual site map link files and you should do that as well. To some degree those might be invisible but those things were not really intended or designed for the idea that, “I’ll make up 100 pages, one for each city that I do car rentals out of, so that I have a page for each city and then I kind of go with it from there.” One of these kind of nightmare situations that you sometimes see.

By the way, links is another example of that. People understand that the search engines like links and they still do like links. It’s still important to have good link profile pointing at you but then the wrong headed SEO move or misconception is, “Well if I just need some links, I will go out and buy them or use a service and I will get a whole bunch of them. Or I’ll concoct a way to generate a bunch of links for me very quickly because maybe I’ll do an infographic and I’ll embed my link in there with certain keywords I’m hoping to be found for.”

Whereas a more natural approach is, “Yeah, maybe I did the infographic and I left it for people to link how they want to.” And surprise, when Google went through and did their Penguin update, these were the kind of things that got hit. The idea that people who had managed to spend all this time building up links with exactly one word leading back to their website, might have found themselves getting hit. And part of them getting hit is because it’s not really natural. That’s not how people normally link.

Brian Clark: Yeah. That’s an excellent topic because it seems to me that after Penguin and it getting incorporated into the broader algorithm, the whole concept of trying to look natural just makes that type of linking building and/or buying, a tougher job.

Meanwhile, people like me, and I guess really like you, you were a journalist, that’s how you came to this trade. So you’ve always been a content guy but the thought of building links like that makes me queasy because I’m a writer guy. I’d rather create something for people and hopefully it works that way. But, we hear everything about signals, social signals and the metrics and all the data that Google has. Google+, Google Analytics etc but the link still matters. How does Google really factor in the fact that because of the mainstreaming of social media, people don’t link like they used to?

Danny Sullivan: We don’t know. And by “We don’t know,” and I don’t think they necessarily even know what their long-term strategy is. I have described links as being like the fossil fuel of search ranking signals and they still work. You can pump them into your search engine, literally, and it will get you to perhaps where you want to go but it’s very, very dirty polluted, there’s a lot of junk and a lot of crud.

So in order to make this sort of like a tar sands thing that we are getting now, into something that you can actually make useable, they’ve got to punch it through a bunch of filters. And that’s what we have seen Google do over the past decade, is add more and more ways to filter out all the crud from the link signal. Penguin being the latest of it. It’s like our super duper centrifuge. We’ll put them all in there and we’ll try and see what still sticks to the wall and that can be used. And so that leads over to what Hummingbird was all about and why that’s important.

With Hummingbird it was as if Google literally took their search engine apart. I mean, people hear about a Penguin or they hear about a Panda and they identify that with penalties and they get that’s our filters, so when they hear Hummingbird, they sometimes think that it’s somehow one specific type of thing that Hummingbird is doing.

Hummingbird was an entire rebuild of their search engine and it was as if they said, “Yeah, we know this link signal is really bad, it’s this bad fuel. We’d love to have our solar panelled car. Or we would love to have a car that can run on multiple kinds of energies.” So that’s what they did. They built a search engine that supposedly can do that.

It’s hard wired in there, so if they want to use solar energy or let’s say that social signals are a solar clean kind of energy or whatever, it can do that. Or if they want to use liquid natural gas, they can pump that in there and they have got a fuel cell, and they have got all these different things that are wired in to the core architecture, now so they don’t have to try and bolt stuff onto it. But by enlarge, it’s still using gas, or it’s still using links. But what they may be able to shift to, that’s what we are all waiting to see.

I long suspected that they would shift over to using more social signals. It doesn’t mean that I think they get away from the link signal entirely and it doesn’t mean that the social signal is less polluted, or is somehow not polluted. I think any signal that you get out there can be gamed but I think with the social signal there is a lot of advantages to it.

I did a piece once, where I talked about “when everybody gets the vote” and the idea that social allows you to do that. So Google uses links because when they started they thought, “Well links, it’s sort of like the democracy of the web and when you like something, you link to it, so we can count up the links. We will weight the links. We’ll do some other things but then that way kind of everybody votes. And I said, “If you think links are like the democracy of the web, then that’s like thinking democracy in America was fine when you had to be 30 years and older, white and land owning, in order to be able to vote. It’s democracy.”

Brian Clark: Right.

Danny Sullivan: Because most people don’t link.

Brian Clark: Yes.

Danny Sullivan: Like in the way that they’ve traditionally done.

You don’t go to a great restaurant or have a great experience with a product you purchased and think, “This is wonderful. I’m now going to go out and write a blog post about it. And, I’ll make sure I write the blog post about it and I’ll double check to make sure that the platform that I use doesn’t some how put no follow on all the links and prevent them from passing credit.

Plus, I’m savvy enough to think, that I’ll also make sure that I use a very descriptive link to just kind of help this extra site because they did such a great job.” It’s like, “No, nobody does that.” So you’ve got some who will go out there and do that but there’s a huge amount of great votes if you will, that don’t get counted because that’s not how they link. Although, the way people do tend to link is with social actions. “I like this restaurant. I literally will like it on Facebook.”

Brian Clark: Yep.

Danny Sullivan: Or, “I’m at a place and I checked into it.” Or “I saw something that I liked, so I followed them on Twitter and I tweeted out that I like this sort of stuff.”

I think social offers an important new kind of signal that can be used to figure out what is good and what should be...