Opinion

The SEOscerer's Apprentice

Have you ever considered hiring an "SEO expert" to "improve your Google rankings"? I don't mean the type that advises you on how to ensure all the express and implied metadata on your website is correct. That seems a reasonable thing to do, and it shouldn't take a magician to help you get it right.

No, I mean the type who want to actively manipulate your rankings through external means. Those "external means" seem more often than not to involve activity that is at best unethical, like sending spam or stuffing download sites, and possibly illegal, like using botnets and unauthorized site access.

One of the communities I help out recently heard from someone who had engaged an "SEO Expert" to artificially boost their status. Just like the novice in the Sorcerer's Apprentice, it seems to have got out of hand. They were begging for help to undo the damage:

"We found thousands of links pointed to our site. This was caused by an SEO team we hired. We wanted to get our templates shared to more users via your site and hired an SEO team to upload our templates to your site. But they are too aggressive and put too many links inside."

Exactly why the community plugin and template repository had accepted all these fake templates is a great question for another time. The point is that stuffing hundreds of links into fake templates or plugins and uploading them to a community repository is sociopathic and ought to have rung alarm bells.

The lesson is that SEO "experts" who offer to game open source communities for you to "improve your rankings" are scammers, and using their services is bad for your business. You might see an instant boost in some sort of metric the SEO scammer offers to improve, but any sort of sociopathy will eventually come at a social cost. The reason is is that Google has both automated and manual checks for breaches of the guidelines on site linking. Once you have unleashed the demon of spammed links to your website, you are only a short distance from a manual action against your site, and then you will need to try to unpick the damage that has been done.

This template-stuffing issue isn't the only example. There are a constant stream of requests to the moderators of mailing lists begging for removal of old postings that were sent by or on the advice of "SEO experts" and are now poisoning search engine ratings rather than improving them. These requests mostly have no effect, since list moderators rarely agree to remove old posts – see the Apache policy for example. Even if they do agree, the many mirrors of community mailing lists are unlikely to be affected.

At the heart of the problem is the confusion of metrics with the results they purport to illustrate. Gaming effects that seem to move metrics in the short term is never smart; one day the rules will change, and your virtual gain will become a real loss. The best solution is to not play the game in the first place.