Famous Marketer Seth Godin Gives Bad Seo Advice
March 29, 2007
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If you don’t know who Seth Godin is, you probably don’t read a lot of marketing blogs or marketing books. He’s authored about a half dozen, including my personal favorite entitled “All Marketers Are Liars.” He’s spoken at Google and his blog was recently listed as the number 1 marketing blog in the world. Ok, enough with his bio; one of his recent posts greatly disappointed me, because he apparently doesn’t understand SEO. After looking deeply at his blog, I was horrified to discover some major downfalls. So I’m going to make some claims, show some evidence and put forth a logical case against his view point and I’m even going to slam his article on SEO as naïve, ill-contrived and most importantly, encouraging of a very expensive mistake for business owners. I’ve got nothing personally against him, but when someone that public publishes something so ignorant concerning a large part of my profession, it warrants a strong response.
First let’s go over his position. His post entitled “Shortcuts That Aren’t So Short” compares SEO to taking short cuts and basically makes the case you see in the following quote:
“Others spend time studying the algorithms of Google and Yahoo to figure out the very best way to jump ahead in the rankings for their blog or corporate site. Is it reciprocal links or careful metatags?… Hey. It’s not so hard. If you make great stuff, people will find you. If you are transparent and accurate and doing what’s good for the surfer, people will find you. If you regularly demonstrate knowledge of content that’s worth seeking out, people (being selfish) will come, and people (being generous) will tell other people. It turns out that it’s easier and faster to do that than to spend all your time on the shortcuts.”
Unfortunately, his position is misleading and can be potentially deadly for your business. I don’t need to use a theoretical example this time. This problem is so widespread that I’m going to give a REAL life example I worked on THIS week. That’s right THIS WEEK! It contradicts all the major purists’ statements against SEO, including Seth Godin’s. One of my weekly projects is for a financial advisor that just launched a new website and blog a month ago. The author is a former newspaper journalist; and he’s off to a prolific blogging start (he posts daily) and his articles are EXCELLENT. His current traffic level is next to 0.
The problem is his blog is designed incorrectly. It uses the same title on all the pages and none of his posts target specific keywords. Additionally, the blog doesn’t ping anywhere when new posts are added, so none of his posts are showing up on any of the blog search engines like Technorati and Google Blog Search. There are other issues as well, but that’s a simple beginning of what I’ll be working on with his site.
Basically his blog is invisible and nothing except fixing the design problems and targeting keywords is going to change that. He could continue to write all the GREAT posts he wants, but no one will be reading them. Why? Google has only indexed his front page and is never going to rank any of his posts for anything. He has great content, but no one’s reading it. What does he need? SEO. While I don’t like using that term, it is appropriate in this instance: he needs an SEO expert to rework his blogging strategy so his posts and blog rank on Google and drive new readers and new potential customers to his site. In the next month I’ll post detailed stats so my readers can see the gigantic traffic increases that are going to result DIRECTLY from my work with his site.
Not every example has to involve new sites or even significant design changes to make profitable gains in the search engine results pages. I recently changed 5 lines in the .htaccess and robots.txt for a particular website. That’s right, just 5 lines of code. It resulted in traffic increases of 20% with the raw traffic being 200 more DAILY visitors from Google. That’s a lot of traffic from changing 5 lines. So what happened? I told Google not to index the duplicate content portions of a particular website; among other things, this resulted in more page rank flowing to the internal pages as opposed to being wasted on duplicate content sections. Yeah, all that from 5 lines!!! Here is a link to a post by Shoe Money, a famous Internet Marketer and one of the top 100 bloggers according Technorati; recanting a similar story of changing only a few lines and seeing a big difference.
Now I’ll illustrate how SEO can help another HUGE A-list bogger like Seth Godin who already has an audience. Jason Calcanis, a very popular blogger, recently blasted SEO as bullshit and was met with a challenge by Neil Patel that said he could increase the traffic to Jason’s blog by over 20% by implementing some basic changes within only a few months. Jason, who already had a popular site, readers and a large audience, took the bet. Within two months his traffic was already up 20% and most of the changes recommended by Neil haven’t even been executed yet. You can read about that more at the link above. The unfortunate thing about this story is that Jason ended up getting SEO for free.
So now I’ll give my challenge (although I doubt he’ll respond) to Seth Godin: pay for my SEO services and I’ll increase your traffic by 20% or more (probably more like 40%) in 6 months. If I fail to have gains that substantial, I’ll give Seth all his money back. With all the increased traffic and subscribers I imagine even Seth Godin would sell more books and all that by implementing SEO and design changes.
Imagine if someone who isn’t already famous, who has to fight to get people to see their blog posts and is just building their online presence, takes Seth’s advice? They’ll be shooting themselves in the foot. Sure there are no magic shortcuts; you can’t just get a bunch of spammy links, but paying attention to keywords and using a design that encourages optimal search engine optimization has MAJOR positive effects when the other stuff is right too. It’s not a little thing, it’s huge and it can be the difference between your business website failing or being successful online.
Google is not as “smart” as people seem to think it is. It’s more like a 5 year old. You have to tell it specially what keywords and what neighborhoods to associate your site with. It WON’T do this automatically. Lots of sites with great content don’t have the rankings they deserve, and it’s usually do to SEO, design and marketing issues as opposed to content quality.
It’s also worth noting that Seth Godin’s blog is on Typepad and absolutely terribly optimized for SEO. If he didn’t have such a large pre-built audience, his blog would be mainly invisible. A few little changes would increase his traffic a ton, even with all the links and exposure he already has.
[tagsSeth Godin, bad SEO advice, search engine marketing[/tags
Sadly, it appears that Seth does see SEO as a shortcut, and as filled with tricks, instead of it being part of a firm foundation to build a site upon.
There are plenty of sites on the web from people capable of both creating great content and exercising poor judgment in how they frame that content. Seth’s is one of them.
Hi Solomon
As I’ve written before, SEO done by the right people for the right reasons is a great idea. My riffs are addressed to folks like Reed (see my previous post about their spams to me). If they had a corporate strategy of great site first, SEO second, then I think it’s quite likely they’d be succeeding today. As for your kind offer, I hope you’re offering it to everyone, not just me!
Not only will I offer the same thing to anybody who will take our advice, I challenge you to take us up on it!
I love your marketing books, but you obviously know almost nothing about our area of expertise: BTW, it is my opinion that whenever you take someone’s money and agree to do something for them, especially on a credit card - which is 90% of our business - you have guaranteed to do it whether you say so or not.
I am surprised that such an educated man would not do his homework before making such sweeping, incorrect statements about something he obviously knows so little about.
It would blow your mind what our service would do to your traffic! You are a scientific guy: lets do an experiment! You can write about the results!
Hi Seth,
My offer is to everyone, although the traffic gains and what I would claim would change depending on the particular site and if they agreed to all my changes. For example you can’t rank a brand new site for “cars”, unless it is absolutely remarkable and more importantly, extremely viral. If we don’t perform, we give the clients their money back, but that never happens. If a client is spamming or low quality, they’re not taking our advice in which case there is no guarantee.
I’m interested in ranking quality sites and working with companies and individuals to improve their online presence and better target new customers. Many people treat me like a spammer, because of ill notions they pick up from reading posts in marketing blogs like yours. I read your blog daily and I did read the Reed post. Although you may have written positively about SEO in the past your last two blog posts say nothing about it’s massive importance and positive effect for businesses, instead it diminishes what I do (incorrectly) which is bad advice, especially for small businesses.
Please take my challenge, I’ll increase your organic traffic as well as providing additional traffic from other sources. The gains will be substantial. You know what, I’ll SEO your site for free if you’ll tell the world the results. What do you have to loose?
Thanks to both of you for such quick responses, even if they’re different (well, 20% for everyone… no, not for everyone.)
The goal of my blog is NOT to get the maximum traffic nor is it to teach blogging by example. It’s just my blog, that’s all. What I have to lose (sp) is that I’d start focusing on something I don’t want to focus on. I know there are a hundred things I could do to make my blog ‘better’, but my simple goal is to have it as a place where I can write. Sorry.
It is a smart choice to bow out of this debate.
We do guarantee results and we do perform, every time: we can only be held accountable for results when our advice is followed in full, because the client will not rank otherwise.
[...] I wrote a blog post critical of marketer Seth Godin’s SEO Advice, there been a number of responses from the blogosphere. The most critical came from the Chief [...]
Same comment over at Active Rain, just duplicating here:
Solomon, you honor me with your angst. Thanks for the tips too.
I fully understood that you were using Seth’s name to make a point and market your abilities. I suggested your tone was pompous, which it appears is your modus operandi. That’s fine with me. If you got it flaunt it.
I also fully understood that your point was that SEO is equally as important as good content, I think Seth commented the same thing, but declined your offer of assistance due to his desire to “just write”
Wow, I got an auto track-back here. Now, I understand what predicated my fame here. Anyway, the impressive thing is not that SEO increased the traffic by 20%. It’s that blogging software got you 80% of the traffic that there was to be picked up on those topics. Wow! Considering the effort that goes into making a blog post, that sounds like a pretty good deal, don’t you think? Thusly, both Solomon AND Seth are correct. I wouldn’t want to give up 20% of my traffic.
Peace, friends!
I think a lot of the problem involves the generalities inherent in describing something complex like search marketing and then breaking it down into specific claims about individuals and hypothetical clients.
Seth has a large pre-existing audience and is well versed on promoting himself online, so 20% was my estimate for improvement on his blog. If you took a client who has much less technical competency (someone starting a blog for the first time and only partially knowledgeable on web 2.0 topics) like many (maybe most) small business owners the gains could be MUCH larger than 20%. So the proportion of traffic increase really has to do with the individual client.
I really do run into many clients (especially in the small business sector) that have serious problems in their approach to how they market themselves online. Gains in these areas can be much higher then 20%. Of course some of these concepts fall outside a narrow definition of SEO (which is why I avoid using that term when describing myself). I also run into people doing something deadly (and not realizing it) to their SEO strategy, which when fixed can also result in larger gains as well.
I want to repost part of my response to another comment of yours on this post (since it’s been very popular lately)
Mike, I’m glad you joined the conversation. I was a bit over critical in my posts regarding your response to my Seth Godin post, but this is a blog and I think it’s good to post with passion even at the expense of sometimes going overboard.
Nice to see you commenting and still here. It seems people have been enjoying this exchange, but the blogosphere did have some entries critical of me ( and my father ) for not encouraging more conversation, so welcome to the conversation Mike glad to have you commenting. I’d love it if Seth followed up too, but I may have burned that bridge, although I don’t hold anything against him, I own and highly recommend “All Marketers are Liars.”
I like this interchange. The reader should consider that, if you say anything at all, someone will dissagree, somebody will misunderstand, somebody may be offended, and you may typo: so what? I say, keep it up anyway! And, if you are good, who will say so if you don’t? Nobody!