Rand Fishkin: How many SEOs does it take to screw in a light-bulb?
Okay… Apparently Rand Fishkin of SeoMoz.org had to ask this question.
38? Maybe 39? Aha… 37. The magic number.
Rand’s team put together a series of questions regarding search engine ranking with the expert opinion of 37 “leaders in the world of organic search engine optimization”, it came down to the slew of opinions, strange ideas, and sometimes relevant commentary (and some humorous commentary too.)
“This document represents the collective wisdom of 37 leaders in the world of organic search engine optimization. Together, they have voted on the various factors that are estimated to comprise Google’s ranking algorithm (the method by which the search engine orders results). The result is a resource of incredible value – although not every one of the estimated 200+ ranking elements are included, it is my opinion that 90-95% of the knowledge required about Google’s algorithm is contained below.”
The list of contributors is impressive actually-
While I appreciate the effort by Rand and his team, the marketer in me feels very jaded. The whole thing reads with generalized words like opinion and estimated. On one hand I understand the very nature of the beast, sometimes search engine work feels almost artistic and instinctual… but rarely do I try to assign numbers to instinct.
Most of the time I have to toss out marketing reports and surveys like this one based simply on the fact that it is based all on opinion. I opened all of the commentary on the ratings and I felt like it was some sort of cosmic boxing ring, with every third person having an entirely different point of view.
I can laugh mostly because I’m not on the list, but it would have been far more informative if the group of experts had actually sat down and formed a consensus, rather than an argument. The “fluffy” nature of search engine marketing is sorely emphasized here as 37 experts continue to have points of disagreement.
Yesterday I wrote Effective Marketing of SEO Conferences, and one of the underlying issues was that the panels involved were things like “Is SEO Bull” or just flat out debate sessions about SEO. There seems to be a fundamental problem in SEO as numbers and specifics are clearly avoided, and as opinion and gut instinct take weight.
Other forms of marketing have been subjected to the consensus of popular opinion, but in this age of tracking and statistics, why is it that one of the most cutting-edge and technically savvy professions subjecting ourselves to fuzzy logic? Perhaps we should sit down and rationalize things a bit, detail more objective questions, be more specific, provide numbers, and even keep ourselves to a higher standard.
If 37 industry experts can’t figure it out, perhaps it is time to start inviting bona fide rocket scientists to read our analytics logs.
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One of the nice things Rand did in this report that I don’t recall was in the 2005 version was to calculate the amount of agreement within each factor. I think this alone was very telling as it helps to identify the areas where there is the most uncertainty across the industry.
I do think that hard, scientific answers are hard to come by in many of the issues where there is disagreement. This is because as more variant factors are taken into account by Google, the harder it gets to make a test case scenario that can be repeatable using the traditional scientific methods.
As more complexity becomes introduced into the system, it is become much more like meteorology than SEO. The more unknowns that even the best meteorologists need to account for, the less precise their conclusions. This is only going to get worse as so much data that Google may be using, or begin to use, such as toolbar usage, etc is for there eyes only.
Actually, the reason there is so much confusion and disagreement is very simple indeed: it is because succesfull SEO strategies are formed by constant trial and error (which is actually very scientific): and the reason they reach very different conclusions, is that there are many ways to skin a proverbial cat: especially when the only thing that really matters is that you get the skin off the cat (perform!) consistently.
Elementary, my dear Watson!