SEO is astrology 2.0

The almost certain demise of PayPerPost got me thinking again about Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). Their advertisers were promised an SEO benefit, google saw through their buy-search-engine-position-by-proxy scam and zapped their ass. Damn right too – SEO is a scandalous profession.

SEO specialists are the astrologers of the internet age. The only difference I discern is that most SEO experts believe in the truth of the advice they’re giving. I suppose that gives them a touch more integrity, though it also makes them a touch more stupid than their stargazing brethren. Both professions, if you can call them that, exist because our reptilian brains find it hard to discriminate between coincidence and consequence.

Let’s try an experiment. A thousand people in a room are asked to toss a coin ten times. It’s a contest to see who can throw the most heads in row. Let’s make it a financial contest. They all pay £1 into a pot, and there is a guaranteed prize for anyone who can throw five or more heads in a row. Not five heads in total, but five in a row. Tricky, eh?

How much should that prize be? It must be pretty unlikely, right? A big prize must be on offer, perhaps the whole pot. Maybe no-one will be able to claim it.

Does it surprise you to learn the prize for throwing five or more heads in a row would only be £9? That’s right, nearly 11% of participants are expected to throw five heads consecutively, nearly 50 people will throw six in a row.

But what has this got to do with SEO consultants?

Well, if you took the 46 (or so) people who threw 6 heads in a row, and asked them how they did it, you could be sure that some of them had technique. One of them would tell you it’s important to throw the coin to exactly the same height each time; one of them might tell you to cross your fingers; another that it’s the way they flicked their wrist. All of them of course would be wrong. It’s a coincidence that they achieved an unlikely result, not a consequence of anything they did. There’s no way you can pick which of the 1000 players will win the prize in advance.

And SEO? Most SEO consultants sell themselves on their past record. I did for years. I had rules of thumb, and metrics and tricks and techniques. I read all the right forums, and used all the right jargon. No-one ever knocked my record. But honestly, I was a fraud. The truth is, once a site is moderately well-structured the rest is luck. I once managed to achieve the equivalent of six heads in a row and that guaranteed my ‘expertise’ – I was expert in the same way the 46 coin-tossers were lucky. Not inherently, but by reputation.

It’s pretty simple to structure a site so that the search-engines are receptive to it. It doesn’t take much expertise or indeed much time. After that you’re on your own – if people want to link to your site, they will and the site will improve in rankings. If they don’t, you need to do something different. Um, that’s pretty much it. Honest.

Oh, and don’t go and do anything stupid or immoral – like the PayPerPost advertisers were attempting. You’ll get caught, because it’s not good for the rest of us and Google, at least, cares about that.

You might as well consult star-charts as SEO consultants to improve your search engine rankings. But then, perhaps I’m too harsh here. I’m likely to be much more cynical about these things than you. I’m a Scorpio, after all.