Too much SEO can be a Bad Thing
or just because you CAN do some SEO does not mean you should.
I recently stumbled across a few SEO “incidents” that had one thing in common – like kids with a new toy – just because you can do some “search engine optimization thingy” doesn’t mean you should. Or read differently, too much of anything can be detrimental.
In the first instance, a business owner had heard that they should “get with the Google Places program”. I got involved only at the end of the story.
This business owner did get with the program – and did see results. All good so far. But then they thought, “if they had one address and one listing doing very well in Google SERPs, two would be better, and three, and four even better”…until there were nine. Yes there were now 9 different Google Places listings for this same business. The method to accomplish this is pretty common (easy to figure out). Each department could have its own address because it had a unique phone number (to validate the listing), and therefore each could have a Google Places listing.
And as you might guess why I have written about this instance, things took a turn for the worse. Interestingly, this client’s reflex in the face of being penalized, was to do even more.
The real solution was to delete all those spammy duplicates and wait. After a few weeks, things returned to a very respectable “normal” for the business’s location(s) in Google Maps search results.
But clients have a very hard time accepting this approach once they get bitten by the Internet Marketing bug.
Think about it! (you business owners)
How realistic is it to expect an ever-increasing number of visitors to your website? A small local business may only expect 3000 searches from what I call viable customers (those who will actually drive to your location) for that service/product in a month. Its unrealistic to want 10,000 monthly visitors is such a case. Someone 1000 miles away is not going to visit the store (period).
In trying to communicate this “frame of reference”, I recalled a post at Webmasterworld, a question asked by one SEO to the community was “What single thing would you recommend to improve search rank?” Approximately 50% of the responses were “Nothing”. Well I would temper that statement because that was a SEO talking to SEOs. For the business owner, solid SEO means doing the basics very very well. Make sure the website does not have errors or other nonsense that looks good to people (maybe) but inhibits search indexing of the site. This kind of basic SEO can’t be overdone. A perfectly search engine friendly website takes lots of work. But that’s very different from bullshit SEO, that can be overdone. Thats the kind of SEO that gets most uninformed and noob SEOs (and DIY-SEO business owners) into trouble.
Here is a good example of what I call Bullshit SEO: Individuals, who are clearly more marketing than SEO. They read the latest Google Webmaster blog about Places Reviews and its off-to-the-races. This automotive SEO video about google reviews about the in-store use of Google Places App on the iPad to encourage positive reviews from customers is a good example of more marketing than SEO.
Every webmaster knows that EVERY server logs IP addresses for EVERYTHING. So question: Google wouldn’t write a script to check for multiple reviews from the same IP address on Google Places/Reviews? Right! Maybe you won’t get caught everytime, because lets face it, Google wants a certain amount of activity to prove Google Places/Reviews is “happenin”. But do it enough, in the wrong way – and you’ll trip the threshhold in the script and you’ll see why…
Just because you can, does not mean you should.