On the support forums occasionally (OK today) someone will ask that a post be edited to remove a link or company name for SEO reasons. Unless there’s a good reason for that (and SEO isn’t) then it just isn’t done. There are millions of posts on those forums; can you imagine if a small percentage of members asked for posts to be edited that way?
It’s not always necessary to edit The Interwebz
I am not a web front end developer. I don’t do “SEO”, I don’t at this time have any advertisements on my site. I post to my self-hosted WordPress blog for my own amusement and occasionally the amusement of my friends.
But just for giggles, let’s do a search on Google for my name. I wonder what comes up?
Huh. That’s weird.
The first hit is my Twitter page, followed by my Make/Support author page, a Polish biologist then a general who both died before I was born (no relation). Then there’s some images (hey, 3 of those are me!) and then my WordPress site. Ah, there’s my Flickr page. I was worried about that not being there.
There is nothing on that search engine results page pointing to the WordPress forums. That’s a shame. I’ve got *looks WOW* 10,772 posts in the forums. That’s not necessarily a lot by the way.
How did that happen?
Again I am not into “SEO” and I haven’t done anything to impact that SERP. I even had to look up what SERP meant to make sure I’m using the term correctly.
But my guess is that the results happened that way because those links are pertinent and each of those links have content that is updated. That’s all there is to it.
- I tweet everyday non-stop so it’s no wonder that popped up as the first hit.
- I post to make/support at least once a week so there’s that.
- Links 3 and 4 are cool and I like that my name is notable (even if the original spelling was Dębowski, ę is pronounced /ɛm/, w is a v sound, look it up).
The important thing is that I produce content and that’s why when someone looks up my name you get sites that I actually update.
So “SEO” magic isn’t real?
There are people who advertise and I assume make a living on SEO work and I am sure they know what they are doing.
If I had a site that I was selling something then I may be concerned that my actual site is 6th down from the top (skipping the images). If I were selling something then perhaps I’d use an SEO plugin. I’d also update my actual site more frequently.
Even without my doing anything special a search for my name shows the links that I expected to see.
My advice to people who want links removed from the forums or anywhere remains the same: if you don’t like your search engine results then change them. Produce original content on your own site. That’s really all there is to it.
