SEO and Quality Content

I was talking with a woman last night about her experience with SEO. She had some consulting work done for her by an outside SEO firm who quickly set to work driving traffic to her site. She thought all was well…until several weeks later when she was blacklisted on Google because the company who did her SEO work was blacklisted, too. One of their SEO “techniques” was comment spamming. Because of this activity and the blacklisting, her results on Google plummetted, and she has yet to gain her pagerank back. She’s contacted Google several times and the best they can do is to tell her to “switch domains”.

I then went out on a limb and suggested that much of SEO was bunk. We’re building social systems on the Web, and Google has shown that social systems leave artifacts that, when measured, tell us what we want to know. For the most part, Google weighs their results depending upon incoming links, which is a definite social artifact. The old tricks (old SEO) of keyword farming and the like don’t work on Google, because they are not socially supported…if we can build systems based on the input of many sites, the power to game the system by a single site decreases.

What does work, of course, is good content. Even the folks at Search Engine Watch make sure to pay homage to quality content, as in this article by Frederick Marckini: Why Quality Content is Key for Search.