GET ON TOPIC PAYNE!
As I was sitting at the Starbucks on 1st Avenue sipping a hot chocolate (nope, I don’t drink coffee) and eating an oatmeal raisin cookie (warmed up, of course), a couple of jurors from across the street came in and sat at the table next to me. As I was feverishly typing away on a site review for my 3rd and final interview, the two jurors finally asked what the heck I was working on with such fervor. I thought it a weird question, but I told them about the site review, about search engine optimization, search engine marketing, page rank 101, and, surprisingly their eyes didn’t glaze over (though it’s not a good pick-up line at a bar, btw…per experience). In fact, one of the jurors said her son was a programmer at MSN and he always talked about how spammers were always trying to outsmart his team of engineers (hell, her son probably had the secret code to Microsoft’s search algo and I totally missed it).
The other juror said something that was very interesting, “So a search on a word such as ‘porn’ on the internet would be really difficult to get top listing in, right [rhetorical]? So, who does search engine optimization for that site? Wouldn’t that SEO be the best SEO in the world? After all, it’s probably one of the most popular searches, and it’s a very broad search too.”
I thought about it for a second and, although it is an overly broad sweep, it does have some merit. Then I thought for a moment about the SEOs that I knew, the blogs I visited, the forums about SEO I frequent, and yet nothing. Not even a whisper about the ‘p’ word. Oh, sure I did find (after some looking) a forum post that Rand Fishkin responded to in 2004 (he’s anti-‘p’ word, btw) and a few dated mentions on some blogs. But it seems to be the STD of the SEO industry. Nobody wants to get it or even hang around others that may have it. Weird!
So . . . I did it. I typed in the ‘p’ word. I’m already going to be sitting on a hot rock in the after-life, so what is one more sin at this point? I expected to see a list of sites that would bombard my computer with pop-ups, pop-unders, for Norton Anti-virus to start freaking out, etc. What did I find? A list of fairly nice sites (ahem, content aside, sort of). I want to use caution on keyword usage, endorsements, etc., so I won’t mention the site by name but I will mention that the site that pulls up #1 has covered most of their bases in regards to white hat SEO. The title tag isn’t what most would recommend (it’s a list of key terms versus a headline style), but they do a great job of H tag usage, meaning they actually use the H tag for keyword emphasis versus style. I have seen so many sites lately that use the H tags for style that I am about to go crazy–use CSS for style and H tags to underscore what the page is about.
The p-word site utilizes alt tags and title attributes. And Matt Cutts would be happy to hear that they are even using ‘nofollow’ tags on outbound links. If you click beyond the first page, you’ll see they do a good job of having a decent taxonomy as well and they flow the link juice of that taxonomy to the important key terms on the page. Are they perfect? No, but frankly they are better than a lot of sites I saw at SES San Jose 2007 during site reviews, and even better than at least one site review I have accomplished in the past week.
Why doesn’t anyone EVER talk about this? Who is doing this industry’s SEO? I have discovered that the SEO industry is very small. But I feel it is very friendly and accepting as well. I don’t think anyone would blacklist someone for talking about this stuff (if, I’m wrong…it was nice being part of the community while it lasted, lol). But, yet nobody dares talk about this very large vertical market. I find that very odd. We are all adults in the SEO industry, so shouldn’t we be able to discuss this in the open air? Are most SEOs really religious? Are most SEOs really conservative? From the party pics I have seen, I wouldn’t say that. I’d say the SEO community has a lot of fun, frankly.
A couple of questions:
- Would you tell anyone if you did do SEO within this industry?
- Why or why not?
- Who does openly do SEO in this industry?
- What are your general thoughts on this topic?
Note: My ex-wife is Secret Service and, for a time, worked on the team that caught people posting photos, videos, etc. of underage persons. It was so bad the agents working in that division undergo a routine psych evaluation. Furthermore, I have a 4-year old son that means everything to me, and I’d never want to have him view any adult site. Laws and regulations are set up for a reason, and I promote their use. It keeps society better.
P.S. To my personal frustration, I see that one of the few single-word terms that actually has higher traffic than the p-word is ‘lyrics’ (Google Trends). And, to my continued frustration, the sites that pull up are spammy, spammy, spammy. So the p-word industry has grown up and wised up, but the lyrics industry is still annoying. I really need to take a look at finishing something I started a long time ago in a galaxy far, far, away. 😉
Brent D. Payne
