Item — HN Reader

"If you are hiring an external SEO agency, make sure they are providing you with complete transparency into everything they are doing."

Being someone who is not a SEO expert, I find it very hard to distinguish black hat from white hat techniques beyond simple basics. In software development there has arisen certain schools of thought for want of a better word, 'Agile' and 'Software craftsmanship' being two examples.

I would love for someone to put a name to their philosophical approach to SEO. Making it easier for practitioners and non practitioners alike to align behind professional approaches in a more informed manner.

It seems to me that there are a bunch of SEO techniques anyone could use but that most people would consider to be immoral or unethical, this is not a question of skill but rather willingness to act with a low ethical bar.

I seems to me that google is very keen to penalize unethical techniques in the long term and so long term practitioners and clients who take a white hat approach should gain greater success with less risk over time.

My challenge to practitioners who wish to set themselves apart ethically is that you come together and create a whitehat SEO Manifesto. What defines your values around doing to SEO? What are you NOT prepared to do?

2 comments

I was actually thinking of throwing something like this together at some point because people will continually get burnt by it time and time again.

It's sadly how I saw a lot of money being made in my consulting experience through clearing up other peoples mess.

As I mentioned in the post I am happy to help the guys at JitBit for free to help get them on the right track towards clearing this up because I hate seeing unethical places get away with this kind of crap.

As some very basic and high level advice you can do a couple of things to help yourself out. If you want to get a decent feel for someone before engaging them you should ask them to show you examples of clients they have worked on in the past. Take that URL and run it through a tool like Open Site Explorer, MajesticSEO or Ahrefs.

If it looks even a little bit spammy I would run the other direction because you are about to pay money to hurt yourself which is the worst of both worlds.

If they can't explain to you in a decent amount of detail exactly what they will be doing then you are about to get shafted.

SEO agencies are dying and so are SEO "experts", it's an industry that is now 95% bullshit. There was a time when optimizing worked because site structure and content was very poor. This is no longer the case, the web has evolved and most sites are already SEO "friendly" right out of the box.

It's such simple stuff that no expertise is typically required. Google is essentially emulating the end user, so cater to the user instead of chasing Google's tail. It's Google's job to figure out what the good content and relevant links are, literally and financially, so plan for the long term and let them figure it out.

ps. There are some markets such as large e-commerce/products/multi-location/etc that do need expertise especially if they messed it all up, but most consulting consists of "make friendly urls" and "write good content that people actually want to see".

95% agree with exactly this. I am more or less done with consulting personally for this reason. In fact as of last month I actively quit my consulting job and moved to South East Asia to work on development and start up ideas full time without any distractions and without crazy living costs.

I can't remember the exact link at the moment but I remember reading something from patio11 where he was saying that the reality is that unless you have absolute mega $$$ to spend then every SEO you can afford is going to give you advice like the above because so much of the industry is based on bullshit and regurgitated blog posts that someone came across.

All of the good ones are already off doing their own thing or are simply out of your price range.

The one thing I do disagree with is that there is no longer advice that goes beyond the level that you just described. Believe me when you get to a certain level of this it goes way beyond that. Go and ask 90% of SEOs how to map out the ideal IA of a large dynamic website for example.