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A Lesson Learned from the Pasternack SEO Contest
March 8, 2007 |
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Why is search engine marketing defined by diametric opposition? It seems
like for every question there are two extreme answers. And these polar
opposite viewpoints are held with a tremendous amount of passion. The
least questioning of our position can unleash a firestorm of
retribution. Blogs kick themselves into high gear as aspersions are cast
without a second thought. We rise passionately to defend our position,
questioning the pedigrees and mental capacities of our opponents. How
could someone be so incredibly dense to not see it our way?
Tempest in a Teapot
In the past few months, little has raised such a passion of opposing
viewpoints as the questioning of the value of organic optimization. The
verbal feud that took place in the blogosphere is well-known to most of
us within the industry. If you've been one of the few that has remained
blissfully ignorant of the David Pasternack (co-founder of Did-It) "Is
SEO rocket science" debate, count yourself fortunate. It's not so much
the debate I want to focus on, but the fallout of that debate because I
think there's a valuable lesson that we can all learn from it. As the
organic community rose to defend its collective value, Threadwatch.org
had the idea of launching an SEO contest. The premise of the contest was
simple. Whoever ranked highest for the phrase David Pasternack by noon
on March 1st was the winner. A Who’s Who of SEO’s rose to take the
challenge, using every trick in the book to try to propel their page to
number one in the Google data centers.
One Set of Results, Two Interpretations
Predictably, the tactics ranged from the white to the dark gray. The
winner, when all was said and done, was the page that have been ranking
previously for a chef in New York also called, coincidently, David
Pasternack. There was a post on Dave Pasternack’s Did-It corporate blog
that said, with a decidedly sarcastic tongue-in-cheek approach, “See? We
told you so! SEO isn't rocket science and after you guys threw the best
you could at the algorithms, the page that was there before the contest
was still the one ranking number one on Google.” That's one viewpoint.
Ironically when you look at that same page of search results, the
opposing side also claims victory. Their contention? They dramatically
changed the appearance of a search results page, which shows that SEO
does have tremendous value and that it's not a "set and forget”, one
time endeavor. Search results pages are dynamic environments and if you
hope to do well on them you have to be prepared to take a long-term
view. That’s the other viewpoint.
See? The same set of search results but two dramatically different
opinions of what happened in the contest. And both sides swear they're
right. In my opinion, they’re both right, or, at least, a little bit of
each argument rings true. The fact is the page for David Pasternak, (the
chef, not the cofounder of Did-It), has been around a long time and this
Pasternak is a well-known guy. Google is doing what it should be doing;
putting the site first that most people would be expecting to find at
the top of the listings.
The SEO side is also correct. They did dramatically change the look of
the page. Other than the top ranking page, the rest of the results
looked decidedly different than they did a few weeks before, prior to
the contest. So rather than quibble about who's right and who's wrong in
this debate, let's look at the takeaways and see what we can learn.
The (Web) Guerilla Approach
One of the most interesting entries was a late one by Greg Boser. Greg's
approach leveraged the existing notoriety of David Pasternack, the chef.
Greg’s approach was not so much based on technical tricks (although they
did play a role), but rather a very clever strategy that was aligned
with the inherent nature of people who frequent the Web. Greg didn't win
the contest, but he came within a whisker’s width of doing so. The fact
was, Greg reluctantly entered the contest late (more irony, both Greg
and Dave Pasternack called SEO contests stupid, but both entered) and he
wanted to time his entry so that it climbed the search engine ranks and
claimed the top spot within 12 hours of the closing of a contest. He
wanted to show that not only could you control your organic visibility,
but you could do it with a fair amount of predictability. His timing was
a little bit off, due more than anything to variations in the various
Google data centers, but he definitely showed that with the right
approach, you can influence search results.
To me, the interesting thing in this was not the technique he used but
the approach he decided to follow. He played the innocent bystander
card. He appealed to human nature and understood how people would react.
The genius of Greg's approach was not in how he used redirects or turned
on the “link juice”. Those were all techniques that were part of the
execution and yes, they had to be done right, but they only mattered
because they were aligned to a strategy that was very clever. He out
thought his competition, rather than hammered them to death with a bag
of black hat tricks. He knew that if he drew attention to the real Dave
Pasternak, the one that was having his rightful visibility usurped by a
temporary blip on the online “buzz” horizon, he would have a better
chance of gaining support because he was appealing to an inherent human
value that we all generally share. We like to protect people, especially
if they've been rightfully wronged in some way. Our best instincts rise
to the surface and we want to rush to the aid of the victim. In this
particular instance, the way to do that was by sending a little "link
love". Greg threw out some irresistible link bait. And what was
particularly impressive about Boser’s entry was the way he almost timed
it down to the hour, letting the momentum of his entry roll right up to
the final moment and coming within one datacenter of actually winning
the contest. Did he usurp the original Dave Pasternak page? No, but he
really shouldn't have. That page had already earned its link love and
should have been right where it was, on top of the listings.
The Value of People Smarts
Recently, I wrote a column about the future of SEO and SEM agencies. And
I said that the time may be coming near where the technical wizardry
that SEOs tend to rely on may have limited value. One thing, however,
that will never have limited value is the ability to understand how
people think and work and then to be able to translate that into an
online reality. That's what Greg Boser showed in this contest. He
understood what makes people tick and then anticipated how that might
play out online. That type of approach will always have value in the
online world. Over time it may translate itself from gaining results on
a search engine to building buzz on Digg, creating more presence on
blogs, or any one of the other thousand and one places that we would
like to gain visibility online. But the ability to take an understanding
of human nature and then to be able to translate that anticipated online
behavior is an incredibly valuable commodity.
Greg, there are many things that we might not agree on, but in this
particular contest, you showed that SEO may not be rocket science, but
it can certainly be a social science. |
Gord Hotchkiss
President and CEO
Enquiro Full Service Search Engine Marketing
Search Engine Positioning by Searchengineposition
Blog: www.outofmygord.com
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