Probably the most controversial SEO blog you'll read all week
Aka: ‘Why following SEO best practices might actually hurt your rankings’
Digital marketing is an industry filled with intricate ideas and influential personalities. This inspired me to ask a question:
Is SEO ‘best practice’ absolutely necessary for dominating the SERPS, or merely a shallow goal that causes you to bypass better opportunities?
Further to that, what even is ‘best practice’? I mean, who defined what that is — and why is it so widely adopted by practitioners?
What is ‘best practice’?
To explain this, I thought I’d better start by pulling the definition from the Oxford dictionary (which redirected me to Lexico, for seemingly no reason):
“Commercial or professional procedures that are accepted or prescribed as being correct or most effective.”
So, this means that it’s a way of doing something that most people see as the best way.
If I were to ask a group of SEO professionals about what they perceive to be best practice, I’m sure I’d get terms like title tags, word counts, and domain authority.
I think the general consensus is that the most commonly-accepted way to optimise a website is to make it appealing to the search engines.
The key benefits of best practice
Despite being somebody who got their career off the ground by not following what others do in order to set myself apart, I understand that having a widely agreed “best practice” has its positives.
This can bring a sense of reassurance to both the practitioner and their client.
I’ll explain:
Security for practitioners
One of the things that I love about SEO is that there are so many unknown factors. Google looks at over 200 ranking factors and keeps them a secret.
This means we’re not only having to deduce what they are, but also which ones are the most important - and in which scenario. Google has admitted that the priority of each ranking factor can change from industry to industry.
When you first start working in SEO, improving the ranking of a web page can feel like some kind of dark art. It’s very strange and it can be easy to feel as if you don’t know what you’re doing, or you aren’t doing the right thing.
Best practice gives newcomers a starting point to launch from. There is comfort in having a clear path in from of you, as you feel secure knowing you’re doing work that will hopefully bring positive results.
Whilst SEO is never a guaranteed thing (read my article on bad SEO agencies for more on that), you can feel more confident when copying the practice of experienced professionals.
Security for clients
Best practice is also beneficial for clients, as they can feel more secure with their investment.
A client who has at least some familiarity with SEO can find comfort in the knowledge that the people they’ve hired are following best practice.
It’s a reassurance that they’ve hired the correct practitioner and, as a result, there is a potential for success.
The problem with best practice
As with anything in life, there are negative parts to blindly accepting guidelines that you haven’t had any experience with.
There’s the decision on what “best practice” is.
Searching for best practice is a good idea, don’t get me wrong. Attempting to define what is right and wrong, then sticking to what’s right, is what any good person wants to do.
However, the issue stems from something I mentioned earlier: the search engines don’t explicitly tell you what they are looking for on a web page.
This leads to eternal debating amongst even the most respected SEO professionals.
One often-debated topic is whether Google uses click-through rate as a ranking factor. Google staff have denied that it is a factor.
However, in February this year, Britney Muller from Moz found an interesting statement on a Google document that seems to confirm it as a ranking factor for Google:
The jury is still out on that one!
If experts that we turn to for guidance are unsure amongst themselves on what the important ranking factors are, then their widely accepted best practices could be leading us all down the wrong path.
Then there are the ‘differences’
The thing about best practice is that it suggests there is only one path to success and all other methods are wrong. The truth is that — in SEO, at least — there are many ways to increase traffic.
One of the things that often gets discussed as a top ranking factor with Google is links. However, if we go back to 2017, Gary Illyes from Google actually stated that “there are tons of top results that don’t have links at all.”
This was in response to an SEO practitioner asking about links being one of the top three ranking factors.
In the same Twitter thread, Gary had also stated that the top ranking factors vary and it “very much depends on the query and the results which signals count more.”
What he’s saying is that for each query that is made, the so-called “top three” ranking factors are different.
The point I’m trying to make here is that we can’t, theoretically, suggest that there is a definitive best way to optimise a page if the ranking factors are weighted differently for each individual search query.
‘A’ way to win business
Some SEO agencies offer free audits and a page 1 ranking guarantee as a way to get a sales meeting with a new client.
In these audits, there’s usually a lot of doom and gloom where they’ll tell you your content isn’t up to scratch. Unfortunately, it’s rarely ever anything that important.
Things like a lack of an H1 tag on a terms and conditions page, or a missing robots.txt file on a small website, are hardly going to make your website jump from Page 60 to Page 1. But these audits will use those flaws, and the client’s lack of interest or knowledge, to instill fear in the client.
The reality, as said before, is that adding alt tags to the two images on a privacy policy page won’t skyrocket your traffic. No matter how much the try-hard agency might push that idea, it’s just not the case.
And finally, ‘cost’. The standard thing with businesses, especially smaller ones with limited budgets, is the cost. The thing about best practice is that ticking all the SEO boxes can prove costly.
If your SEO agency creates a robots.txt file just for the sake of it, it’s not a worthwhile or wise use of their time. I’ve seen plenty of empty robots.txt files that have been created by less-than-stellar SEO “experts”.
The use of resources and finances when following best practice can result in more important tasks being relegated or outright ignored due to the constraints.
These tasks that could have made a legitimate difference don’t get done, and you end up with a frustrated client.
How was SEO ‘best practice’ formed?
Deciding on whether SEO best practice is helpful or not depends on two things.
Firstly, there’s the way that it is followed. As mentioned before, factors such as resources, time and finances can lead to people not following best practice properly, making it more of a hindrance.
The other thing to consider is how the best practice was formed.
The thing about SEO is that there are so many methods that have been developed and shared over the years. It is down to the individual person whether they trust or reject each method.
Does this mean that SEO best practice doesn’t even exist?
The idea of a formula
The Internet is full of highly detailed and genuinely valuable SEO guides for beginners.
They are useful for getting you on the right track if you’ve never tried optimising content or a website before. Who wouldn’t want an understanding of how search engines work and how you can do well by them?
What’s more of a challenge with these resources is not the actual guides themselves, but how SEO practitioners approach them.
In reality, they should almost be treated as if they are a car manual. They tell you how the car works, what the warning lights mean and look like, and how to solve common problems when they arise.
When you have this information readily available to you, you’re much more confident about using, maintaining and repairing your car.
The thing is, these car manuals only give you basic information that you, an ordinary human, need to know. Nothing too complicated.
With these SEO guides for beginners, it’s the same thing. But the trap many fall into is treating these guides like the be-all-and-end-all. They don’t cover every aspect of SEO, yet some will expect the guide to bump their website to the top of Google’s rankings.
This then causes you to ask a question along the lines of:
“How is it that a competitors website, with thin content and a non-existent backlink profile is ranking higher than my own, well-optimised website?”
It turns out that the answer is that search engines don’t always work the way we expect them to. This goes for both beginners and experts.
By attempting to follow best practice, we are merely trying to follow guidelines. Those guidelines were created by an SEO expert that, as discussed before, doesn’t definitively know what Google’s ranking factors are and how they’re weighted.
To put it another way, it’s like buying a particular pair of running shoes because your local running forum told you it’s the best one.
They might actually cost more than they’re worth and could cause injuries. Running shoes offer all kinds of different support, so you may end up buying a pair of sprinting shoes (which offer little support) when you’re actually planning to do marathons (which requires shoes with lots of support).
Unless you experiment with different types of running shoe, or if a running analyser confirms that they suit your running style, goals and foot shape, why would you take that suggestion as the ultimate solution?
Unless you have definitive evidence to back up the claim, it would be very unwise to assume it is correct.
The truth is that search engines are complicated. Whilst it is common knowledge that nobody outside of Google knows what all of the ranking factors are and how they individually work, I also doubt that many, if any, of the Google staff themselves, possess this knowledge.
Perhaps this is why there have been numerous conflicts in the past?
Anybody who says that they know how the algorithms work and in what way for each search term is very much mistaken. Either that or they are lying in order to win more clients.
The lesson learned here is that whilst these guides and cheat sheets are great resources, they are just a starting point. They are designed to hold your hand as you enter the swimming pool that is the SEO world.
Once you’re in, let go and start to swim and explore on your own. Test, measure, make mistakes and always learn from what you’re doing.
Influencers
Reading the word “influencer” has probably sprung up images of makeup bloggers endorsing products and those poor souls trapped at Fyre Festival in your mind.
Except for a few entrepreneurs who are trying to push their latest online Udemy course, the SEO community talking on social media and in forums is mostly trying to share information in an ongoing journey of improvement.
While intentions may be to genuinely help others or simply raise their own profile, the results are the same: There are many “experts” in these spaces pushing their views on what SEO “best practice” is.
I will say now that I fully support and praise professionals who wish to share their experience and knowledge with others. It’s a selfless and commendable act.
The problem is more what we do with the knowledge these experts have shared.
Becoming an SEO-influencer is almost a little too easy. I mean, how does one decide who is a credible person and what influences us to pay attention to them?
Our online identity can be pretty much anything we want it to be. I could tell you right now that I have 15 years of experience in digital marketing and some would believe it. Suddenly, I’ve become an SEO influencer.
On top of the challenge of questioning authority, there is also the differing opinions of SEO influencers. There are many well-respected, legitimate SEO professionals who make sure to properly engage with their followers.
The advice they give is based on their years of experience. They aren’t just pulling information from out of the air, yet there are other SEO professionals with a similar career journey who would completely disagree with the advice given.
Who do you trust?
This actually reminds me a little bit about an academic epiphany I had whilst studying guitar (yes, you really can get a degree in the guitar) at university. I still follow and believe this, even today:
For every argument in this world, there is an equally convincing counter-argument.
Whenever I get involved in an SEO best practice discussion, a tweet is one of the most common forms of evidence used to back up a claim from my peer:
“[Insert SEO influencer name] tweeted to say that click-through rates are the most important ranking factor.”
All of a sudden, this becomes pure fact and it spreads. Fast.
The next morning, marketing agencies hold meetings to discuss how they will be changing their practice moving forward. Blog posts are written and teams are updated with this new insight.
The issue here is that people are blindly following a method and accepting it as “best practice” just because [insert SEO influencer name] said it.
Whilst whatever has been said might have had a positive effect on that SEO’s own website, or a specific client they worked on, we can guarantee that it will be the case for all other industries.
Best practice seems to be passed down in an almost parent-child manner. As children, we blindly accepted and believed anything that our parents told us. As junior SEOs, we trust and believe what our seniors say as the truth.
If our seniors are blindly following what they see on Twitter without any testing or questioning, then the industry almost becomes like the blind leading the blind.
Suddenly, we’re surrounded by correct and incorrect information, with no way of filtering out what to trust and what to disregard.
Just as a quick note here before moving on, whilst this section was about questioning tweets from SEO influencers, I should point out that tweets from Google executives like John Mueller and Gary Illyes are safe to believe.
However, that does not excuse you from putting what they say to the test. Bad joke time: Do you know what ‘A/B Testing’ stands for?
Always Be Testing.
I will accept any laughs of pity.
What does ‘bad’ best practice look like?
There are many “best practice” rules that get thrown out all the time. All of them should be questioned, yet here are a few that are often accepted without any challenges from practitioners.
Some of these can be quite harmful to your campaign. But make sure to question what I’m saying and put it to the test!
Title tag character limits
The rule here is that you need to keep your meta title under 60 characters, otherwise you’re hurting your rankings.
I definitely hear this common myth from less experienced SEOs more often than veterans.
Whilst I do acknowledge that truncation happens on both mobile and desktop SERPs, it varies between devices. And I don’t just mean ‘mobile and desktop’ devices. It can vary between different phone models, as they have different screen sizes.
Below, I’ve included a truncated page title in the desktop Google SERP.
Not the ‘…’ at the end. This indicates a truncated title
The guidelines offered by Google (which is often a great way to disprove a fraudulent SEO influencer) state that we should “avoid unnecessarily long or verbose titles, which are likely to get truncated when they show up in the search results.”
This is where the myth comes from: an SEO found that 60-characters was the limit before meta titles on the Google SERP was truncated. But only specifically for those titles and the device, or devices, that person used.
There are two ways to explain my theory on where that myth came from. The first way is simple, in that the Google guidelines don’t mention a character limit anywhere.
The second was discussed by Moz (which I did also test myself). Their explanation was that “there’s no exact character limit because characters can vary in width and Google’s display titles max out (currently) at 600 pixels.”
What is being said here is that your “character limit” can increase if you use letters that take up less space on the screen. If you look at the space an ‘I’ takes up compared to a ‘W’, you’ll see what I mean.
60 characters that consist of mostly ‘W’ will take up more than 600 pixels, whereas sixty characters that consist mostly of ‘I’ will take up a lot less.
Despite this so-called “limit” of 600 pixels, you shouldn’t restrict yourself. As reported by Oncrawl, Google still looks at the title even beyond where it is truncated.
This is an opportunity for you to potentially boost your rankings beyond your competitors who are limiting themselves to 60 characters, which could still mean a truncated title.
However, it should be considered that truncated titles can look a little messy on the SERPs and may affect your click-through rate.
Again, make sure you experiment with different title tag lengths. Test, measure and do what is best for the individual website.
Always have a robots.txt file
When an SEO company offers a free audit to new, potential clients, you can probably assume that they will check if there is a robots.txt file.
In the report, they will tell you that there is no robots.txt file present and that it’s bad for your website. A bad agency won’t go any further into it than that because they don’t actually know what they’re looking for within the file.
What is the file asking crawlers to do?
Is the file even necessary?
Having a robots.txt file can be useful, but if you add one just for the sake of it, you won’t make much difference, if any, to your ranking.
What I mean by “adding one just for the sake of it” is having an almost empty one that tells all crawlers they can access the site to crawl. It does nothing, as the crawlers intended to do that anyway.
If adding a robots.txt file to your basic website is named as an important task, you can probably assume that the practitioner is blindly following “best practice” without any thought or consideration.
Either that or they decided that “robots.txt” sounded complicated enough to make themselves sound knowledgeable and are using it to win your business. Be sure to question the actions that SEOs want to take. Often, bad agencies won’t expect to be questioned and stumble very quickly.
Disavow all unwanted backlinks
Oh no, here we go with this one.
I swear that some of the staff at Google (John Mueller, I’m looking in your general direction) have nightmares about the Google Search Console disavow tool.
There are three things you need to know about the GSC disavow tool:
Google already has the capability to identify and ignore bad or spammy links without you using the disavow tool, as reported by John Mueller in a Google Webmaster Hangout. This means you don’t need to use the tool unless you are seriously worried or want to deal with links you are personally responsible for (such as ones you paid for).
Google doesn’t like the disavow tool and aren’t keen for people to use it. For these reasons, they deliberately make it difficult to find. The only reason they have the tool available is that link-obsessed SEOs kept asking for it.
Using the disavow tool improperly can easily ruin years of hard work very quickly.
The disavow tool is something where Google has been consistent in their answers. Since 2012, Google has strictly told SEOs to only use the tool for negative links that you intentionally built.
However, SEOs still constantly use the disavow tool for all links that they’ve deemed ‘unworthy’ or ‘negative’. The answer to this can be best said by Google’s own John Mueller:
Blindly following “best practice” and disavowing all the spammy links you can find simply uses time and resources that could have been better used elsewhere.
You are simply re-doing a job that Google Penguin had already done ages ago.
In a worst-case-scenario, you may inadvertently disavow helpful backlinks because you didn’t understand where they came from or just thought they were harmful.
Your word count
I will be the first to admit that I once totally fell for this one. I have since learned from my mistakes.
The myth here is that your copy needs to be of a certain minimum word count in order to rank well. The actual number is debated and can range from around 200 words by SEMrush in their “Ultimate SEO Audit Checklist”, up to 1,900 words according to a study from Backlinko.
The thing is that this isn’t particularly accurate. This varies from page to page rather than industry to industry. It just depends on how many words it takes to properly answer the searcher’s question.
As an example, I asked Google: “what is the weather like in San Diego” and the top result contained over 700 words.
The second result had under 200 words.
These two pages are ranking first and second, yet they have completely different lengths of copy on them. One summarised the answer in a simple table, whereas the other went into more detail about the history of San Diego weather and more.
It’s all about providing the answer to the question and satisfying user intent. One page is more suitable for people who want a quick answer, whereas the first result offered insight for those who wanted more information.
There’s a lot more to writing copy than closing your eyes and bashing a keyboard. Writing well is even harder.
Setting minimum or maximum word limits is a distraction for any copywriter.
If you want copy that converts, having unnecessary amounts of text that doesn’t provide any value will hinder your progress towards that goal.
Final thoughts
Best practice in SEO doesn’t really exist in my eyes. Unfortunately, there is too much variation and too many unknowns.
However, I do believe in good launch pads. I mean the basic “SEO for beginners” guides that are all over the Internet. They provide a good starting point for those new to the industry.
They help to provide a feeling of safety and confidence in the early days. We can speak to potential clients about the work we are doing with some knowledge to back up our claims. At the same time, we are able to ask the right questions to SEO professionals in order to further our knowledge and grow beyond the beginner's guide.
But that last sentence is exactly where the beginner's guide becomes less valuable to us. You need to be able to leave it behind and start to make decisions for yourself.
Always be testing, measuring and learning what works for you. Nobody on the Internet can tell you what “best practice” is for your own website and your own clients.
Blindly following a “best practice” formula can distract you from what could actually benefit your SEO efforts. In some instances, it can be harmful to your campaign.
Use these basic guides in your early days, but within a year you should be able to start making your own claims in SEO and be able to back up those claims with your own results.
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