SEO bloggers: stop linkbaiting and stop imitating

The problem with SEO blogs is that search engine optimisation consultants on the whole do not understand the concept of blogging. They only understand linkbait.

When you read SEO blogs, how many times over the course of a week do you see the same round of posts on the "Top 12 SEO tools," the "Top 20 mistakes SEO newbies make," the "Top 11 places to get free links" ad infinitum.

Everytime someone makes a post about "Top tips to write compelling headlines" we get a new raft of imitators - at the moment it's all about the "Why SEO is like...." and "What SEO can learn from..."where you can fill in the blank with anything from cartoon characters to other businesses to foodstuffs - just to entice people to click. Usually those posts say very little that isn't blatant common sense and hasn't been written better and shorter before in many other ways.

But when the veterans get lazy and start writing just for the sake of fresh content, that's when you know there's a problem in how SEO professionals understand blogging.  Search Engine Land produced a treat yesterday. I quote, "The first type of blog that totally sucks is the "Anchor Text Spam" blog. ...their main purpose seems to be to provide other sites with big fat juicy keyword-rich anchor text links." 

Right, so Jill Whelan does not like link spam. There's a revelation. Does anybody like finding link spam in the SERPs?

Then we go onto "Another type of blog that totally sucks is the "Trick Me Into Clicking" blog."

Right, so she doesn't like PPC ad spam. Honestly, I didn't like AdSense directories back in the day and I don't like them now. Tell me something that I don't know already.

And she finishes with, "And the last type of blog that totally sucks is the "You Mean I Have to Know How to Write to be a Blogger?" blog."

So, she doesn't like reading articles that don't make any sense because the authors can't string a sentence together or worse still because they are the result of auto-generated content. Well, call me crazy, but I'd have thought most people would already know this sort of content is useless and spammy.

If you ask me, this is not informative, it's just content spam by another name.

Seriously, is there a person out there who thinks the sort of blogs she describes are a good thing? No. They get produced because they get SEO results and they make money, not because they expect readership.

She's hardly stopping the perpetrators by pointing this stuff out, so how is this sort of post any more helpful than any of the stuff she's complaining about?

The problem is that SEO bloggers think that just producing content (like they do on the websites they optimise) is enough - but blogging is not about just producing loads of pages of writing.

Blogging is about sharing your interests and information about your interests and your opinions with the world in order to engage with people with similar interests and varying opinions.

In order to convince anybody that your blog is worth reading you really need to be saying something worth writing about - and you can't do that unless you're writing passionately which means that you need to be saying something that means something to you, not just saying something because you have a deadline.