Is there such a thing as "too much SEO?"

It goes without saying that search engine optimization – SEO – is a Good Thing. You want your customers to find you when searching. And there are lots of individuals out there willing to tell you what constitutes best practices, what’s “white hat” and “black hat” (i.e., techniques that play closer to – and further away from – Google’s rules, respectively). But all this back and forth on tactics and techniques begs the question: Can you have too much of a good thing? How much SEO is too much?

In case you’re worried this is just a theoretical exercise, take a look at the recent back and forth on sculpting PageRank with nofollow – or not, as the case may be. I don’t usually go into the gory, technical details of SEO and you’re about to see why. But bear with me for just a moment or two and I’ll try to keep this from being too painful. I think you’ll find it worth the wait.

Google recently reversed itself on whether sculpting PageRank with nofollow – a fairly technical solution used by some SEO firms – is a good practice, now stating that it’s not. As Google web spam guru Matt Cutts recently said:

“…[nofollow] isn’t the most effective way to utilize your PageRank. In general, I would let PageRank flow freely within your site. The notion of “PageRank sculpting” has always been a second- or third-order recommendation for us.”

I’m not going to debate whether “…PageRank sculpting has always been a second- or third-order recommendation.” I don’t think that’s why you come here. But, it is a fact that the dangers of nofollow PageRank sculpting were already well known to many solid SEO practioners. Still, the SEO industry immediately leapt into action following this recent shift, with some suggesting Google is “criminalizing” SEO and others looking for practical solutions to “…plug the nofollow leak.”

The point being, you can waste a lot of time on technical arcana, when you should be investing your time in creating great marketing, offering your customers products and services that solve their problems. I like to call it Customer Experience Optimization. When the topic of PageRank sculpting through nofollow first started making waves, I referenced and expanded on Search Engine Roundtable’s advice, stating :

“…Search Engine Roundtable has the best approach: “why not [do it], if you have exhausted everything else you could have done on your site” (emphasis mine). Most small business websites have far bigger search engine optimization – and customer experience optimization – issues than this. In other words, know the basics of SEO. But once you get too deep into that rabbit hole, leave it to the rabbits.”

Bryan Eisenberg of GrokDotCom echoes this point, stating:

” I recommend that you do great marketing primarily. Then focus on making sure you publish the best content for the person doing a search. When that person has a list of options to choose from in their search engine results page, your content provides them with the best experience.“

To illustrate the point, Amazon.com has over 200 links on its home page – itself a “violation” of SEO best practices – and only 10 of them use nofollow. Clearly, they’re giving the topic some though -but not too much. Yet they rank well, don’t they? More important, their customers use them, talk about them, recommend them. And isn’t that what you’re really going for?

Great marketing, such as described in this recent post by Marketing Headhunter.com’s Harry Joiner shows what I mean. Joiner clearly benefits from search – and has a well-optimized site. But he benefits most when his marketing resonates with his target customer first. And so will you.

As long as Google and its competitors focus on providing the best result to searchers, we’ll continue to have an arms race between the search engines and SEO marketers. And that’s OK. It’s absolutely important to do a good job at SEO. But always sremember you’re playing by the search engines’ rules. In practice, the best way to win at marketing is to define your own set of rules.

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Image credit: husin.sani via Flickr using Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic.

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