SEO is in turmoil; notwithstanding there is a high volume of SEO
software that continues to thrive on. Neither the demand for nor
does the supply of such SEO software ever seem to be declining. They are being sold like hotcakes. One can see their advertisement almost
everywhere on the internet. This reminds of many actors whose popularity dim after
some time; they turn back to their PR agencies seeking their help in making front
page news. Analogously, SEO agencies behave the same at times. They do everything
and anything to sell their low valued software/tools, and thereby enhance the number of subscribers.
If black hat SEO is illegal, isn’t selling such software/tool illegal too? Perhaps,
one of the reasons why dying industry raises over $100 million in 2012! I know, SEJ could not agree any more.
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Unfortunately, customers
in general believe these software/tools as the handiest for all-in-one SEO
audits. Seems anomalous, when someone brags – “Get High Rankings With This Tool.” Moreover, there are companies
who don’t make such a tall claim, but they bid high on Google, for they know there
is a high demand for key phrases such as ‘SEO Software’.
May be, such software/tools fetch a report that Google webmaster does not show. However, I’m not a big fan of them unless they audit both like a human and Google.
Yes, human, because your audience is human, and Google, because organic search
results matter, don’t they? For Google, set up a webmaster account, and for
human, use your IQ.
Strange as it sounds, many of us trust high on the hocus-pocus report pulled from software/tool showing title characters, H1 tags, canonicals, backlink quality, and other SEO fiddle-faddle.
Strange as it sounds, many of us trust high on the hocus-pocus report pulled from software/tool showing title characters, H1 tags, canonicals, backlink quality, and other SEO fiddle-faddle.
Making a Google friendly website is indeed a very good practice, but going by over-simplified and unsolicited SEO
audits, and fixing all shitty errors is awful tommyrot. Practically, we see -how
agencies/firms without understanding a CMS and code complexity of a website export a hokey-pokey report that scares anybody as if their website is fucking crap.
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A sample audit report of mashable.com from Screaming Frog is
pulled. You can check if you use this tool, or see the above screenshot
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Unless you go back to
the pre-semantic search era a decade back or have no clue how a website is
being linked back, pulling information about hundreds and thousands of URLs in a nice graphic pdf/xls using any link checker/link automation tool may not eliminate the core issue inherently present in most
of the websites. Unsure, if such report helps anyone deploy fruitful “backlink strategy"
in outranking their organic competitors! Frankly speaking, this is all SEO fluff.
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Mashable.com
backlinks
(via ahrefs.com)
As a matter of fact, Google has their
algorithm that determines whether backlinks are good quality or poor
quality, and whether or not your backlinks are proportional to a website
traffic and overall content base.
Good content is anything
which is useful for the audience. Many people mistakenly think that writing unique
content which passes Copyscape is good content. Well, it’s irrelevant. That’s
not a clear indicator of whether that piece of content is good or not.
Automation helps a lot
in the software industry; however, I’m not a big fan of such automation in SEO.
Software/tools scan every bits and pieces of a website from a crawler
perspective, and shows tons of errors that don’t sometimes make sense. All that
is shown may not be as prominent as many SEO professionals consider. Sometimes, such audits may cause more harm than good in today’s semantic and personalized search environment. Be advised to pick through the fluff to find the Tic-Tac of truth.
It’s that “invisible algorithmic editing of the web” that is rewriting the rules of SEO. Watch out the video and see how "search" is changing fast, and how personalized search results are rewriting the rules. Google has already filed a patent long back that allows a human-review element to their search results. Let optimization (aka SEO) has human elements, for no tool ever replicate the “findings” a human does. The game has changed. Ranking has become irrelevant, and the whole keywords ecosystem is collapsing. So, avoid subscribing to any software/tools as much as you can. All you require a human approach more than any SEO software/tool to separate the sheep from the goats. I absolutely agree with |
Just want to say your article is striking. The clearness in your post is simply spectacular and i can take for granted you are an expert on this field. Well with your permission
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