As an industry, SEO has struggled with setting standards of quality
from day one. Even with countless professional SEOs doing best-in-class
work, the industry as a whole is constantly battling the bad rap of
being tactless, unethical, and sometimes even "dead."
Black-hat or black cat?
At
SEOmoz, we find ourselves pleasantly surprised day after day by the
array of high-quality SEOs that make our industry such a wonderful place
to be. Unfortunately, the time finally came where we had to ask
ourselves the nagging questions looming over our industry: where was all
this negative noise coming from? Had we been missing a widely accepted
fact in the SEO world? And, most importantly, was the current state of
SEO really as awful as some were making it seem?
There was only one way to find out.
Inspired by a post highlighting the "sad state" of today's SEO consultants, we decided to conduct a survey of our own to determine the true, calculated quality of SEOs in 2012. Similar to the Webmaster World member
whose less-than-awesome exchange with various SEO consultants sparked
this hot debate, we chose to reach out to real, third-party SEO
companies for advice on how to improve rankings to collect our data. But
we wanted to do it bigger.
Enter: The PEPS Project
To
collect data in the most neutral way possible, we knew we wouldn’t be
able to use our own name for fear of skewing responses (i.e. if SEOmoz
emailed you, asking for beginner-level SEO advice, would you believe us?
No? That's ok, we probably wouldn't, either.). We decided to partner
with the charitable organization and long-time friend of SEOmoz, Program for Early Parent Support
(PEPS), to help us out. PEPS is a great organization that we'd been
wanting to get some SEO help for for quite some time. In return for
allowing us to go "undercover" as a PEPS employee when reaching out to
SEO consultants for advice, SEOmoz would foot the bill for a complete
site audit for PEPS. The consulting agency to conduct the site audit
would be the best SEO selected from our study, and everyone involved
would win!
The project design
After setting a Moz employee
up with a PEPS account, it was time to get to work. We compiled a list
of general, broad questions that a site owner new to SEO might ask in
reaching out for SEO advice, all the while making sure that the
questions would be solid indicators of an agency’s level of ethical or
unethical SEO knowledge. Once we selected the top few benchmarks that
should be hit, we pulled together an email including these four
questions:
- Do you see any quick areas for improvement? Are we doing anything really wrong or dangerous?
- We've been hearing a lot of talk about the "Panda"and "Penguin" penalties from Google. Can you explain what these are? Are we at risk for these penalties? How can we tell if we've been hit?
- We have the opportunity to buy some domains that relate to our services, like ParentSupport.com. We were thinking of building a second version of our site on a .com site that is more related to our services. Is it better to have a.com or a .org domain? How can we leverage buying other domains that have to do with our services to help get more SEO traffic?
- We get lots of emails from people wanting to trade or exchange links with us. Should we be saying yes? Will this help with SEO?
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