It is not. Despite what SEO workers seem to think, not to mention their customers.
A technical profession, for instance electronics or automotive service, possesses a body of knowledge incorporated in textbooks, professional publications, rules of thumb, tips openly circulated, tested and adopted or rejected and the results of still unpublished research and development. In this sense website development is very much a technical profession. But SEO, which grew out of it, is something utterly different. And since SEO is commonly practiced as if it is a technical profession the outcome is so often frustrating, perplexing and, as seen from some critical distance, even ridiculous.
The body of knowledge of SEO is in its largest part secret. It is not kept secret from the uninitiated, like ancient alchemy, but kept secret from its practitioners. Have you ever heard of any profession like this?
After all, any search engine, Google for instance, can be useful only by providing lists of the most relevant results with spammy ones sieved out. So the details of its ranking algorithm are kept secret – the various parameters and the shifting weight of each, new parameters recently added and old ones dropped without notice. And not only the algorithm is secret, so are the relevance scores of each listing in its SERPs. SEO workers can only watch the rankings, a reflection of the descending order of relevance scores that contain no information on the size of the relevance score gap between two
adjacent listings. Suppose my page is at # 11 and following the implementation of a tip it jumps to # 9, pushing down the pages formerly at # 9 and # 10. With no information on the actual relevance scores I cannot know whether this was a success. Perhaps the tip was harmful and all three of us implementing it lost some relevance score, but the other two SEOs were much more industrious than me! And the success is sure to be short-lived because unknowingly I come too close to the score of page # 12, I am tempted to view that tip as a great idea and work on it longer than my two other competitors.
SEO is also not a technical profession that has to cope with some degree of uncertainty, like meteorology for instance. It has to cope with the fact that practically almost all data one needs for everyday practice is very effectively blocked behind a wall. SEO belongs in fact to the very small category of professions characterized by decision-making in conditions of minimal information. And it is about making decisions because if you do nothing you can be sure that others will get on top of you and you’ll be further away from your goal.
The practical solution of most SEO workers I meet as colleagues, candidates for employment and mostly as members of the Israeli forum in which I write daily is to fantasize that SEO IS a technical profession. (And not only technical but highly-technical.) They fantasize that reflecting for a few minutes on some issue they can emulate the decision-making process of Google’s team, who have been working on that issue for months and years, and thus understand some features of the algorithm. Or they fantasize that by working successfully for some time in arenas characterized by minimal competition future will bring no surprises. Or that there are gurus who know more.
But the most common fantasy is the belief that “an experienced SEO worker†can take a look at page A at # 10, for a competitive search query in Google, and at page B at # 11 and tell why A is # 10 and B is # 11 and not the other way around. This fantasy is derived from the fact that if one looks at page C at # 200 and compares it with page A at # 10 the differences are very often quite obvious – fewer links, sloppy metatags, short text, few pages in site. And, based on this comparison, it seems easy to estimate, if not really calculate, the amount of work required to surpass page A.
But the problem is that here one looks at the open to all (or perhaps processed a little bit) available data and when one compares pages A and B the data is very often confusing – the upper page has fewer links, poor metatags and text and so on. How can that be? Obviously the upper page has a higher relevance score despite these apparent shortcomings. There must be a hidden factor that provides the missing relevance score – the quality value of the links versus the smaller sheer number, a TR link we cannot identify, in fact anything within the hidden 95% or so of the data Google works hard to prevent us from getting. This is the reason why the price quote to bring page B to # 10 for a competitive search query is pure invention, while the price quote for bringing page C from # 200 to # 10, which looked like a simple calculation, will reach the same data block when page C reaches # 11.
IAG
pinesk
Hebergeurs
