One thing I hate about one seo blog after another is the constant drivel many put out there as “advice” on their websites. In an industry where most agree it’s impossible to know how Google works, there are sure a lot of arse-holes out there who seem to think they actually do know how Google works.

Constant regurgitation of basic advice and passing this advice of as their own is pointless shite, but I’m sure it fools the odd customer who stumbles onto their blog after typing in something so fucking obscure as to unfortunately land on that site.

Don’t get me wrong, that’s exactly how I started.

But it’s nice to see a couple of blogs in Scotland who’ve genuinely put a bit more effort into making their site a bit unique and linkworthy. That’s definitely what I’m trying to achieve on the whole with the Hobo corporate site (which I don’t link to) - a bit of testing, opinion and research, and of course on this site, I’m getting threatened with legal action - that’ll make me stand out when I get bankrupted after I name the company in question - probably get a few links too.
Paul’s done OK with his Top Ten SEO League and I think Michael’s got a neat idea with his Internet Marketing Mashup page. There’s two links those guys wouldn’t have got without a bit of creative thinking and some hard work. I actually thought of something similar along both lines of thinking, but as usual, never got the time (or had the inclination) to actually get it onto my blog.

Paul’s Top Ten is great fun. You get to see some of the techniques people will use to grab the “accolade” of best SEO. Some are clever, some are crap, some are pure spam, some show a complete misunderstanding of Google from what I think I know, some are even worse (just knocking it so they can rank - very altruistic).

I’ve not seen much in the way of inspiration. Just keyword stuffing that makes the text read crap (even I am guilty of this in places but I do experiment with everything), anchor text link manipulation, client keyword bombing and internal linking malarkey. I’ve even dabbled with theme and neighbourhood in my efforts to rank, and learned a wee bit about some other things I finally decided to give a go.

I’m actually disappointed to see some of the simple stuff working way too well. But that’s just life. I’m talking about domain age, keywords in the url and keyword bombing from client sites, in particular. It would appear the more clients you have the better your chances. By the time we have 100 clients’, no doubt Google will have found out how to deal with this! Of course these metrics do have value and offer some kind of relevance, but I don’t think it’s very advanced seo, and I hope Google finds a way to cope with it (very unlikely in the short term).

I’ve got another couple of ideas to grab the top spot again. In fact here’s a couple for seo scotland, seo company scotland and search engine optimization scotland.
Yeah I agree - not very advanced, but I think that’s what I’m on about. It’s the simple stuff, isn’t it
I’d actually link to see my name on that list somewhere as well, the vanity of it all
Actually I think the best thing about Paul’s competition is that it’s given me the chance to network with a few seos in the locale who are genuinely interested in seo. It’s started a bit of a community north of the border. It’s nice to get this far into the competition without anybody acting like a dug with two dicks and trying to fuck anybody over….

I’m all for a sort of Scottish seo community spirit. There’s too many ignorant cunts/cowboys out there that give the rest of us a bad name, and too many clients out there looking for an honest days work that makes their site better, for the actual passionate seos to have to stand on each other’s toes.