Weblogsky: Marqui's Search Engine Optimization Flap

Marqui's Search Engine Optimization Flap

Another word about Marqui, a Weblogsky.com sponsor! Marqui has a blog, too, and the December 31 post talks about the Search Engine Optimization white paper mentioned in my New Year's Day post. I dutifully passed the word on without analyzing the SEO paper, but other Marqui bloggers, especially Robin Good, took time to read, analyze, and write critiques of the paper. Robin said "the white paper is a badly written collection of well-known antiquated principles and techniques that are either out of use, outdated, unsubstantiated or plainly wrong." This negative feedback is a great test of Marqui's resolve to encourage the kind of honest responses that bloggers would normally post, even from blogs the company is sponsoring. As Mitch notes, Marqui has been living up to its promise to take criticism to heart and respond constructively, as they did in their December 31 post.

I asked Bill Leake, whose company LCG (Leads Customers Growth) specializes in SEO, what he thought of Robin's critique. Bill thinks that page titles are probably still relevant, and the anchor text in a link is important, despite Robin's statement to the contrary. He also says "content and links are the most important thing, but it's not all about simply getting good on-page content and links from quality websites. There are many minor tactical devils lurking in the details that become, in aggregate, strategically important when trying to optimize and do well in a competitive space," whereas "some spaces are not at all competitive, and simply good on-page content writing that gets indexed, with no particular SEO expertise behind it, will perform very well indeed in such spaces."

jon posted this at 6:32 AM
Share on Facebook| email to a friend