What Would Mother Do

I was talking to my mother about the internet this morning and a few things clicked in my little mind. I'm not sure if the clicking sound was something breaking or not, but anyways, here are a few thoughts with my mother in mind...

What would my Mother do?

Google is trying to tweak their algorithms out to help organic searches, and in SEO it’s the webmasters job to pull in as much of that organic traffic as possible. The smarter we get, the tougher it is to fool the machine….but what if fooling the machine is not the way to go?

SPAM: Sending out bulk emails will get you banned from most hosting companies, as well as get you blacklisted on most mail servers. I think out of the thousands of bulk mailings I’ve gotten I’ve opened maybe 5 and have never once bought into them. My mother on the other hand reads about half and has called me several times to ask how she can buy what’s being sold.

MFA: I think it’s unfair to focus on AdSence here, as any (spammy) affiliate sites likely falls under this heading. When I see a page like this I click the back button and tweak my search terms. My mother clicks on ads thinking they are part of the site.

Geocities: My mother can't tell the difference between your $100,000 website and my nephews homepage on Geocities. So aside from making a fancy MFA site, why not kick out a few sub-pages that are a bit more 'organic' and link these pages back to the main host or another of your sites. Then head out to places like Gecities, AoL and the like and start sending Emails to these "webmasters" for some reciprocal linking.

Text Links/Banners: My mother has yet to understand the concept of the status bar to see where a link takes her, and even if she did, if it was blank she’d likely think it was part of the site sinse it wasn’t telling her otherwise. This makes ads a good thing…though personally I’ve only clicked on maybe 10 ads in my life…my mother has clicked on likely thousands (I won’t give her the addresses to my sites).

The three things above if done incorrectly can get one penalized in SERP placement and no one really wants that, but if one is to use such methods, then it’s likely best to aim things at the people that do not have a clue what is actually going on. Fellow webmasters, SEO experts, and the like are less inclined to fall for such things, so never focus your less ethical tactics their way, instead focus such efforts at people that will fall for them…like your own mother!

Search Engines are doing their best to keep things as organic as possible. They are looking into all types of links trying to get all of the false ones filtered out of their calculations. Currently their main target is links created to specifically effect Search Engine Rank Position, these links are generally created by SEOers and Webmasters, they know it and we know it. As they are getting better and better at spotting things, it’s our job to get more creative in fooling them…but what if that’s really not needed?

I own a forum, and most of the members on that forum have NO CLUE what Anchor Text means let alone how to use it. When they give a link they give it like http://www.google.com/ how’s that for SEO? Yeah, that’s what I’m thinking about…but what if we are wrong? I mean, if they want the results to assist the ‘average user’ then shouldn’t we be thinking like the average user? We are not the average user that’s for sure, but I’m willing to be the users on a general topic forum are…and those are the ones we are wanting to draw in right?

So go on and try it, take a small site and promote the hell out of it…but don’t do it like your other sites. Before you do anything and before you do everything ask yourself “what would mother do?” and then do it that way… see how far it takes you. You may be surprised.

(and yes, I realize my mother is a moron )