Scratching the Surface Can Be Dangerous in SEO

In many cases, SEO is done using what I would call “surface-level methods”—treating search engine optimization as a set of rules to follow in order to achieve results. But this approach can lead to very poor outcomes.

Many of us write practical SEO guides for beginners, often filled with simple, actionable tips that work in most situations. The problem isn’t that beginners are doing SEO—on the contrary, I often think that’s a great thing. The real issue arises when those beginners improve and begin taking SEO more seriously. Here lies a major drawback of the types of guides we—and so many others—have been sharing for over a decade.

Personally, I hadn’t really considered the downsides until now, because systems thinking has always come naturally to me. When I first started with SEO, it wasn’t nearly as well understood how search engines actually worked, and it was also less complex (though arguably more complicated). Today, however, every market in the world is flooded with SEO advice and “Best Practice” blog posts. You can go quite far—even build a solid career as an SEO consultant—using only best practices.

A discussion from last week serves as a good example. A colleague (who doesn’t work in SEO) and I were talking about internal linking. Linking internally from specific articles to pages you want to boost—or adding a page to the navigation to gain rankings—can be a powerful tactic. A page that previously sat deep in the site hierarchy can perform much better for a mid-level keyword if you add it to the site’s navigation. This is what Best Practice tells us. The problem is that it creates other, less obvious issues.

With a bit more understanding, you realize that every page you add to your navigation cannibalizes from the rest of your site. The more links you include in your navigation, the less power each individual page receives. Let’s not dive into the technical mechanics here, but instead focus on what this example illustrates: when you add internal links, the value of the others decreases. That means each link requires a deliberate, informed decision. But how do you make that kind of decision if all you’ve learned is Best Practice?

The issue I want to highlight here is that we in the industry, hoping to welcome more people into SEO, often oversimplify. We don’t explain the full picture. We don’t clarify that what we’ve said is true in many cases, but is ultimately a special case—not a universal rule.

I don’t know the best way to handle this—perhaps there isn’t one. But I do know that I don’t want to stop creating beginner-friendly material, and that content can’t be too complex. Maybe what we all need to do is strive to be a bit clearer.