Today I thought I would talk a bit about one of the things I find most difficult in search engine optimization: cognitive bias.
I won’t dive too deeply into the psychological aspects here, but a short explanation may be useful. Cognitive bias is the psychological term for having a distorted view of reality or making irrational decisions based on prior knowledge and experience. This affects everyone to some degree, and it is something I see frequently within SEO—myself included.
A clear example of this could be seen during the first year after Google launched its Panda filter. A large part of the industry spent so much time trying to figure out what had happened, how it could be fixed, and then cleaning up, consolidating, and rewriting content, that it became easy to forget that Panda was “only” a layer on top of the core algorithm. For a while, it felt as though the general perception in the industry was that all ranking issues were caused by Panda, and that the only solution was to rewrite the site’s content. That was, of course, not true. The core algorithm continued to do its job, and all the many filters that existed before Panda were still there, continuing to reshuffle the search results. People were simply so focused on one specific factor that happened to have a major impact on many sites at that time. That does not mean it was the only thing influencing rankings.
In everyday work this is not quite as obvious, but I notice it often when results are slow to appear or even start to decline for a site. Many people—myself included—tend to start by looking at the area they are strongest in and try to identify a potential problem there, instead of taking a step back and looking at the big picture first. Better content is not necessarily the solution just because you are a text nerd who can easily spot mediocre copy. It is far from certain that those slightly questionable links are actually the problem just because you are used to working with sites that previously bought poor off-page optimization.
So how do you make sure you don’t get stuck in habitual patterns and end up spending a lot of time and energy on things that won’t solve the real problem at hand? For us, the solution has been to never work alone with a client—especially not when progress is slow. More eyes, more experience, and more examples of successful and failed projects in your backpack make it easier to avoid getting stuck. On top of that, you will almost certainly learn more by working together with someone else on complex projects.
