Search engine optimisation blogs and forums are packed with tips, tricks and generally useful information to do with pretty much every technical element of SEO. In fact, you would probably be hard pressed to name a topic related to SEO that hasn’t received some coverage in the vast quantities of SEO blogs.
Unfortunately, with this level of content comes the risk that some of it will be erroneous and ill-informed. Despite this, Rand Fishkin, whose blog over at www.seomoz.org is one of the foremost in the industry, states that ‘the major forums of the SEO world were my training ground’. With this positive endorsement from one of the brightest minds in search engine optimisation, it seems that as long as you can differentiate between a blog based on fact and supporting evidence and another based on unreliable opinion, then you have an extremely valuable resource.
I suppose before continuing I better add a bit of a disclaimer. Due to the constantly evolving world of internet marketing where new definitions are constantly being coined and new theories tested a lot of the factually incorrect blogs may be written with good intentions, just poorly executed. What I mean is that you don’t always have to blame the author. It’s easy to get things wrong in this industry and I guess that’s part of the fun. Anyway, here are some things to look for to help judge the validity of a blog or forum topic.
Is the topic still being investigated?
A good example of this occurring might be when one of the search engines rolls out a big algorithm update. For instance, when Google released the Panda update earlier this year, it fuelled wild speculation about the purpose of the update, who it was going to affect and how to adapt to it.
In cases like this it might be best to just bide your time until patterns start emerging in the SERPs, and you can base your blog on verifiable evidence. Some might say it would be a positive move to try and stay ahead of the curve, but indulging in speculation could potentially damage the reputation of your blog.
How old is the resource in question?
The age of a source could theoretically appear as being more reliable due to its location at the top of the SERPs. This could be because, if an article/blog/forum is written at a very early stage in the discovery of a new process or algorithm update, it could receive a lot of links to it and cause it to outrank more up to date sources in the ranking pages.
This can be easily dealt with by using the time-scale specific search option on Google Blog Search.
Is it from a reputable source?
As a new topic seems to emerge weekly, possibly even daily in SEO, there are so many opinions formed over such a short space of time that it can be difficult to keep track of the reliable sources and the unreliable ones.
Because so many things can change in such a short space of time, the process of predicting a theory can be very hard to judge. So, it’s important to keep in mind that not even the industry experts get it right every time. If a number of experts have collaborated on a particular topic then this is more likely to be based on truth as supposed to mere conjecture, but again this doesn’t guarantee factual accuracy.
Over time, as you become more acquainted with particular blogs and forums you will begin to be able to distinguish those that are reliable from those that aren’t. It might just be how many people have commented on it, and what those comment say, or how many times it’s been shared on Facebook or Twitter. If you are using SEO blogs and forums to conduct research remember to S.E.O Suspect. Every. Opinion.
