If you look hard enough you will find just about every wild idea and cockamamie theory in Web marketing has been passed off as true SEO science by someone, somewhere. It takes a lot of self-confidence or maybe a great sense of humor to write some of the ridiculous articles that have been published about search engine optimization. Some of the great dumb ideas of the past include judging links by Google’s toolbar, using rel=’nofollow’ to manage your pagerank, and dropping links on blogs and forums. All of these ideas are still being used to “teach” people good SEO.
Good search engine optimization questions everything. You cannot trust people to know what they are talking about since so many people in the SEO community just repeat what they read on other SEO blogs. It’s a bit funny because basic SEO theory says that good SEO is based on repetition. But you’re supposed to repeat the keywords that are important to you and not bad SEO advice. Some people recognize the value of SEO theory and offer additional insight into it.
Other people try to pass SEO off as an art. What are we supposed to do? Paint success by numbers? But that is just repeating what other people tell us and that doesn’t work very well at all. You have to learn from other people but if you cannot reach beyond what others teach and learn for your self all the SEO theory in the universe is just wasted on you.
There is no turning back once you open the book of SEO theory and start turning the pages. Learning how to develop your SEO skills so that you can build your own trustworthy resources and techniques is preferable to just doing what other people tell you to do. There is an old saying: give a man a fish and he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish and he eats for life.