Wrong types of questions...

[SteveOllington]

I've noticed something in the forums.

Many people are asking the wrong types of questions with regards to SEO and having success with their sites on it.

This is understandable since many of the questions being asked are by those who have only just got in to SEO. But it does show that the emphasis of the industry must still be very much focused on getting links and changing META data, etc... with little mention out there in all those resources of what actually matters.

Thankfully, the questions are answered with people explaining that the wrong questions are being asked, and that it's not just about random traffic gained through rankings for general keywords.

Do you think that in time we'll see an evolution of the questions, as awareness grows, moving from questions of how to rank to questions on how work out the best KPIs to measure, and how to action strategies for improving them?

[Mcarle]

I'm a small business owner who managed to get lost down the SEO rabbit hole a few years ago on another forum.

Since then I have learned so much that I do spurts of intense study for a few months then leave it alone for a year.  I then come back to learn all the new and exiting changes that are constantly going on.

What I do find odd is that in my experience 99.99% of the SEO "experts" who call my business and try to sell me a product or service fail so miserably that I just shake my head & then go back to my own learning instead of paying someone else to do the work for me.

I understand that lots of people who are new will ask the same new questions, I sure did.

If they are asking the wrong ones a two fold approach might help.

a. Answer the question.

b. Guide them to the proper questions with examples of why another method of thinking might be important.

[5225Marketing]

If it's the questions you're worried about, that's why we're here - to learn from experts.

If it's the answers you're worried about, I think you can tell who are the experts and who are the kindly novices.

As a novice myself, I would be grateful if someone pointed out to me that I could be asking better questions.

This site already has a reference section with articles that cover almost every topic (definitely the basic ones) in SEO. You can always point people to those when they ask a basic question, and put more effort into questions where the author has done their homework.

[flowsimple]

I'd rather see the solution involve some hard core user experience upgrades with some minor moderation for duplicates.

To start, the Pro Q&A could borrow some of the UX principles implemented by the User Voice app. Some things that would significantly prevent duplicate questions from being asked again include:

• combining the Search and Ask fields into one box to require all users to search for similar questions before asking.
• Implement an instant on search/filter for all questions.
• Allow administrators to merge 2 similar discussion questions.

Perhaps a bit of investigation of some of other modern forum apps would uncover some other tactics to showcase the most common questions, and prevent duplicate questions.

[oznappies]

Coming from the other side of the fence as a developer and business owner and not an SEO person, I find that this is a great resource channel to discuss ideas. I will ask questions at time that will be basic, sometimes because I see different view on here or have a answer from the external SEO company we use. I like to know why something is done, not just that its is done. There are many responses I scan on here to find that information, and if I cannot find it I ask. Having spent many years on cutting edge software, I am used to asking questions in forums and just getting silence, it is refreshing in here to see prompt answers, support (thumbs up and good answer icons) and discussion on various topics.

The title of this discussion prompts me to say: 'The only wrong question is the one not asked .When you assume you know the answer to every problem then you become the problem.'

[dignan99]

I find this frustraing as well at times, but guess what?  I had to start somewhere too.  Hopefully many of the people who have found a quality source, such as this site, will be guided in a great direction.

At some point in the future it will be absolute common knowledge that the meta, title etc. will have to optimized well, and the SEO questions will revolve around schema.org, seo strategies for specific industries and networking etc.

I believe things will evolve rather quickly, but some will have to still start at the beginning, and some will have evolved into cutting edge industry leaders.  In any industry this is how it begins, and what you are asking is what will separate the best from the rest.

In such a fledgling industry, I would love to see more outside the box thinking and speculation on where SEO should be heading.  I've had responses about this from some leaders in this community, and many mention that Matt Cutts says SEOers should never be chasing Google.

While some might be chasing, it would be wonderful to see honest speculation to stay ahead of the search engines, where the value added by SEO experts is what Google and the like will start to consider as superior, and change their algos to have an affinity to the best webdev and SEO practices.

[sferrino]

I think this is a great topic and wish I found this post sooner.

As a person new to the SEOMoz community, not SEO, I am proud that I can start giving back. I too notice that some of the questions are as Steve put, 'not the right questions', but feel that many times if you know the correct question to ask, you will know where to find an answer. Personally I have spend hours looking for and testing different things, just so I wouldn't have to ask a question, it's just my inquisitive nature.

I try to judge, based on the question, whether the person is looking for just the answer and not the means to find it, or is looking for how to find the answer (teach a man to fish), which sometimes works and sometimes doesn't. I am striving towards being able to answer some things in the in-depth fashion that EGOL does.

As Dunamis pointed out, some (read most in regards to SEO) of the information on the internet is old and outdated, and the droves of new people just getting started don't know which is current and why something they tried from a 1998 webpage doesn't work. Since my focus has mostly been On-Site, technical, & server based, those are the only ones I work to answer.

I certainly appreciate that this is a paid forum and not one of the others that have people answering questions with, "I don't know", just to get their post counts up.

As for sticky items, I do see that a majority of the questions are repetitive, but that is just the nature of a Q & A forum. If everything had an answer I wouldn't have a chance to put those braincells back in to action to answer a question I found the answer to years ago. A big thumbs up for the SEOmoz Staff getting involved and adding additional thoughts to questions.

[BlastAM]

You are right, when I started learning about SEO it is very difficult to distinguish which way is the best way because of the many conflicting information out there and everyone claiming that they are an SEO EXPERT. It takes a little work and knowledge to become savvy enough to know what to look for, what questions to ask, and find out who the real experts are.

[SteveOllington]

Hehe, I promise I'm not making fun, I just can't resist quoting that Ken Robinson video on TED Talks whenever somebody mentions two types of people:

“There are two types of people in this world. Those who divide the world into two types, and those who do not.”

lol.

But yes, you're totally right. I didn't realize it until you mentioned it but there are some questions (certainly a tiny minority) where people just want to be told exactly where to get links, etc...

I reckon I've been guilty of that myself with some stuff though, if I'm truly honest. I think sometimes I'm just aware that others may provide a fast answer where I cannot. Not so much with SEO, but our developer guy Nick suffers that stuff from me all the time. I hate code, can't do it... so on the odd occasion when something codey comes up I think "Well I could sit here all day and figure it out by noon, or I could just ask Nick"

But then, swings and round-a-bouts, my colleagues do the same to me for SEO.

Anyway, off-topic but now that I mentioned the TED Talks I feel I have to post links in case any of you haven't seen them... some of the most incredible stuff in the existence of the web:

http://www.ted.com/talks/ken_robinson_says_schools_kill_creativity.html

http://www.ted.com/talks/sir_ken_robinson_bring_on_the_revolution.html

You simply must all trust me on this and watch them, mind blowing!

[Dr-Pete]

From my own experiences on the private Q&A here and other SEO forums, it seems like you run into two groups:

1. People who are new, trying to absorb everything, and may be misinformed.
2. People who want easy answers.

I admit that I often get frustrated with (2), but I also try to remember that there's a lot of (1)'s in the mix. Many people are just business owners, webmasters who wear multiple hats, marketers who got handed an SEO problem, etc., and there's a mountain of information out there (good and bad), spanning more than a decade of SEO. What often seems "obvious" to us is new to 100s of people every day, and sometimes we have to step back and try to remember that.

[SteveOllington]

That's a good point actually. I have to admit that until using the SEOmoz dashboard, I didn't put nearly enough focus onto crawl errors as I should have done, but now with the crawling tool making the issues nice and clear for me I use it and get a lot more of that side of things covered for our clients.

I don't find the questions frustrating though, I don't mind answering the simple questions... I just think it highlights that there's still only a small portion of SEO that's understood or even been made aware of by the bulk of people, who don't realise there's so much more.

I think you're right though, the dashboards and tools out there will change that in time, with people seeing there's far more involved and it's much more exciting than they might first think

[jennita]

This is exactly why I love my job. #thatisall

[randfish]

I have to admit that while it can be frustrating to see some of those very basic questions here (and around the web), it's also inspiring to see how many great people jump in to help point folks in the right direction.

Obviously, a company, particularly a venture-backed one like ours, is supposed to earn revenue, scale, etc. but the best and most exciting part for me is feeling like we really can make a difference in our mission to educate and provide the tools for smart, dedicated people to become talented marketers. I'm humbled by how much time and effort is put in by so many people here in Q+A, and hopeful that we really might be moving the needle toward making people across the web better at this challenging process.

In terms of the "evolution" you speak of, Steve, it's my sense that we've got some opportunity there, too. Linkscape + OSE (and competitors like Majestic) helped provide some metrics that shifted a bit of focus off of PageRank and made SEOs think more critically about how we evaluate pages and links. I want to believe we could do that with KPIs if we built the right kinds of reporting dashboards into our software and opened access to more people as well.

If you have suggestions, we're all ears (you can email me personally, too).

[SteveOllington]

Yes there's some incredible experience on here.

I know exactly what you mean, it's all about the on-page at the start. My first learning experience of SEO was the lynda.com learning course. That was all about the on-page. Then I went on to do more research and found that it was pretty much all stuff like that.

I think the on-page might just be easier to write about too, so people choose that to make up the bulk of their content, with a little on off-page. It's not until you get on here and start looking properly at analytics segmentation that you start to see how much more there is to it.

I agree though, I guess it makes sense to start at the easy stuff... it just seems like many SEO's out there (not on these boards) seem to plateau at that point and stop learning any more.

[SteveOllington]

"I post to learn and want to hear other opinions when I am wrong"

Love it! Same here!

For me, the best way to learn is from getting something wrong and then having that pointed it. Which is probably the main reason I love this forum so much. So many people with sooo much knowledge and experience that way surpasses what I know, so submersing myself into that can only result in more knowledge for me

It's like they say, the best way to get better is to be around the best... this is clearly that place, and I've been getting better since being in here.

The questions being the wrong type don't bother me, especially as I know I was asking those same questions not long ago... and still do of-course, as the answers are still important to know. I am just curious about how it is that SEO has such a smokescreen as to what is important, and why it always starts off at that same place for everybody before they figure out the rest of it. I think Alan answered that perfectly with the phenomena being due to the influx of SEO's and the volume of "fundamentals only" resources out there.

[SteveOllington]

"is this phenomena due to the fact that there are new people entering the industry all the time, or is it just that not enough clear information exists that's readily available?"

I think you hit the nail on the head there! I used to think it was all about just those other things too, not realising how much deeper the rabbit hole went, and that was of course due to both having just joined the industry, and find that all the information out there was pretty much just about the on-page optimization and a little about links. It seems that very few resources when you're looking to learn cover more.

[MarieHaynes]

I don't think we're ever going to get to the point where people stop asking about meta keywords and blog commenting and keyword density, etc. etc.  The main reason for this is that there is so much content online that will stay there for eternity, so when newbies start out they are going to find this information and have questions about it.

Similarly, when you first start doing SEO, you want to do everything you can to improve on page stuff and people are usually quite intimidated by getting others to link to their sites.  So, the idea that you could potentially rank better by stuffing your keywords or doing other "easy" stuff is going to be appealing.

What I like so far about SEOMoz is that there is a real mixture.  I feel that I can help out by answering the newbies' questions, but I have so much to learn from the experienced folks.  It's great!

[AlanBleiweiss]

If it's accessible to members only (and not open to search indexing), I'd even copy some of my past blog articles into it.  I've referred to a number of them in the past couple months.

[EGOL]

Another way to handle this would be giving each member some space in his profile where he/she can post a few standard answers to frequently asked questions.  Instead of typing the same answers out over and over... just say....  See "Keyword research" in my profile.

I am not promising to write a book there but after I write a good answer to a question I might republish it there for future reference.

[AlanBleiweiss]

I like this concept a lot. Commonly asked questions can readily be assigned to specific drill-down categories and sub-categories.  Not necessarily based on the topics people assign their own questions though. I've seen a lot of questions here assigned to many categories, not all truly accurate (another symptom of people not really having the expertise, though if they did, they wouldn't be asking, I suppose).

[EGOL]

I agree about the "sticky" entries, Alan.

A lot of other forums don't care about the sticky content.  They are motivated by pageviews or potential ad clicks.

Perhaps if asking a question included a first step of selecting a topic in a drill  down list... and after selecting the member would see links to "endorsed" answers for that topic on the left side of the screen and the type-in box on the right... then some of the elementary questions would be answered by historic posts instead of being asked again in the forum.?

[AlanBleiweiss]

Money?  Did someone say money?

Actually EGOL something you just responded with caught my eye - "Will the questions be interesting and varied enough to hold the interest of experience people?"

That is a very good question.  Even when forums create "sticky" entries, and FAQs, and such, so many people never read them.  Which inevitably leads to so many basic questions being asked over and over that it tends to burn many more experienced people out.

Yet perhaps over time enough experienced people will stay, or at least be joined by other experienced people on a regular basis.

All I do know for sure, is that the Moz Pro Q&A is one of the best, if not the best system I've seen to date.

[EGOL]

I like this subject, Steve.

I think that the answer to your question will be mainly determined by the type of traffic (people) who find there way into SEOmoz Q&A.

I posted for many years at another popular SEO forum and at least 90% of the questions there today are based upon misconception - and almost 90% of the answers given there are not answers that you would endorse.

I am spending almost all of my forum time here, now.  I burned out on seeing really bad answers being given and people going out to use that information.  And, often when someone posted a correct, very generous and technically correct reply the person asking the question would argue to the point of insult.   (This does not mean that every answer that I gave was correct - I post to learn and want to hear other opinions when I am wrong.)

The sad part is that many of those people have websites on SEO domain names and are offering their SEO expertise for hire.

The difference here at SEOmoz is that most of the forum participants are paying to post or have earned enough MozPoints to have a little competence behind them. And, SEOmoz is not allowing signature links and seems to be killing spammy links added to questions/answers.

I firmly agree that many of the wrong types of questions are being asked here.  However, I am happy to see a lot of high quality advice being given out by you and many others.  I think that will help the people who ask the questions redirect their thinking into more profitable routes.   Also, the people who receive that advice are generally say "thank you"  and will mark "good answer" when they think that it is helpful.

Will it continue?  Probably a steady flow of it will happen as new members arrive.  Hopefully lots of those members will continue to post after they acquire a little knowledge and success.

But the real answer, I believe, will depend again on the traffic (people).  Will the questions be interesting and varied enough to hold the interest of experience people?  Where will the new members come from?  That depends upon the "barrier to entry" of money or MozPoints... also holding the policy of not allowing signature links on every post (the people who go after them don't know about  "nofollow").

[AlanBleiweiss]

Perhaps the better question might be "is this phenomena due to the fact that there are new people entering the industry all the time, or is it just that not enough clear information exists that's readily available?"

Because I think this is the situation - new people are still coming into the industry in droves.  This is most likely due to the fact that more and more old-school marketing companies finally realize they need to adapt, more business owners realize they need SEO yet can't necessarily afford to hire a seasoned professional or agency, and also as SEO gets more attention in media, more people will try to join the industry themselves.

Then there's the reality that with the economy not improving dramatically in such a long time, more people look for new ways to generate income as entrepreneurs than previously.

So put another way, to answer your question more directly, I'd say no most likely not