Ask HN: Overcoming engineer/developer bias against SEO

As an engineer for a decade and a half (turned tech manager, now), I used to have that same feeling. I believe that's because until you work with a competent marketing group, there's an awful lot of "Dilbert marketing department" evident. And truly competent marketing groups are only slightly more plentiful than unicorns, IME.

Work alongside a good marketing team however, and it's night and day. I think that they have in many cases more interesting problems, especially in the context of growing a startup.

How can you tell a good marketing department? They're smart, able and willing to do math, are willing to be data and metrics driven and can't comprehend it could work any other way. If someone says to you "math has no place in marketing", you don't want to work with that marketing department.

The biggest misconception about SEO is that its intent is to be spammy. SEO is in fact directed towards more effective communication with search engines. Using web analytics, and intelligence we optimize content to be more direct towards users, and search engines by using keywords etc that users are searching for. We're basically improving communications just like quality CRM does only with search engines, and users. Link farms are highly transparent and easily flagged by Google. They have extremely sophisticated algorithms to determine who the spammers are.

Perhaps your first problem is that there isn't even a "Careers" or "Jobs" link on your homepage, and Googling "seomoz jobs" and "seomoz careers" leads to a job board and not your company's hiring page?

Seriously, I am interested in hearing about your machine learning openings, and I can't even find the job description anywhere.

Yeah - certainly. And I think our branding around software for SEOs speaks to that, but the branding of "SEO" in general is something we think about a lot, too. We're not just trying to improve our image or brand, we want to make the brand of "SEO" something people like/enjoy/respect/appreciate.

Let me explain why I have learned to hate SEO over the years.

I'm writing this from a throwaway HN account. I work for a 4-year old company, where I was one of the first 3 employees. We have a very popular website that gets over 400 million page views per month. We get lots of traffic from Google. When I started, our priority was making a great, simple user interface. But we were also very aware of SEO, and paid much attention to self-links we put on the site, anchor text, URL parameters, all the usual smart SEO stuff. So far so good -- we did this opportunistically, and never at the expense of the user experience.

As we grew, we hired a person dedicated to SEO (a non-programmer). Then we hired another. These SEO people started having us add links and pages in strange places that made no sense to actual users. And adding links that sometimes made sense to users, but were unnecessary, and cluttered the user interface. The page footer grew and grew, eventually spanning 3 lines. We added funny redirect schemes that made the site slower for users. We were afraid of our links to other sites because we might leak valuable "Google juice". We added redundant tooltips that were useless to users. Many of these tactics were crap our SEO people read on some webmaster SEO forum, with no scientific basis. Sometimes our SEO people even had the gall to say "I have an idea I think will be better for the user experience", and go on to propose something that only benefited SEO, and made the user experience worse! In other words, they would focus on GETTING the user (via Google), but forgot about KEEPING the user (through good user experience). Thankfully, we never did the black-hat methods like cloaking, but some things very close were proposed and met with loud opposition from our developers.

For a long time I would fight against these changes, because they made the UI worse. I lost most of these battles because it was hard to convince the managers that it was hurting the site (but it never seemed to be necessary for the SEO people to prove it was actually helping SEO). I was eventually spending so much energy fighting these SEO proposals that I just gave up. User interface designers and developers spend a lot of effort to make a web site look good and run fast. Then the SEO people go and fuck it up. It's very frustrating for developers. I know SEO is important. All I'm saying is that SEO should never be at the expense of the user experience. I hate what it has done to our web site, and I know it's happened to other websites as well.