Search Made Simple – SEO, Star Wars and The Force

Please excuse this post but I just couldn’t help myself. In my quest for analogies I was just sat here thinking if there were any parallels that could be drawn between SEO and Star Wars? It didn’t take me long to come up with the following:

Just like the force SEO has a dark and a light side.

These are more commonly known as Black Hat and White Hat, however for the purposes of this post they shall be referred to as the Dark and the Light side. Essentially the Dark side will intentionally try to trick or deceive the search engines, whilst the Light side will focus on user led techniques that actually add value to your site.

The Dark side often employ some of the following techniques:

  • Hidden Text
  • Cloaked content
  • Doorway pages
  • Duplicate Content
  • Splogs – Blogs made of nonsense that link to your site.
  • Link farming

The Light side are more likely to:

  • Make sure you have the right relevant keywords in your site copy
  • Create pages that are integral to your site and add value
  • Create interesting useful content
  • Make sure you are mirroring your offline PR online
  • Get you involved in your online community
  • Encourage you to blog and share your wisdom

The light side can often require a greater amount of work and as we have seen with Luke in the Star Wars films there is often temptation to give into the dark side, however we all know that eventually the light side will emerge triumphant.

If your black hat SEO campaign is like the Death Star it can often appear that nothing can stop you from dominating the universe of SERP’s, however just like the Death Star there is a weakness and this can be exploited by your competitors.

Even if your black hat techniques are not detected by automated bots just one carefully aimed spam report can see your whole campaign explode into a million pieces leaving you with no option but start the whole thing again from scratch and your business in tatters.

I am sure I have only skimmed the surface here and want to really get as many Star Wars / SEO analogies as I possibly can.

So please post your comments no matter how absurd they may sound.

Image available as a poster from www.firebox.com

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