Natural vs. Aggressive SEO Strategies: Part 1

Michael Bergbauer - May 17, 2013

As the saying goes, “good things come to those who wait.” In certain aspects of quality SEO programs, there’s a lot of truth to that statement. Time and time again, we explain to clients that results from an SEO program are not quantifiable overnight. SEO efforts are most effective when they follow a natural philosophy.

“Natural” here refers to the actions your SEO strategy takes in light of guidelines set by search engines. All over the Internet, there are SEO blogs showcasing the latest and greatest aggressive SEO strategies. These are usually tweaks and implementations that are not out-rightly against guidelines. Essentially, an aggressive strategy searches for ways to bend the system to gain an advantage. Aggressive strategies aren’t necessary for SEO success, but they may get results faster.

An advantage that doesn’t actually break any rules sounds great! But, the advantage tends to fall apart over the long-term — resulting in wasted effort. In fact, many of the strategies that are now banned by current search engine guidelines were aggressive strategies that gained widespread use, to the detriment of users.

Take blog networks as an example. Until last year, it was ordinary for websites to join up with a blog network for quick promotion and increased rankings. It was similar to a link farm, but it wasn’t expressly forbidden. In March 2012, Google finally took action and de-indexed hundreds of blog networking web pages. The aggressive strategy of signing up with blog networks and catering to their requirements garnered good results for a while. But, any sites that worked with blog networks essentially had all of that time and effort thrown out the window once Google adjusted its guidelines. Had these sites promoted their blogs via natural linking efforts, they wouldn’t have suffered such a penalization.

That’s just one of many examples of a successful “aggressive” strategy completely backfiring. In a future post, we’ll go over why “natural” style strategies are more effective in the long run.