WordPress’ SEO Sucks

“what to say when someone asks you to suck them off”

Not the sort of term anyone would really associate with this site. So imagine my surprise when I saw my search stats in Jetpack:

That sentence is at the end of my list of Search Engine Terms. I tweeted that I was astounded, and wondered how far down the SEO hole one had to traipse to find my site. As it turns out, not very far at all:

Fourth. That’s it. That’s how high I ranked. So the next logical question would be to ask what I did to make my site rate that high on random searches? Nothing. I don’t have anything ‘special’ on this site. I have a good theme, certainly, but I don’t use any WordPress SEO plugins, and in fact, I’ve never (until now) used “what to say when someone asks you to suck them off” like that, all in a row.

What’s the magic?

It’s not WordPress.

That is, it is and it isn’t WordPress. WordPress is SEO optimized out of the box, and your content totally matters. And it’s content that probably landed me so high. You take good content, you add in people linking to your content, you promote yourself with friends who pass it on, and magically your hard work becomes content!

Last week someone told me they wanted to “automate the posting of [original] content” and I was completely bewildered at the concept. The issue, as I understood it, was that posting original content to 100 blogs meant writing original content 100 times. And you can’t automate that. By definition, posting unique posts means … you make unique (aka different) posts. This person went on to say it was time consuming to make 100 posts and create 100 custom links to them. I sat back and blinked a few times, and thought “Well, yeah.”

I say it over and over. A website is work. If people could magically install WordPress and boom, money, then I wouldn’t have a job helping people speed up sites or debug strange conflicts, or a million other weird things I do every day. WordPress can make publishing on the web a heck of a lot easier, but it will never be effortless because effort is what makes your site amazing. Effort and attention are crucial to keeping your site going.

Every time I hear about someone trying to find the quick and easy way around content creation, I shake my head. There isn’t a quick way, there isn’t an easy way, and there isn’t a simple way. Unless you like writing and think that it’s any of those things. But even then, you can’t just write and expect magic to happen. You have to write, and customize, and care, and water, and fertilize your website.

So how did my site get ranked so highly about sex when it’s about tech? If you read the post that got linked, it’s about how you suck. “My question is you suck” is the title, and in there, I talk about what to say when someone says you suck. It’s actually a pretty logical result, when you think about it for a moment. But because enough people link to me, and enough people used the word ‘suck’ in their links, and enough people shared the link, I’m respected by google and score crazy high on a totally non-relevant search.

That’s how you work the system.

Sorry about that, to everyone who is vastly disappointed, having come here via the search result.

Ipstenu (Mika Epstein)

I’m Mika (aka Ipstenu) and I’m complicated. I’ve been on the net since the days of dedicated terminals and Novation CAT modems and solved Missionaries and Cannibals (or Goats and Cabbages) before I was six, and blog about WordPress and technical/computer things at Half Elf on Tech.

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