"My Guru is Smarter Than Your Guru" - SEO Experts Disagree From Time to Time - Don't Believe Everything You Read or Hear

"My Guru is Smarter Than Your Guru" -  SEO Experts Disagree From Time to Time - Don't Believe Everything You Read or Hear

I read a recent post on ActiveRain where the author suggested something that would improve SEO.  And midway through the string of comments, one commenter began disagreeing with the post, saying that someone she greatly admires who is a "superstar" said this SEO strategy is a bad idea.

This commenter wrote "I hang onto every word of his opinion" (referring to her "superstar"), and so she "immediately" took steps to follow his advice to the letter.

Look up the term "hero worship" on the Web.  On one website, hero worship is defined as "raising a person to the level of a deity".

How about looking up "obeisance"?  Or how about "cult following"?

Yes, ActiveRain members are out there searching for the ultimate SEO advice, the absolute truth about issues like duplicate content and whether or not to use heading tags in a blog post.  And ActiveRain has no shortage of experts, real and self-proclaimed, who will be glad to tell you that their advice is sterling and all others are idiots.

I categorized this post under "Tips and Advice".  So here's my advice.  Don't belive everything you read or hear, whether it's on ActiveRain or anyplace else for that matter, at least not right away.  Be a bit skeptical until you're able to verify that the source of that SEO information can truly walk on water.

A few weeks ago, I read an interesting AR post about how to insert H1 and H2 heading tags into a post.  The author definitively stated that this was vitally important to SEO success.  Commenters lined up to proclaim this information the Gospel.

The next day, another "guru" of my acquaintance who had read this post complained to me that the advice is "utterly worthless".  He said "heading tags used to work, but now they accomplish nothing" and he pointed me to a couple of articles on the Web which support his opinion.

It's way too easy to become declared a guru around here.  Since homes have gotten harder to sell, some agents have branched out into selling themselves as uber-geeks.  And Rainers will often line up to bestow laurel wreaths upon these folks, sometimes without even doing their homework.