Information Addiction and the Parable of the Arrow

[thehobbster]

Information Addiction and the Parable of the Arrow​

I'm pretty well connected to the internet marketing world nowadays. I wake up and check the forums. At lunch, I take a break and check my RSS feed reader. And then I check the forums again. And throughout the entire workday I'm on Skype talking to my elite brethren. I feel the ebb and flow of the culture's ocean and I must say, there is a monster constantly lurking beneath the surface. It stalks newbies and bawses alike... This is the horrible creature of Information Addiction.

Information Addiction & Information Overload
Newbies gather up as much info as they can and then stumble across every single nonsense detail they can. "Should my keyword density be 4.8% or 5.32%?" "Should I use a hyphen in my dot com or just get the dot org?" You should build a fricking website! Even the veterans... "Is it okay for the phrase variations of my anchor text to bust 20% of my overall link building profile, or should I only worry about single uses?" "Do my headers have to be nested, and should I use long-tails in them?" Many times, questions like these are fear and procrastination based and not truly investigative in nature.

Regardless of why this is bubbling up so often, the reality is that these types of attention to over-detail impede progress. The most frequent comment I see popping up more than any other these days is "correlation does not equal causation" as if they are the only ones who took Statistics 101. Posting vague one liners on a forum is not giving any of you an air of mystique or causing anyone to assume you are the holder of hidden knowledge. It's just annoying. And undermining the veracity of a claim does not remove the strength of it's usage.

Let me put that in layman's terms, which is actually a Taoist saying. "Those who speak do not know, those who know do not speak." What that means is SEO's don't know, and Google Engineers aren't telling. All anyone can do is attempt to back-engineer the world's most complex computational algorithm in the world, which is based on a SERP-by-SERP basis anyways, with perturbations and allowances anyways. There is no hard answer. While everyone is searching for it, some of us are stacking paper.

The Parable of the Poisoned Arrow
There is a Buddhist parable that fits this scenario perfectly. Wasting time trying to probe the metaphysical unanswerables will not bring you any closer to liberation, just as worrying over small details will not help you scale your business. You should keep your mind on the ultimate goal. Here's the Parable of the Arrow (Jared Paraphrased Version):

So this knuckle-head gets shot by a poisoned arrow and is laying there while the venom is about to spread. But there's time! His buddy says, "Let me make a little cut right here and suck the poison out and you'll be fine." And the guy says...

Wait a second. Cut. Let's do this the Internet Marketing way.

The Parable of the Penguinized Site
So this knuckle-head gets his site tanked when Penguin rolls out. Everyone is scrambling trying to 301 their domains and dilute their anchor text percentages. Joe Momma says "What should I do?" and Jared replies "I can tell you the fastest and quickest way to recovery."

Joe Momma says, "No! I want to know what crashed my site! Was it a Wiki link or a Social Bookmark?!?" Jared says, "Well, I don't know and nobody knows, but that doesn't matter because..."

"No! I want to know exactly what it was. Was it my crappy spun content or the giant public blog network I was submitting to?!?" And I says to the guy, "Nobody can tell you, and you'll never know, but I can fix..."

"No! Was it an on-page problem or an off-page problem?!?" So I says, "What does it even matter? All you need to do is..."

"No! No No No!!!!" And his site stayed in the 500's forever after. Amen.

So What's My Point?
He should have just moved his site to a new domain and started over. I said it long before everyone started trying to trick The Gorg Hive Mind with 301's and all this other nonsense. Everyone is still trying to figure out why their sites dropped in rank so they can fix it, while I moved all my penalized sites to new domains and am already re-ranked and banking.

Did I need to know exactly why my site was down and out? Nope, because I had a general idea of why. Did I need to fix the specific problem? Nope, because I could dodge it altogether. It's called not being attached to each project and having to massage every detail. It's called not being addicted to information. It's called not being in a scarcity mindset. Look towards the goal. Think in terms of abundance and growth, not recovery and reclamation. Especially where there is an absolute unknowable involved.

The Takeaway
While you guys disregard correlation until you pinpoint causation, the rest of us are taking advantage. You go ahead and not make a move until you have 100% certainty. I'll settle for 90% confidence and making money.

Originally Posted on March 11, 2012 on

 

[Samwise89]

I kind of agree and don't. Time is a big deal now in Google's algorithm (I see you wrote this in 2012 though). We can take a possible misstep so we get results sooner that could set us back to the start and waste even more of our time.

Really all of this is an argument for not spamming. Google's made that a real bad value proposition lately, to the point where there's spammer's blatantly lying about their results out of desperation for link sales. Not that they didn't already do that but they're moving into long cons lately, running fake case studies and year long blog series.

This is still sound advice for things like going forward on a marketing campaign, where you collect data and tweak the attack, versus waiting to try and collect it before starting. I'd agree with not trying to save penalized sites at this point too. I've seen some come back but never back to full value. I'm not a veteran so I've not been around long enough but I hear it takes years before you can ever get full rankings back.