My brother, a long haul trucker with a Bachelor's Degree in English Literature, happened to be passing through Denver Friday and dropped by for a visit. "Any reason for a home cooked hot meal and a sleep in a room not equipped with shock absorbers," I would chide. Late Friday night we were discussing the economy and the like, as fuel costs have affected his business rather drastically. He mentioned that he could tell his industry was getting hit pretty hard, as even the websites he had been using for quite a while were disappearing. He lamented about one particular site he wanted to use again, but could not find it anywhere. I had assumed his bookmarked sites had gone out of business, but later clued into the fact that he did not bookmark, he just used the same search terms he had used to find them earlier. I realized that I did the same thing a lot of the time. Interested, I sat at his laptop and pulled up his browsing history.

While scrolling down through the history he saw a link that might be the one he was looking for. I clicked it, and low and behold there was the site. It was still there. He started looking through it and rolled his eyes back and groaned. He declared “It is perfect!” After glancing back I realized what he meant. The spelling was perfect, the grammar was perfect, and I noticed the browser titles were “out of place” for the audience. I switched to “View Source” and it was instantly obvious the site had been SEO'ed. This site had been online for 4 years and, according to my brother, was at the top of the first search page for the terms he used...something about “daisy be round.” Well, that phrase had disappeared from the website, except a few references embedded in graphics which could not be indexed. The “flavor” of the whole site had changed. There are probably very few long haul truckers with English degrees -- they have their own lifestyle and a language that goes with it. Since the website was SEO'ed I am sure it will rank high in the grammatically perfect search terms they targeted. This would be fine if the purpose was bringing yuppies into the LHT community. However, the audience was still actual long haul truckers and their needs.

The horror continued on the site's blogs. The categories had changed to rather vanilla descriptions; again, the colloquial terms had disappeared. “Gearing the Divide” had changed to “Trucking Through the Rockies.” While the later can be found easily by residents in Manhattan, the former could be found by truckers. The blog had also become moderated. Instead of posting almost immediately, there was now a delay of several hours at the least. In a community where the residents depend on up-to-the-minute information a delay like this is important. These users are restricted to where and when they can use their laptops. They have maybe an hour at a truckstop with WiFi, or use their in-cab Internet connections when they are not concentrating on driving.

The posting volume on the site had dropped significantly. Looking at the posting archives, I think I know why. The site was getting a lot of blog spam. The postings were obviously from someone not in the community plugging other sites. They would suddenly appear, post something rather off-topic, using the wrong jargon, and never be seen again. To keep the spam down, they went to moderated blogs which then became basically useless to the target community.

I started using the full website name in some searches to see if there were any PPC ads for the site. Yup, all with ad copy that just didn't seem to fit the target community. Again, perfect grammar and broad terms designed for a wider market totally devoid of the colloquial jargon of the community. I would love to be able to talk to these folks and see how the SEO work had affected their business.

This would appear to be a classic example of following a strict and rather unimaginative “formula” approach to SEO. It was done perfectly, and it was wrong. I am a firm believer in copy that should match the audience, warts and all. And, if you are going to blog spam, at least get someone that knows the community they are dealing with and offer some interesting, on topic posts before plugging.