I have just finished reading Brad Carroll's blog post on "Optimizing your active Rain Profile" and skimmed through all of the comments and I am AMAZED that there was not a single post questioning his suggestions regarding what Active Rain members should be doing with their profiles - He suggests a keyword loaded username so that your URL has keywords in it (Which has not had an effect on search engine rankings in several years) and even goes so far as to suggest that you put your full name in the first name field just so you can use the last name field to stuff extra keywords in your profile - I am sorry Brad (And I am posting this to help educate those 148 users who left comments and the countless others that read and may have taken this advice) not to pick on you. Later on in the post you do actually give some decent advice for descriptions etc but your SEO advice in this post is very poor and will IMHO make users look less professional
Your first suggestion:
"Select a username that is the keyword you are trying to optimize. For example, if you are trying to optimize for Sheridan Wyoming Real Estate, then make your username SheridanRealEstate. If you have already signed up for Active Rain, then keep this tip in mind as you join other social networks."
Your justification for this is that your user name becomes the URL and "I think" you are under the impression that keyword stuffed URL's are a benefit to search engine rankings. This is simply not the case - while it is important to have search engine friendly (Clean) URL's in order for spiders to be able to traverse your pages, making your user name a keyword so it shows up in the URL will not do anything for AR members profile rankings. And what if they choose wrong? These are permanent right? What if someone is trying to show up for "Area Realtor" and makes that their user name, sooner or later they will learn the hard way, that using "Area Realtor" as their user name is a violation of the NAR's membership mark, and they will be forced to delete that account or at least change the URL (Which means they start from square one)
What really floored me though was what you suggested next: In effect inappropriately spamming the last name field.
You posted and I quote:
"You may have been tempted to simply enter your first and last name when you signed up. That’s the obvious process, but your name will be seen on every comment you make, every blog post and more. So use this as an opportunity to include another keyword. This is important - Don’t use the same keyword as your username. Using the example above, if your username keyword is SheridanRealEstate, your Name keyword may be Sheridan Wyoming Real Estate or even Sheridan Wyoming Properties. To do this, simply enter both your first and last name into the First Name field. Next, enter your keyword into the Last Name field."
Are you kidding me?
Here is a quote regarding keyword stuffing (A form of spam) from Google's webmaster center that I hope everyone after reading this post decides to go and read - I am going to bold the most important part for emphasis
"Keyword stuffing" refers to the practice of loading a webpage with keywords in an attempt to manipulate a site's ranking in Google's search results. Filling pages with keywords results in a negative user experience, and can harm your site's ranking. Focus on creating useful, information-rich content that uses keywords appropriately and in context."
Ok so that addresses the search engine misinformation and spam issue, but think about what you just suggested
Active Rain has created this resource based on best practices and the fields they provide a user are not to be abused - you just suggested to a bunch of people to use the last name field for search engine spam instead of what it is labeled and meant for. Each person that takes this advice reflects negatively on the community as a whole and will inevitably invite more and more poor quality members who post with the intention of spamming search engine indexes.
Next think about when the result you are going for happens to be achieved - you get your profile ranked highly in Google and all of a sudden people are seeing it - under first name, they see your first and last name, a under last name they see a bunch of keywords - people are going to think you are stupid and can't even fill out your own bio properly. You spoke very well later about how you want to have your profile make a good impression, yet at the beginning of your blog, you tell them to do the exact opposite.
What we have here is a clear case of SEO tunnel vision - usability and professionalism are tossed aside because they are not given due consideration in conjunction with one's search engine optimization efforts.
I hope this isn't taken as mean spirited because it really isn't meant to be - but hopefully it does serve as a reminder to all AR members, that they should take everything they read with a grain of salt and apply common sense to it. I got a little concerned when I saw over 140 comments on the post all saying thank you, and not a single person seemed to have read it.
Morgan Carey
;)
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Parked