I have found that there are a lot of posts out there written by people that don’t seem to “walk the walk”. When I look at their websites or those of their clients, they don’t have very high page rank or they don’t dominate in any substantial way. How can someone have credibility and authority when they’ve not been successful in their own right?

On a more specific level, say someone is touting a particular method of link building in a blog post, if I can’t look at their own link profile and find any evidence of those links then it begs the question if they’re speaking based on hunches instead of proven success.

It’s an unfortunate fact in this industry that you get a lot of people who present themselves as gurus when they really don’t know enough to authoritatively write an article or worse, charge someone for SEO services.

Mike

As far as your findings being stolen, yeah. It happens. I had a nice post years ago about the PR passing shortened URLs that I saw some exact data go uncredited into a Search Engine Land post. I can understand anyone’s decision to not to want to share it, but if you’re doing the kind of posts I noted above (it sounds like you aren’t), I’d be frustrated.

NDAs are tough (which I also noted in my post). I still argue there’s a way to blind enough data to show something. But most of the posts I’m criticising share nothing remotely convincing. And frankly, the industry happily goes along with it. That’s the crux of the biscuit for me.

Again, AJ is not guilty of this frustration at all. He’s an example of a thought leader who is doing it right by my book.

Then to publish those results, so that I can be viewed as an “expert” to peers? So that we can all have the same knowledge base and leave no differentiating factors between us? No thanks. You get credit for the data for a second these days, before the “Big Boys of Search” incorporate into their repertoire or claim it as their own discovery. Now I do my testing and discovery with my client sites and keep that knowledge to myself (good and bad).

It’s why I’m given to writing about SEO theory, marketing tactics, business philosophy with search slants on it these days. It’s a lot more fulfilling to where to go and different angles on Search/SEO than it is to give away the data. It takes as much critical thinking to write great theory and philosophy posts as it does to conduct tests, IMO.

I’m cognizant that for every ‘theory’ post I should also have a post that is truly productive, actionable or fact-based. It’s one of the reasons I like to develop bookmarklets or write about Excel tips (though I haven’t done the latter in a while.)

A lot of the time I try to show the work that I’m doing via my blog – dogfooding. I hope that something like my post on changing the title tag falls into that camp.

http://www.blindfiveyearold.com/blog-post-optimization

Unfortunately, real client case studies are often difficult to use because of confidentiality issues. But in all I agree that there needs to be more practical versus theoretical. James Agate is a very good example of this and I think I actually told him so on Google+ a few weeks ago.

One response to your examples: I think many writers pushing the future of Authorship would agree that it has relatively small effects on rankings at the moment. But, it’s growth in the future seems inevitable, as Google has shown time and time again that they can’t handle spam with their current approach. It’s easy to forget that nothing’s inevitable in this industry, which is why I think most posts on Authorship skip the disclaimer of “this may or may not affect rankings now and we’re speculating on why we think it will be important in the future.”