Is Positive SEO Possible? A Google Parkour Case Study

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When you read about SEO by 2024 you may still wonder:

Is positive SEO even possible?

Can the bad rep of SEO get even worse?

Well, yes, most media coverage is focusing on the downsides of SEO already.

Yet some pundits make SEO sound even more obnoxious!

It’s not just about spamming Google apparently.

Yes, new even more obnoxious terms spread like forest fires:

So-called “negative SEO” is the most infamous. What the hell is that?

The “negative SEO” publicity nightmare

In recent years so called “negative SEO” is all over social media and blogs.

It has been one of the most written about topics in the search marketing industry and beyond.

Luckily only a few major publications have covered the topic or even used this misleading term. Why?

Well, for most people out there all SEO is negative.

The “negative SEO” wave is just new evidence that proves how evil SEO is.

It not only is about spamming Google and hacking blogs and websites for profit.

It’s also about hurting competing sites.

At first I didn’t want to write about that at all. It’s such a shame.

Why spread the word about this shameful practice even more?

Why convince the public that SEO is “negative” and a means to sabotage others on Google?

It isn’t! Most SEO is neutral. I can help but also hurt (if you do it wrong).

Yet you can make sure from the start that your SEO is positive. Are you kidding me?

Can Search Engine Optimization be positive?

So I considered just writing about how SEO is not bad after all.

I wanted to mention that even Google is teaching SEO.

The plan was to reiterate that it’s not spam blah blah blah.

Yet I’m not that good in praising SEO.

Danny Sullivan does a better job at it. Also he has more authority than I do.

After a while I finally found a way to deal with all that negativity: Positive SEO.

Is positive SEO possible? How? Wait a minute!

Sadly I have to explain what “negative SEO” is to make you understand what positive SEO is about.

You know, it’s not only about the image of SEO or the “reputation problem”.

I’d like to coin the term positive SEO and to describe a special technique of performing SEO.

The most common SEO technique of “negative SEO” is so called “Google Bowling”.

What is Google Bowling? It’s buying spammy links on low quality sites to link to your competitors.

Google acts on these links and then penalizes your competition. It disappears from the Google results. That’s the theory.

It may work or not but I hate the sheer fact that thousands of people already try it. I see sites attacked all over the place.

Google parkour case study

Positive SEO is very similar to “negative SEO” but it works the other way around.

You use authority links to link out to your competitors. Then they rank and it helps you actually.

It can help in a social SEO way because the people you link out to notice it.

Then in the future they will link out to you as well ideally to reciprocate.

I link out to “the competition” all the time for years and I think I will never stop.

Today I want to show you a short case study where I used positive SEO to help a “competitor”.

In SEO there are no real competitors, just colleagues.

I got one to rank at #1 in Google and thus got valuable relevant traffic directly from this #1 ranking.

I know there is at least one other name for this technique. It has been called second tier link building but this term is a bit clunky.

I’d like to rename it Google Parkour and call the whole strategy positive SEO.

Now I will show you the details so that you can grasp what I want to say:

One of my good old online friends from the SEO industry I have never met in real life is Ann Smarty.

She a great blogger and is known for her writings all over the place plus her guest blogging community.

In the ancient past of 2008 she has written a post on image SEO which for years ranked at #1 on Google.com for the keyphrase [image seo].

It’s a great overview and offers some background information plus several useful links to additional resources from other blogs.

One of those links at the bottom of the post leads to my blog here to a post about finding free images for your blog posts:

Over the years I’ve noticed that I get steady traffic from Ann Smarty’s post on image SEO.

I even updated the post she links to regularly so that all the people coming over find what they need.

It’s nothing huge. I got like around 50 monthly visitors from SEO Smarty via this post.

You could argue that I could earn more visitors or even money by trying to push my own post on image SEO on Google.

After all it was even on #10 when I originally wrote this post.

Call me lazy but I didn’t have the time to play around with this keyphrase.

I have lots of client work and I don’t earn money directly by this blog so why should I compete with my old friend instead of helping her to help me?

I’d rather take the short path and push what’s already on top.

I think she was already in the top 3 before I linked out to her again in another post:

Then I got more visitors than previously via her post. I think it was roughly 100% more.

Indeed 50 visitors is still not enough. You are right.

That’s why I will engage more often in positive SEO in future.

I don’t have the time to push the seo2.blog all the time.

I even struggle to find the time to write for it regularly.

Thus when I finally do I will practice more positive SEO and Google Parkour.

What is Parkour?

Parkour is this modern discipline I trained regularly for a 12 years.

It’s a way of overcoming obstacles in the city and countryside.

You jump and climb over walls or trees for example.

It really feels like flying. I love it. One great thing about it is also that it’s non-competitive.

Whenever a parkour practitioner meets another one they often help each other.

You talk about techniques, you tell them or they tell you what you do wrong or why you fail and afterwards everybody has improved.

Thus I consider the name Google Parkour to be the perfect term to describe the technique of linking out to your competition to help them help you.

In parkour everybody jumps her or himself after all as well and everybody is happy afterwards as well.

What obstacle do you want to overcome right now? Are you ranking somewhere near the top and need some a helping hand?

Tell me in the comments. Sometimes it’s time consuming to find good resources to link out to.

Thus feel free to mention your latest Google Parkour obstacle you want to overcome in the comments.

I may also share it on social media in the mean time.

Please forget “negative SEO” and practice positive SEO with me.

You optimize to improve! Or you sabotage

Just think about it! How would “negative SEO” look in real life?

• Would you vandalize your competitor’s store to get his customers?
• Would you flood the street in front of their store?
• Would you pay thugs to break in and steal their products?

This is just sabotage. There is no “optimization” involved at all. That’s also why “negative SEO” is i´nonsense.

You either fix or break things. You either help or hurt people.

When you optimize something then you actually improve things by definition.

You can’t negatively optimize something. Optimization is never negative on purpose.

Sure, you can try to optimize something and break it by accident. That’s a different story though.

When you sabotage your competition online, especially to hurt them on Google you do just that “Google sabotage”.

Positive SEO is much more natural and rewarding.

You don’t even have to pay some spammers or criminals.

Btw. Google Parkour works without even telling your friend about it.

We didn’t agree to push each other in the search results. We just linked out where it mattered.

Check your inbound links and find out who already links to you to practice some Google Parkour.

Check your referral stats to see which sites send you traffic already. You might find some low hanging fruit that way.

* The Flag by ModernDope, one of my favourite parkour images.

Merken