This morning I was talking to James Perrott on Twitter about the SEO industries love for a good ol fashioned winners and losers list. The dudes at Search Metrics have tried to steal a march on others by creating a list that shows the winners and losers from the most recent webspam update. I can understand why they’ve gone to this effort as these lists get alot of visitors and makes the author/website look like ‘thought leaders’ (I hate that term). The data discussed in the post has since been confirmed as Panda 3.5 by Matt Cutts.

Now I don’t believe for a second that Search Metrics were trying to decieve anyone, I’m sure that they thought these results were linked to the webspam update and without checking the data I’m sure the winners and losers were correct.

The problem I’ve got is that if Matt Cutts hadn’t mentioned that it was Panda 3.5 some people could have believed that the webspam update was to do with sites using databases to aggregate content, press portals/aggregators and heavily templated websites.

It’s this kind of misinformation (unintentionally or intentionally) that can give people the wrong idea about what updates entail and how to react to them. Adapting to an update is more important than knowing which one it is but it made me think about what I’ve read recently and whether it was true, unintentionally false or intentionally wrong.

I know what you are thinking. Don’t trust everything you read! Yes, I know I shouldn’t (and don’t) believe everything I read, blah blah blah but you have to draw the line somewhere and unfortunately I don’t cynically review everything I read on a daily basis.

Do you trust [nothing | most | everything] you read? You can’t test every idea yourself so what sources (except this one) do you trust within the SEO industry? O.k well this post hasn’t exactly gone to plan but I can’t be bothered to write it so, ah, yeah, thoughts? 🙂