The Church of Latter-Day SEO

I saw a fascinating article appear and drift off the front page of The Washington Post today: "Mormons using the Web to control their own image." The article suggests:

Try this. Type “church,” “Old Testament” or even “friend” into Google, and the Web site of the LDS church, the Mormons, pops up near the top of the list.

Controlling their image is one thing. I can certainly understand the Church of LDS using SEO to make sure that if you search for "LDS," "Mormon," "Book of Mormon," or the like, you'll land on a church-approved website, giving Mormons a chance to get out their message ahead of people talking about them. Reputation management is an important (and legitimate) branch of SEO.

But notice what their SEO campaign has done. The church of LDS is at position #3 for "friend" and "Old Testament" on Google. It's farther down on page 1 for "church" due to local results. Based on those examples, it's probably dominating thousands of other searches that are not specific to the Church of LDS.

Since my parents live in Utah and have a lot of Mormon friends, I know at least a little about the Church of LDS. It's good at crowdsourcing, and when it puts effort and members behind a cause, it gets the job done. So I decided to find out what the "LDS SEO" strategy is, in case I could learn something!

Of course, the church's SEO strategists won't post their full strategy in public; professional SEO experts generally don't. There are a few clues, however. Following links in the WaPo article, I found a 2007 LDS primer on how to do backlink building and a more recent SEO wiki on lds.org outlining a particular SEO campaign [Update: No longer; the page has now been edited, removing all specifics of the plan, but for the moment Google still has a cache of it from Jul 29.]

Before that wiki page was bowdlerized, it outlined an SEO campaign relying heavily on backlink building and article marketing. Here's my summary of the campaign, as I understand it (NOT copied from their site...this is my own rough synopsis).

First, the church created a large website, providentliving.org, with many articles teaching LDS values and beliefs: the content the SEO campaign is designed to promote. Notice that LDS is not in the URL, so people who may be skeptical of their church won't avoid clicking the links. Then, volunteers are asked to do the following:

1. Identify popular searches on ANY topic using the Google keywords tool. Forget competition. The goal is to target lots of searches.
2. Google site:providentliving.org for that keyword. This selector identifies pages on the providentliving website that contain those keywords.
3. Publish articles on multiple platforms -- ezinearticles, Hubpages, Squidoo -- designed around those keywords, with a link to the providentliving.org page identified in step 2.
4. Use social media and bookmarking services to promote the pages on providentliving.org and the pages pointing to them.
5. Use old-fashioned linkbuilding, contacting webmasters of popular and important websites related to their keywords and asking for a backlink.
6. And of course, share and promote links among friends, relatives and colleagues.

This SEO campaign targets popular searches such as "paying off credit cards" (not the example phrase they used, but an analogous one), rather than directly targeting searches related to the LDS church. This is a form of content farming, creating content tailored to capture traffic from popular searches. Their stated goal is to attract traffic from hundreds of thousands of searches to a website which teaches LDS values and shares the LDS message.

I don't think most of us can apply this SEO strategy. It's using a flamethrower to light a candle. It works because there's thousands of volunteers behind the campaign, so even if some of the methods they're using aren't all that effective, the cumulative effect is enough to capture even high-competition searches like "friend."

This SEO campaign reminds us of the double-edged power of the internet, which allows hundreds of thousands of like-minded individuals to organize themselves. We saw it for good in the Arab Spring. We saw it for bad in the London riots. The LDS SEO campaign is not even close to either of those two extremes. What worries me is that they're not only trying to control searches related directly to the Church of LDS; they're also trying to dominate and control popular web searches in general. Notice that the lds website took down its step-by-step SEO instructions from that page as soon as WaPo linked to it. I'm sure the information is still available to church members in some other form.

Search engines will fight back, of course. But just like JCPenny's paid links campaign last holiday season, for the moment, LDS SEO is winning the game. And this isn't a paid links campaign. It's a body of devoted, grassroots volunteers committed to a cause.

Think about that. The LDS SEO strategy isn't particularly sophisticated, but it's working. We will see much more sophisticated versions of this approach in the future: very large organizations harnessing their vast membership for SEO purposes. Can you think of other groups which might want to employ such a strategy to control what ordinary people see when they search the web? Can you imagine how the web -- or the world -- might change, if some of those groups succeed? This isn't a hypothetical, because I'm quite sure that the Church of LDS is not an isolated case or a pioneer; there are surely other groups out there doing this too.

This is a teachable moment. We need to start educating friends, family, and relatives about what SEO is and how it works. The web is the first place people go to look up information. They need to ponder the source of the information they're finding. They need to consider spin, bias, motive and context when reading a webpage or clicking a link. Not because the content is necessarily false or wrong -- the information might be perfectly sound and well-intentioned, in the same way that a salesperson may be absolutely sincere and have a good product -- but web users do need to realize and take into account where the message is coming from and who is promoting it.

In fact, it's time for a pop quiz: what ulterior motive might I have for writing this page, while at the same time I am sincerely interested (and somewhat concerned) about this news story? This is the question you should ask yourself on every webpage you read.

NOTE: I don't pass judgment on other people's religions, and I will NOT accept comments in my guestbook bashing the Church of LDS or Mormons for their faith. They can believe whatever they want, and they can spread their message however they like, so long as they respect my right to say, "No, thank you."

The issue I'm discussing is the phenomenon of a large organization mustering a grassroots SEO campaign. It could be any organization doing it, for any message or cause. My concern is not what they're trying to promote, but the methods they're using. I have no beef with optimizing for terms related to one's message, organization, goal or product, but I'm troubled by their attempts to dominate unrelated search terms. What do you think?