How much information out there on blogs, forums and webpages about SEO, linking and the like that is intentional DISInformation (or even unintentional)?For example:
1) I discover a certain process I'll call "Process A" works exceptionally well for high rankings; and
2) another, "Process B" is terrible
What is the correct action for me?
1) Tell the world to use "process A" so the whole world can benefit?
2) Tell the world to use "process B" so hopefully my competition will sink?
3) Shut up!
If I tell everyone about "process A" I will be the good guy and help everyone, but probably in the longer term hurt myself as the search engines will respond by diminishing the effectiveness of the process.
That leaves telling everyone that "process B" IS effective (although it's not) hoping this will benefit me as my competition will try the process and sink a bit.
I think option 3 is the best line of attack.
The reason being of course "unintentional" disinformation. I think many people try something and attain good results in the search engines (or not) and decide that their particular process is effective in attaining excellent SEO positioning.
For example, avoiding the use of site wide links. Of course it could be a completely different factor that got the great rankings. Or, someone might decide that cross linking sites on the same c-block results in poor rankings, while the actual reason could be completely different.
So the basic conclusion is that if you attain high rankings or not, it is extremely difficult to offer a complete and comprehensive explanation of why unless of course your work for the search engine in question!