How do I use Amazon Mechanical Turk for SEO to increase my page ranks? – Q&A with BuzzStarter on Quora Series

One of the things I’ve been trying to do is change the whole way people think about SEO, digital & search marketing as well as analytics by participating a little bit more on Quora. I also go on that site to spread the word on BuzzStarter and what we do. So this will be the first article entry in a series of entries where I try to educate people using my own experiences being in this field. A couple of days ago, this questions was asked:

How do I use Amazon Mechanical Turk for SEO to increase my page ranks?

My answer as originally posted on Quora.

I’ll give you the best advice here coming from experience and try not step on anyone’s ego. I noticed that most of the long answers given here are a bit inexperienced and the short ones are from experienced people who are a bit sarcastic. I’ll give you a use case on how you should use Mechanical Turk because in a nutshell, what it really is is cheap crowdsourcing work. 

MT is good for things like, creating lists. For example, you want to create a comprehensive list of all mom bloggers out on the web for a PR campaign you’re doing, then you use that service.

Or if you want to do an a/b test in a controlled environment, then you use MT. Load balancing test that mimics normal human activity? Yes.

It’s also good for collecting data that you have a hard time doing yourself by writing code, especially if you’re not good at writing code.

That’s how you would use MT.

Now let’s turn to your question because what you’re really asking is how can you use crowdsourcing to increase your PageRank. To increase PageRank, I’m assuming you’re thinking about backlinking because that’s the algorithm if this was still 2010. Since this is 2014, I’m going to give you a friendly advice, be that brick wall and tell you not to use MT in anyway to generate backlinks or generate content to push up your PageRank because it won’t work. The reasons being:

• There’s this algorithm called Penguin. Look it up and you would understand why this won’t work, especially combined with Panda (and Payday Loan 2.0).
• It will look unnatural. You may even get a penalty for doing what you’re about to do.
• Stop being in the mindset of, “if I use MT to create content or links in bulk, I will start ranking” because that too will not work.

My advice for you if you are serious about SEO in 2014 is, think about what you should do to create important popularity signals back to your content, that is not contrived, artificial or machine generated where you’re not chasing people for links all the time.

Also forget growth hacking, which is not good for SEO. Those guys are hacks in my opinion because the audience they build is stimulated only on the short term. Google values user experience that engages visitors, makes them stay and come back to your site over time.

Make sense?

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