If you’ve been doing SEO for any length of time, chances are you have stories to tell about a nightmare situation or client. And if you’re on Twitter, chances are you were sharing some of those stories over the past few days using the #SEOHorrorStories hashtag — a hashtag that became so popular it actually reached Twitter’s trends on Friday evening.
How #SEOHorrorStories Began
Credit for the hashtag goes to Aleyda Solis, one of our SEO columnists on Search Engine Land, who posted the first tweet Friday morning and then invited other SEOs to do the same.
When all internal pages of the site were canonicalized to the home page #seohorrorstories — Aleyda Solis (@aleyda) October 30, 2015
SEOs: Share your #seohorrorstories … Because Halloween is a good time to laugh (or cry) about them :) — Aleyda Solis (@aleyda) October 30, 2015
And the SEO industry jumped right in, with people all over the world hopping on the #SEOHorrorStories bandwagon.
Every client sentence that starts with…. "I read this article…."#seohorrorstories — Kristine Schachinger (@schachin) October 31, 2015
"We've gotta launch next week, so we'll 'SEO the site' later" #seohorrorstories — Aaron Bradley (@aaranged) October 30, 2015
Almost everything that starts with "Our developer says…" #SEOHorrorStories — Barry Adams (@badams) October 30, 2015
We redid our website four months ago and our web designer said that redirects weren't necessary. #seohorrorstories — Dana DiTomaso (@danaditomaso) October 31, 2015
"We have 25 GA accounts so we can monitor everything" All for one site #SEOHorrorStories — Alan Bleiweiss (@AlanBleiweiss) October 31, 2015
Even Matt Cutts, the former head of Google’s webspam team, got involved. And the official Google Analytics Twitter account sent out several SEO horror story tweets (three are included here).
"I was just discussing your sites with some of the webspam team."#seohorrorstories — Matt Cutts (@mattcutts) November 1, 2015
"Our website is written completely in Flash." #seohorrorstories — Google Analytics (@googleanalytics) November 1, 2015
<meta name="robots" content="noindex">#seohorrorstories — Google Analytics (@googleanalytics) November 1, 2015
When your client trusts their gut and not your analytics. #seohorrorstories — Google Analytics (@googleanalytics) November 1, 2015
With a total of 1.3 million followers between the two accounts (including those who follow both), that’s huge exposure for the hashtag.
Over the weekend, Olivier Duffez started the French version of the hashtag: #horreursduseo.
SEO On Twitter Trends
The hashtag was so popular by Friday evening that it hit Twitter trends, as Martin Macdonald captured in this tweet:
@aleyda lol: pic.twitter.com/xOVfOkBgBQ — Martin Macdonald (@searchmartin) October 31, 2015
I’m thinking that’s probably the first time an SEO-related hashtag has ever reached Twitter trends. (If anyone knows for sure, one way or another, please let me know via a tweet to @mattmcgee.)
How Far Did #SEOHorrorStories Travel?
In short, pretty far — especially for an SEO-related hashtag. There are a number of different hashtag analysis tools you can use for data. None of them are showing the same exact numbers, but they’re pretty close.
Number Of Tweets
According to FollowTheHashtag, there were 1,668 tweets with #SEOHorrorStories as of late Monday. Topsy says the number is more in the 1,300–1,400 range. HashTracking.com‘s count is also in that same lower range.
Topsy shows how quickly the hashtag took off:
Impressions
FollowTheHashtag also has the highest count here — 10.9 million as of late Monday. Hashtracking.com says there was about 8.5 million “timeline deliveries.”
But numbers aside, as several SEOs pointed out — perhaps none better than Greg Gifford — #SEOHorrorStories is great reading for job-related comedy and proof that misery loves company.
If you're in SEO and you're not following the #SEOHorrorStories hashtag, you're missing out on pretty much the best thing ever — Greg Gifford (@GregGifford) October 31, 2015
One last note: Aleyda Solis has written her own recap of how the #SEOHorrorStories hashtag spread, and she also created a Twitter account — @SEOHorrorStory — for SEOs to keep the stories alive.
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