Co-Chronology Vs Causality: An Important SEO Distinction

Weird title, but you NEED to read this post.

This is about how the actions you take to improve your search rankings actually influence your results… and also how they DON’T. Furthermore it’s an important distinction on statistics and analysis that you might just find helpful throughout your life as a whole!

I really can’t think of an appropriate introduction for this subject so I figure we’ll just launch into it…

I often get questions from Firepow members and others to this effect:

“Yesterday I submitted my site to to a list of web directories, and today my rankings have dropped from page 2 for my keyword to page 100! What’s going on?! You recommended me do that and now you’ve screwed me!”

Or in the news, you might hear something like this…

“As Taliban millitants continue to resist the occupation in the southern provinces, Afghanistan’s civilian death toll rises to the highest level since the beginning of the war.”

Each of these statements is saying something “behind” the words…

The first is saying:

“The reason my site lost it’s ranking was because I submitted it to these directories.”

And the second is saying:

“The reason the Afghan civilian death toll is so high is because of the Taliban’s continued resistance”

Here we uncover a potentially harmful verbal and mental phenomenon.

The phenomenon I’m talking about is:

To mistakenly assume that the link between two factors is CAUSAL rather than Co-Chronological. (actually I’m pretty sure Co-Chronological is not a real term. What I’m meaning is, two things happening at the same time.)

In other words: Just because two things happen at the same point in time, doesn’t mean one causes another! They MIGHT well be proven with testing to be causal, but the mere co-existence of them at the same point in time says nothing about how likely one is to have influenced the occurrence of the other.

Am I sounding like a crazy person yet?? Let’s go back to our fictional examples.

1. Just because you submitted your site yesterday, and your rankings dropped today, doesn’t mean the submission caused the drop. Most people who ask questions like this have very new sites, and it’s common knowledge that when your site is new in the SERPS your rankings bobble around all over the place. There’s constant reindexing, constant shuffling. Some people have called it “The Google Dance”.

2. Just because the Taliban are resisting today and the Afghan civilian death toll is at it’s highest point, doesn’t mean their resistance is the reason for the death toll. Just like the search engines, there are other critical factors in play that haven’t been mentioned in the inference.

The real point of this post for online marketers, particularly those looking for free organic traffic is to… (and I seem to be giving this advice alot lately)

RELAX!

Relax, and don’t judge what something means too quickly, particularly before you have all the information. Especially when you have a new site and you’re doing many different things to improve your rankings, don’t freak out and make an incorrect assumption of a connection between two factors unless the connection:

1. Makes Sense (it doesn’t make sense that getting backlinks from quality site directories would harm your rankings)

2. Corroborates with other evidence, experiential or proven (Have you seen this happen before? Have other people reported it happening before? Is it documented?)

And even then it’s something to be TESTED, not decided upon (with the exclusion of the “proven” category from above)

And in the rest of your life?

When you hear something like:

“Gas prices have risen since the beginning of the Obama administration” (I don’t know if that’s true or not)…

You’ll know to see past the inane inference and think “That doesn’t mean anything the administration has done has been the cause of that… I need more facts to evaluate that statement properly”. And then you’ll realize “I sound like a total nerd right now and I need to get back to work”

I hope this makes you think a little more, both as you build your search engine presence and as you go about every day life.