How do we discover what we want to read? By Roz Morris

According to a post on Problogger, my Undercover Soundtrack series might doom me to deepest obscurity because of new Google search algorithms.

In a post titled Why Blogs that allow Guest Posts Will BePenalised in 2013, Problogger explains that the term ‘guest’ and the use of multiple links are now likely to make Google bots condemn my content as spam. 

In the Undercover Soundtrack, I host writers who use music as part of their creative process (here’s a recent post that explains). It’s guests galore. 

Don't say 'guest'

Problogger says: ‘Stop using the words “guest post,” “guest blog” etc. Oh dear. What other noun do I use to introduce a post that’s not by me? ‘Guest’ is perfect. Like ‘said’ in dialogue, it does its job and doesn’t get in the way. Anything else is absurd.

Bad to link

And what of the other major SEO clanger, links? They’re not all bad, says Problogger, as there’s a difference between ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’ links. 

Here I’m puzzled. A sentient human can tell at a glance whether a link is useful, but how can an algorithm? My Undercover Soundtrack posts are full of links to Youtube - all part of the experience. How will Google guess they’re justified and essential?

(Perhaps as a warning of what happens when you worry too much about SEO and not enough about content, the Problogger post is full of typos. Or perhaps ‘mecognizsim’ is a word they’ve invented to stay out of a blue hole.)

Searching questions

Of course, we couldn’t function without search algorithms. But are some things, particularly the arts, unclassifiable? We try to teach machines how we browse and what makes a result helpful, but to do that we have to write the perfect wishlist. If I search for a book, I’ll type keywords. But there might be a book without them that is more perfectly what I want, only I didn’t know how to ask for it. And art works by surprising us, by taking us to places we can’t invent for ourselves.

This is where SEO fails. 

Non-fiction

SEO certainly works for non-fiction. I’m careful about it with my Nail Your Novel blog (was that link allowed, Google?), because it seems entirely possible that a reader could find it with keywords. Even so, its real appeal is probably more a matter of unmeasurables such as personality. And I still think I get more readers from making connections on Twitter and Facebook. (Since I must be damned, I'm gonna link.)

 

Heart and art

The more the content is designed to speak to hearts and imaginations, the less it can be adequately sifted and served by the literal eye of a formula. A poet chooses a word because he likes its beat. A stranger reads it and finds himself beguiled. Neither of them can exhaustively define why, or how it should be bottled, labelled, number-crunched or tagged. It just is.

Google may not approve of The Undercover Soundtrack, but I’m gathering a bunch of human readers who do. They love to see authors unpeel about the process of creation, to see the writer in private, on their lonely, individual voyage to make a novel.  

Even better, it’s selling books. Increasingly, subscribers comment ‘I’m off to buy’, or tell me on Facebook how they’ve discovered several new authors through following the series. 

D.I.S.C.O (verability)

Savour that word: discovered. Discoverability is a holy grail for authors and publishers alike. How do I let you know I’ve written a book you might like? With non-fiction it’s relatively easy: tick the right boxes. Genre fiction too. But for the literary, extraordinary and less classifiable, we woo our readers on the gut level where algorithms don’t go.

Or can they?

How do you help readers discover your work? How do you find what you want to read? What impulse buy have you stumbled across online and how did you discover it? How accurately can we specify what we’re looking for until we find it? How will we teach our machines to help?

Let’s comment.

Thanks for the mountain pic Daveynin

Roz Morris is a bestselling ghostwriter and book doctor. She blogs at Nail Your Novel  and has a double life on Twitter; for writing advice follow her as @dirtywhitecandy, for more normal chit-chat try her on @ByRozMorris. Her books are Nail Your Novel: Why Writers Abandon Books And How You Can Draft, Fix and Finish With Confidence, available in print and on Kindle  She also has a novel, My Memories of a Future Life available on Kindle (US and UK) and also in print. You can also listen to or download a free audio of the first 4 chapters right here.