When SEO Horror Stories Met Twitter

Halloween is the best time to sit around with your friends and tell stories that make you quiver in your boots. On Oct. 29, the day before Halloween, SEO horror stories became a worldwide trending topic as high profile Twitter accounts like Google Analytics and Matt Cutts, along with other SEOs, shared their worst experiences dealing with humorous Web disasters. 

Working in SEO means that at some point you will deal with overbearing clients, web developers that don’t understand what you are envisioning and other obstacles that make a career in SEO difficult. Aleyda Solis, an SEO columnist on Search Engine Land posted the first tweet using the hashtag #seohorrorstories and invited other SEO experts to join her in sharing anecdotes of difficult moments in SEO. The topic became popular in Utah and across the globe.

Solis’ first tweet read, “When all internal pages of the site were canonicalized to the home page.” From there, the responses rolled in rapidly from Utah and across the globe. The most memorable responses were from some of the bigger names in SEO.

High profile contributors, such as Google Analytics, joined in on the sharing of SEO horror stories. Their tweet, which said, “our website is written entirely in Flash” received over 150 retweets.

Another big name in Google’s former head of their webspam team, Matt Cutts, also shared his own horror story tweet. Cutts said, “I was just discussing your site with some of the webspam team.”

With over 1.3 million followers between the participating Twitter accounts, the hashtag received a lot of exposure. Not only was the topic trending in Utah and the rest of the United States, but a French version of the hashtag reading #horreursduseo began to make its rounds through the French Twitterverse. 

This trending hashtag over Halloween weekend not only brought together SEO experts by giving them the opportunity to share funny anecdotes of situations from the job, but also showed how many similar experiences these professionals share.  These stories demonstrate that difficult situations don’t just arise in SEO because of the way you are handling the job, but simply because of the nature of the job.

By the end of the weekend, the hashtag was used between 1,300 and 1,700 times and received around 8 million to 11 million impressions. These tweets were not just seen locally in places like Utah but across the globe where French, German and Spanish similar hashtags were created.