The client received an SEO review from Yoast that contained numerous inaccuracies and irrelevant recommendations that did not address the client's needs or website model. The client, who has decades of experience in consulting, deemed the report one of the worst he had ever seen. He requests a full refund or a completely new report from Yoast that is based on an accurate examination of the site and focuses solely on relevant SEO issues. The client provides multiple examples to support his criticism that the original report demonstrated a lack of understanding of the site and failed to properly investigate it.

1. Dear Team Yoast,
I received your review of my website, Naked Capitalism on
March 4. One of the things you mentioned in it was that
you were being blunt.
Let me respond in kind. Your review was not what you
promised on your website. You repeatedly indicated that
I would receivea review of “your site,” meaning that it
would be based on a specific and detailed examination.
Your site also stressed your experience in performing
SEO reviews, (600 reviews of customers similarly
situated to me, plus more in-depth work which much
larger concerns).
Therefore what I was sold was a review that would be
based on understanding my site, performed by
experienced, knowledgeable personnel. Instead, what I
got was an embarrassment that looks to have been
produced by a new hire mechanically following a
checklist. It contains numerous statements about my
site that are flatly inaccurate.
The level of errors reveals a failure to make an
adequate investigationof my site, a failure to
understand my revenue model and audience and even
worse, demonstrates a lack of experience with sites
that are journalistic in nature.
Your report follows a “check the box” format, and
wastes considerable space on misguided and irrelevant
recommendations that I did not ask for. Only a
comparatively small portion of this report addresses
what I was interested in, SEO. Most of those cannot be
implemented due to constraints we identified on your
intake form.
The other bizarre unstated assumption underlying your
report is that we don’t understand our readers. We have
an extremely large, engaged, and highly vocal
readership. They tell us what they want and don’t want, in
our comments section and via e-mail, even about trivial
annoyances. We also go to considerable lengths to

2. solicit input from them. For instance, we went through
five drafts of our redesign and got extensive reader
feedback on each one before going live. And they pay us
back, literally. A significant portion of our site’s
revenues comes via reader donations, a fact that you
appear to have missed completely in your analysis (as in
keeping our current loyal readers happy is of
paramount importance).
The result, almost without exception, is that the
recommendations based on these erroneous
assumptions are misguided, unimplementable, and
sometimes counterproductive. The few useful
suggestion you have are buried among ones that are
filler.
Even worse, for these very few, useful, potentially high
impact ones, you don’t provide remotely enough
guidance for us to be able to implement them. So pray
tell, what were we paying for?
I base this view on the fact that I have been in the
management consulting business since 1983, starting at
McKinsey, and a considerable amount of my work has
involved young technology-related ventures. I have
seen a large amount of professional services analyses
provided to me by clients and contacts. Your report is
one of the worst I have ever encountered. And this
is not just my opinion. I have shared it so far with 4
individuals, each of them IT professionals, each with
over 25 years of experience in settings that would have
them seeing third-party professional work, and all gave
very bad grades to this report. I am thus highly
confident that if I were to publish it on my blog, with
this letter, that my and their criticisms of it would be
seen as accurate by third parties.
I will detail the considerable shortcomings with your
report in due course. However, I expect one of two
remedies: either a full refund or a completely new
version of this report, based on a proper examination
of my site, focused solely on SEO issues. I prefer a

3. refund, since I have little confidence that a new report
would be much of an improvement. Again, you did not give
me what you promised and what I paid for.
Sales Bait and Switch; Discouraging Clients from
Providing Information
Your intake form actively discourages clients from
providing much information. Your e-mail with the link had
the header “Two Intake Questions for our Review of
Naked Capitalism.” The form stated: “Are there any
specific things we need to know about your site? (Please
keep it short, we'll read your site too.)” It had a
remarkably diminutive box for putting in the answer, not
even capable of displaying a reasonable-length
sentence, making it virtually impossible to say anything
meaningful. Thus your intake process actively
discourages clients from providing you with
information, and you are explicit about not wanting to
hear much from the client. You instead strongly
signaled that you wanted to do your own investigation,
and made the unusually intrusive request of asking for
an admin login, which I supplied. That approach would
have fine if you were willing to do your own work or
contact clients during the review with questions but
neither happened in my case.
It was only when I saw the intake form that I had any
clue you intended to cover topics you had not mentioned
as part of the site review and that I was not interested
in (usability, conversion, site speed). (I signed up when
significant numbers of your pages were down, including
ones related to your site reviews, and your records
will show I used the intake form for your consulting
projects to ask if you had stopped doing site reviews).
You market yourselves as an SEO site, I had gotten a
referral from someone who had gotten an SEO review
(by Joost, not a new hire) and was happy with the result.
I never thought when I committed to the review that I
would be paying for irrelevant advice. I checked the SEO
box.

4. Embarrassing Mistakes in the Report
Your cookie-cutter approach in Section 2 is clearly not
designed for journalistic/analytical sites like mine. You
start with a boilerplate discussion of bounce rates, and
presume that is a problem without having asked for or
looked at statistics on what my bounce rate actually is.
My bounce rate is 42%, which I understand considered to
be good, particularly since my site’s name is Naked
Capitalism. I will always have a higher bounce rate than
other sites in my space because some people who visit
the site will be looking for porn. And you’ve got lots of
canned lingo that you couldn’t be bothered to edit to
hide that fact. For instance: “Your product or service
can be the greatest thing on earth.” I’m not selling
products or services, I’m providing information.
Conversions. You bizarrely assume we have a
conversion problem in the absence of evidence. You make
suggestions like a call to action for "conversions" but
what a "conversion" means to us is simply that visitors
click on links to see posts and comment on them, and we
have a ton of links in their faces to click on already. We
have a much higher than average number of page views
per visit (3 pages, even with our bounce rate) and a very
good average time per visit (6 minutes, which is almost
unheard of) so your assumption that we have a
conversion problem is counterfactual. We do extremely
well when we get visitors. What we need is more of them.
Testimonials. Testimonials are simply not done in the
information/journalistic space. Please go look at any
major newspaper or independent blog or any of the
other tops sites in any of the spaces in which I compete
(economics, finance, politics). Testimonials come via
being quoted on and linked to at other sites. I work in a
very active ecosystem (all the top bloggers know each
other personally, and are known by top financial media
reporters and columnists), and easily spend 2-3 hours

5. a day managing relationships with them and readers. This
is another concept that appears to be alien to how you
think about sites.
Whitespace. Boilerplate and incorrect. Your claim is
readers can’t tell when the article begin and end. The
change in type size and color with new article titles is a
clear and obvious marker.
Banners. You are out of your depth on advertising. You
did not bother to find out, which you could have by
either asking me, watching the site loading carefully or
by looking in our backstage, that all of our ads are
served by a third party, Investing Channel. You are
probably seeing more remnant ads than most readers by
virtue of being located in the Netherlands (many of our
ad campaigns have geographic limits, which can be as
specific as New York City area). Investing Channel is run
by professionals who have been selling Internet ads
since 1999 and place ads with top ad agencies. They
provided extensive advice in our recent site redesign on
the placement and design of advertising based on what is
optimal in terms of what advertisers want, and when
appropriate, reader response. They are also QUITE aware
of the tradeoff between too many ads and loss of
pageviews (and the risk is not as you claim bounces but
adblockers).
***
I am going to start being more terse here and will
skip over some items in the interest of keeping
this missive to letter rather than book length.
However, just because we are silent on anything
that appears subsequently in our response does
not mean that we do not have objections to it or
that your suggestions are based on inadequate
investigation.
***

6. 404 pages. Not adequately investigated. Relevant only
if readers get a lot of 404 errors. You appear not to
have used Webmaster Tools and instead gave us a canned
recommendation. It is certainly a good idea to have an
informative 404 page, but you should have looked to see
how material it was for us to give us a proper sense of
priorities. We have no broken internal links and virtually
all of our 404 are served to Google bots or junk
sites. This is a “nice to do when you can get around to it”
rather than critical.
Ranking on keywords. Irrelevant, reflects lack of
understanding of news/analytical sites. We don’t care
about keywords. We don’t sell a product. We would not
expect to rank or be found using the word “capitalism”
or any of the other major topics we write about. They
are enormous topics and much higher traffic general
news sites would clearly outrank us. We would expect
to rank ONLY on more targeted searches.
Moreover, to write a keyword page, we’d need to write
that (and 100 other pages) and keep updating it
whenever thinking or news on that changed. It’s double
work and as indicated, this is just not happening, any
extra work would result in a reduction of the number of
posts we can publish, which will very quickly kill our
business.
Introductory content. Inappropriate. People come to
our site for news and they want to get it quickly. They
do not any more visual clutter (and we already have a
lot thanks to the ads) to distract them from the meat,
which is our news-driven content.
Excerpts on Archive pages. We have extensive
feedback from readers on this and you are incorrect.
The only people who use Archives pages are regular
readers, and they have asked for a “see a month on a
page version, headers only” and provided models from
other sites they liked. They want something they can

7. scan quickly and not have to go through multiple pages
(which is what results from including extracts).
Author pages. Lack of basic research into our site.
Our two lead writers and some of our other authors
are pseudonymous and will not provide “proper
biographies”. I have gotten death threats and thus am
not willing to provide much detail. Moreover, we are not
willing to expose ourselves more to NSA and private
surveillance by providing any more information than we
already do to Google via a Google Profile. And none of
our major competitors use avatars, so we are not at a
disadvantage by not using them.
Taxonomies. False assumption. We have not been not
adding more categories, as you incorrectly indicate;
we’ve been at this level for three years. The only two
we’ve added are “surveillance state” as a result of the
Snowden revelations and “payment systems, and both
are legitimately new topics for us. And I don’t see any
value in a higher level categorization. It’s useless to
readers and there is no way I see to create one that is
MECE (mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive).
Internal Search. False assumption. We used Google
search for years. For our purposes, WP search is better
if still flawed. And if forced to have one or the other,
we and readers WANT results by date, not relevance.
Email. Factually incorrect and false assumptions. We
do offer email subscriptions. More important, we have
over 7000 subscribers, making your Mailchip
recommendation a poor choice.
You further assume that readers might want something
other than daily. They don’t. No one wants a day old or
week old newspaper. We have never once had a reader
ask for anything other than a daily email. Aside from the
fact that our content is news-driven, a second reason
people want e-mails daily is our extremely popular
Antidote du Jour.

8. Schema.org. This is one of the few potential high impact
recommendations, and you punted, giving us two canned
paragraphs that amount to handwaving. Schema.org is
notoriously user-unfriendly even to experienced tech
professionals. This is where we should have gotten the
benefit of your expertise, in how to implement schema,
but you failed to provide it.
Breadcrumbs. Inappropriate, and reflects failure to
investigate the site. This is boilerplate that should have
been deleted. Our site has only two levels: the landing
page and individual post or header bar pages, that are
only one level below the home page. There’s no point in
breadcrumbs for a site with this flat a structure.
Responsive website. Failure to investigate. Your
reviewer missed that our mobile versions are served by
Onswipe, a third-party which we do not control. We have
asked Onswipe to make the choice of “visit desktop site”
(upper left) persist for 30 days, and the overwhelming
majority of our readers are doing that (Onswipe
provides marginally higher revenues from the readers
who do tolerate it, but we may ditch it anyhow). You
evidently did not look at how the desktop version
renders on the iPad, and our iPad users (including one
of our lead writers, who even posts from his iPad) like
how it renders.
Heading Structure. Failure to make inquiries and
possibly dated advice. We are not about to use headers
withinposts. We do serious policy work, as we did tell
you in our intake form. Law firm, Congressional reports,
inspector general reports, think tank documents use
only simple bolded text to indicate sections within
document. We need to emulate those forms to signal
that we understand the visual vocabulary of serious
policy discourse.
As for the “there should only be one <h1> per page,”
while it’s not hard to clear up (our logo showing as a
<h1> is some sort of anomaly), Google’s Webmaster
Tools in the last two months or so eliminate the

9. functionality of being able to check for duplicate
headers, suggesting that Google no longer cares
about this. If our assumption is correct, your remark is
dated and suggests we are not getting current advice,
which would be a major failure given how often Google
changes its search priorities.
Page Titles. This recommendation is insane. Go look at
any news site, or the most successful financial blogs,
our direct competitors. They almost never have less
than 60 character headlines. People are not going to
waste their time clicking on an article unless they have
an idea why they should do so. Moreover, because we
are in finance, signaling what a post is about can
inherently take a lot of characters because the subject
matter is complex. For instance, there is a new scandal
about a company called Ocwen where the New York State
banking regulator Benjamin Lawsky is after them for
how many mortgage servicing rights they’ve bought
recently, which has led them to do a bad job at
servicing. “Mortgage servicing rights” + Ocwen + “New
York’s banking regulator Lawsky” have to be in the
headline, and we’re already up to almost 60 characters
before saying what the issue is. Most of our posts are
like that, in that they cover material where you need to
use specific terminology in the headline.
A second reason this recommendation is insane is one
of our most important audiences is journalists, who
serve as force multipliers for our work. They don’t
necessarily drive traffic to our site, but we influence
how major finance stories are covered because we are
often out faster than are with an informed point of view.
And we have had some stories where we’ve been told that
our coverage determined the prevailing narrative. That is
what our readers pay for in our fundraiser, the
knowledge that we can influence media discourse on our
beat.
Journalists overwhelmingly use RSS and Twitter. You
don’t get click throughs on RSS unless you’ve got a
clear (as in generally not short and cryptic) headline.
Similarly, because I am on a nighttime production

10. schedule (which you could have seen had you
investigated) I have time only to auto-tweet headlines.
Again, a more, not less, communicative headline has more
impact.
Meta Description.This discussion is unclear and
therefore useless due to the failure to define what you
mean by “pages”. If you mean pages as defined in the
WordPress backstage, we do have six that lack meta
descriptions, but they are all ones about the site (in our
header bar) and while it would not be hard to add meta
descriptions, it is inconceivable that someone
conducting an external search would want to find those
pages and be inclined to click through. So while this is
not hard to do, this comes off as a “gothca” that adds
to the length of your report but has virtually no real
value added. If you mean a meta description for each
post, that’s a completely unrealistic request given our
resource constraints, which we told you about in our
intake form.
Separately, our WordPress support person tells us
that Google made a major change of how it handled
meta descriptions in January, with the result that it had a
large negative impact on sites she works with that
(unlike ours) are very concerned with keyword rankings.
If you are going to tell people to provide better meta
descriptions, and you are supposedly giving expert
advice, we would expect you to tell us in much more
detail as to how to create better meta descriptions,
particularly since Google now appears to downgrade
sites for repeated use of keywords/expressions in meta
descriptions. Instead, you gave us three short and
unclear paragraphs of apple pie and motherhood on this
important topic, when this is a place where we need and
expect technical detail, versus the four longer
paragraphs on the irrelevant topic of testimonials.
Outbound linking. This is the single most shocking,
boneheaded comment in the entire report:
“enormousblogroll”. You’ve just confirmed you’ve never

11. done work for finance, economics, or political blogs.
Thenumber of sites in my blogroll is low compared to
norms for finance and economics blogs; blogrolls two
to four times as long as mine are common. And political
blogs typically have at least twice as many in their
blogroll as I do (and we write more about politics than
most finance blogs do, so the comparison is germane).
You appear to have no understanding of the role a
blogroll plays in the econoblogosphere. First, more
than any single attribute, it tells new visitors who you
are (as in what you read tells them what your focus is).
I’ve frequently had readers tell me “You link to so and
so often, you really need to add them to your
blogroll”. Second, it cements alliances. Removing
someone from a blogroll is tantamount to declaring
war on them. Not showing it on every page would have a
similar effect. It’s just not done. It would be like
farting in a church. Whatever I might gain in Google
points I would lose in the way of inbound traffic from
aligned sites.
This is absolutely essential to our site. But rather than
offer a solution, you say, in effect, “drop the
blogroll”. Your job is to solve problems. You need to
give me a solution that allows us to keep the blogroll,
not do the equivalent of throw up your hands.
Site speed. Failure to do promised investigation. As
indicated above, you appear to have missed that readers
can access our site on small devices via opting out of
Onswipe, which virtually all do. You apparently did not
test the desktop version on a mobile device. More
important, you failed to diagnose (which a cursory
review would have identified) that the reason the site
loads less than quickly is due to the ads and related
tracking. That is served by and controlled by Investing
Channel which had you looked in our backstage, you
could have easily figured out. We’ve long been asking
them to do something about it. As a result, your
comments here and in 7.1 are irrelevant because you
incorrectly assume we control these elements.

12. Combine and minify CSS and JS files. Failure to
investigate. As we’ve mentioned repeatedly, we run ads
that come from a third-party server, so you didn’t
identify what was under our control. We have only one
CSS file.
As for minifying, you missed several issues. First, we
can’t minify the third party content. Second, how much
you can minify is limited if you run more than 2 or 3
plugins and we have 18 active plugins. Our WordPress
person, who has a lot of experience with these issues,
has taken minification and combining as far as she can
on our site. She says if she were inexperienced and had
tried implementing your advice, it would break the site.
Jetpack. This looks to have been a general cut and
paste you dropped in and didn’t bother checking against
how the site runs. Our WordPress person is very familiar
with Jetpack, and uses it because it has unique
functionality she values. She also manually (truly
manually) goes over the settings ever time she updates
it.
But worse, this section has embarrassing statements
that again confirm you didn’t properly review the site.
“Since you don't have comments on most of your site„”.
Naked Capitalism is known for having the best, most
engaged, highest quality comment section of the entire
econoblogosphere. If you had bothered looking in our
backstage, you’d see we have over 450,000 comments. In
fact, our comment frequency means we run the
notoriously fragile WordPress database so hard that it
poses a serious problem from a hosting perspective
even with caching implemented.
Similarly the “you are using several site stat packages”
again reflects a failure to understand how the site
operates. Almost all of the stat packages are for our
advertisers (remember our discussion of Investing
Channel?) and we can’t dispense with them. The

13. WordPress stats are necessary in addition to that for
our own use.
Edit Flow. You didn’t bother understanding how we run
this site and this is irrelevant and presumptuous. You
see “multiple authors” and you assumed “hierarchical,
scheduled process” which is incorrect. Had you looked,
you would see that on virtually all days, one blogger
is running the site. On the very rare days two people are
DJing the site, we have clearly delineated duties (“you
are doing X posts of Y type and I am doing the rest”).
Activate Wordpress SEO/Check Wordpress SEO. We
told you in our intake form that we are severely
resource constrained. If you didn’t understand what
that meant, the onus was on you to ask us. Among other
things, it means that we are stretched so thin that we
cannot take on any tasks that add to the time it takes
for us to generate and publish posts (ie, the only
changes we can afford to make from a time standpoint
are at the site level, not at a post level).
Similarly, if you had actually read any posts or
comments, you would have seen that we are so time
pressed that we often have typos in our posts. We don’t
have time for a full copy edit. We certainly don’t have
time to spend 3-5 minutes on SEO for each post. I am
already on the verge of breaking down physically at my
current load. In addition, there is a not-trivial
possibility that the SEO will tell us Google prefers
posts written at the 6th
or 8th
grade level to our reading
level, which is college level. We aren’t dumbing down
our content.
XML Sitemaps. Another embarrassing proof of a failure
to investigate. We do have a sitemap, called BWP GSX,
which you could have easily seen in our backstage had
you looked.
* * *
We have summarized our issues with your review in the
accompanying Excel spreadsheet. Of your

14. recommendations 1-25, we cannot implement most of them
and the ones we can are ones you deemed comparatively
unimportant. Specifically, if we throw out the
recommendations that are:
• not business-appropriate (1, 2, 3, 4, 11, 15, and the post-
specific part of 19)
• have no SEO justification and/or misguided due to
failure to investigate (1, 2, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 20, 25)
• we don't have the capacity to do (3, 6, 13, 17, 18, 23, which
makes 22 moot)
• require significant content rework (6, 13, 17, 18)
We are left with:
14, 16, 21, and 24, and a partial implementation of 19.
Notice that none are ones you flagged as high-
priorityrecommendations.From our perspective, there
are three that could be: 4, 14, and 18. However, for 4, you
didn’t give us a solution that fits our business
imperatives, and on 14 and 18, you didn’t give us remotely
enough guidance to be able to proceed.
I’m highly confident that I have been in the professional
services business longer and have dealt with far more
professional services companies (other management
consultants, top and mid tier law firms, accounting
firms, IT consultants) than you have. So let me hazard
giving you some advice. If you are offering a service that
is customized, or you are pretending is customized, you
need to qualify your prospects and you need to deliver
a customized service. You did neither in my case, which is
why the result was a fiasco.