What is Technical Debt?
The process of getting something done now at the expense of having to go back and shore up loose ends later generally incurs debt. This is true of our national situation, where in theory, if we spend a bunch now to steady things up, we’ll be better off later even if we have to pay down the debt of taking the shortcut right now to get things working fast.
This is Not Ward Cunningham. This is Ward Cleaver. Just seeing if you're still paying attention.
Technical debt is a term first coined by Ward Cunningham in 1992. This term describes what happens when programming code for software and computers is hurried out the door in order to meet operational deadlines. The problem is, down the road, you have to do twice the work to make up for whatever sloppiness, mistakes and shortcuts you took to get things out the door.
Code without comments. Code that doesn’t quite do the job but “at least it’s a start” all has to be re-done later, often completely redone because problems with the original make it completely un-usable when you decide to do it right.
Similar to technical debt is what could be coined “SEO Debt.” You take the shortcuts, you buy paid links, you link from everywhere from India to Siberia back to your new website because you have to get it ranked fast. Then along comes Google in its well known periodic “Google Dance” and shakes your page one or two ranking down to page five because the algorithms figure out that your SEO campaign was crap from the start.
If you can’t afford that kind of SEO debt, then simply don’t incur it in the first place. Build your links gradually and naturally. Build Squidoo lenses and supporting blogs and solicit natural links from related websites. All the slow way. It’s like spending cash, though. Once you make the “investment” of time and effort, the product tends to stick around long term. It’s yours and a Google shakedown of spammy sites and links won’t need to worry you at all.
Just like Technical Debt, SEO Debt comes back to bite you in the wallet where it hurts for a long time, so incur as little as possible, pay as you go and keep your SEO out of the crosshairs of Google’s effective anti-spam routines.
