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In a moment of sheer boredom I visited a mainstream message board today to see what might be on mainstream webmasters' minds right now. Before I went I promised myself that I would not go anywhere near their search engine forum. I tend to get angry and frustrated when I read so much bad advice being given out to gullible newcomers on that particular part of the site.

I'm sure that you will have already realised that the search engine forum was one of the very first places I went to and I came away just as frustrated and angry as I always do ... and I only read one thread.

That one thread told me that it's time for another column about the value of advice you get on webmaster forums and in blogs too.

The person who started that particular thread asked that timeless question of how do they get good placement in search engines. Of course he or she got all the usual advice about building up links from good sites. Someone else came in and proclaimed that the only way to get those links they needed was to get people interested in the site by adding great content.

In fact, that person ascerted that all it took to get great traffic from the search engines was to add lots of great content. Then I noticed that the person who had made that ascertion proudly proclaimed in his sig that he was 16 years old.

Is it any wonder that there are so many webmasters bumbling around out there in a never-ending struggle to get noticed by the search engines when 16 year olds can claim to have such a strong grip on the truth?

Now I freely admit that perhaps there are some 16 year olds who understand how to make Google work for them but this guy didn't. In fact a lot of the ‘good' advice that was given in that thread was way off target. Yet it was all delivered as if coming from gurus who had a huge amount of success and experience in the field of SEO.

I'm sure that many newcomers who have read that thread, or will read it in the future, will look at that advice and think that it must be right and if it's right then it must be worth following. They'll earnestly follow every step outlined in that thread and they'll fail simply because the advice is wrong.

And right there is something that all newcomers to both mainstream and adult webmaster forums need to understand. The advice you get in those forums is quite likely to be completely wrong. Sure, you can pick up some real nuggets in webmaster forums but you can also get advice that is going to waste your time, cost you money and ultimately lead to your failure in this industry.

You have to understand that people who offer advice on those forums do so for a wide variety of reasons. Some of them do it because they love to help people and they genuinely do have the experience to give advice. Others love to help people but have absolutely no clue so, instead of keeping their mouths shut, they simply repeat what they have read somewhere else. And who says what they read was genuinely good advice?

Others give advice on webmaster forums because they want to sound important; they want to be seen as gurus and experts. They need the adulation of others and so they pass out information as if it was guaranteed to work ... even if they haven't tried it themselves.

Those people will even try and shout down anyone who offers an opposing opinion and they won't care if that other person is right or not. All they want is to be the one all newcomers look up to and if that means burning a few people with bad advice then that's just too bad.

Then there are those who have malicious motives and give out ‘good' advice that they know won't work. Those guys do it to harm the competition or simply to make money for themselves. Several years ago, when the 2257 rules were first being changed, there was at least one content provider who was telling newcomers that they didn't need any documentation with the images they purchased. It was interesting to note that this content provider didn't have any 2257 documentation for their content.

Of course it's not easy to spot any of the people I've mentioned above; not everyone is as open about their experience as that 16-year-old wannabe search engine guru. That means that you're going to have to be very careful about the advice that you take from the webmaster forums you visit.

You will need to test the advice, weigh it up carefully and compare it to advice you might see in other places. If you're not sure whether the person giving the advice has the experience that might add some weight to the advice then be prepared to ask them what their experience is.

Draw you own conclusions from their response to your polite query and never unquestioningly take the advice you are given simply because the person who gives the advice has a huge post count. Sometimes people with the lowest post counts offer the best advice.

Finally let me wish you good luck because quite frankly it's a minefield out there and deciding just where to step next can be a bit of a lottery. But you can improve the odds in your favor if you only take some care.