Bloggers in general, and SEO bloggers in particular, seem to have an addiction to writing Top 10 lists of everything.  They’ll even make Top 10 lists OF Top 10 lists.  They’ll argue that this is because it’s a format that makes it very easy for people to read and understand the pertinent points, or because it’s a useful way of promoting links out to more detailed articles about each particular point, thus making it a useful reference for their readers.  If they’re really honest they may even admit to the fact that they’re exploiting the search engine algorithms’ preferences for bullet pointed lists as a way of determining greater relevance for the keywords contained in a list structure compared to the keywords within the main body text of a page.

However, what very few SEOs will admit to is the fact that it’s just a hell of a lot easier to knock out a random list of things that are all vaguely related to whatever particular keywords they happen to be targeting, call it “The Definitive Top 10 List of Groovy Stuff” and bang out a new post to keep their site fresh when their feeling too lazy/tired/busy-doing-other-things/hungover to come up with a full article to post.

And so (because it’s Sunday afternoon and I’ve spent my weekend busily doing other things, like upgrading my blog to WordPress 2.5 and investigating Drupal for the purposes of using it for another site I’ll be working on - but don’t worry, I’ll get back to work on my Beginner’s Guides to WordPress and SEO soon enough) without any further ado, I present you with:

The Definitive Top 10 List Of Reasons Why People Should Stop Putting Top 10 Lists On Their Blogs  (By the way, I’m aware of the irony of writing a Top 10 List in order to decry it, so don’t bother pointing that out)

1. Because Top 10 Lists have been done to death and aren’t nearly as effective as linkbait as you probably think they are.
2. Because Top 10 Lists rarely reflect a truly Top 10 ranking of anything.
3. Because you aren’t Dave Letterman.
4. Because even if you are Dave Letterman it’s probably about time to admit that Top 10 Lists are really boring.
5. Because you’ll probably run out of steam halfway through.
6. See number 5.

Um..yeah.