Not Wrong If It Works
Best practices are advice, not physics ... if the evidence says otherwise, follow the evidence.
Definition of “Not Wrong If It Works”
SEO advice gets treated like law more often than it should. It is not law. It is a set of recommendations built from the last time enough sites behaved a certain way and got rewarded or punished for it. Google's guidance changes, AI systems reward different signals than search engines did, and today's violation is tomorrow's best practice with a rebrand.
So when something I was told never to do keeps outperforming the version I was told to do, I stop treating the rule as sacred and start treating the result as data. In SEO, it's not wrong if it works.
“Not Wrong If It Works” In Practice
Meta descriptions were supposedly dead as a ranking factor for years. Then AI Overviews and LLM citation systems started pulling directly from them again as the summary source. Anyone who kept writing them well, rule or no rule, had a head start.
Worth Knowing About “Not Wrong If It Works”
This is not a license to ignore guidelines that exist for good reason, like manipulating structured data or cloaking content. It is a filter for the enormous middle ground of advice that was true once, in one context, and got repeated as gospel long after the context changed. Test it. If it works consistently and it isn't deceptive, keep it.