Some "SEO is bulls#$t" fallout... (I'll keep updating this post)

1. The very smart Danny Sullivan takes me apart and makes a great point that the blogosphere leaders think SEO = comment spam (because comment spam folks are looking for SEO):

I know a lot of thought-leaders in the blogosphere see SEO as tainted. I've written about this before. It formed the title for my Worthless Shady Criminals: A Defense Of SEO article back in 2005, when we last had an SEO reputation crisis as we do every two years (and somehow, it keeps rolling along).

My response to Danny is that I'm sure 90% of the good 10% of SEO folks are the folks who show up at his excellent conference. The 90% I'm talking about are the ones who operate on the fringe. Also, we're basically getting to the point in the discussion where it's obvious that we are talking about two different things when we say SEO. People on my side of the argument hear SEO and they think "scam" and "losers," and Danny--who knows a lot more about SEO than I--thinks "which SEO firms are you talking about, whitehat or blackhat?"

So, it's time to make two buckets: good and evil.. and the evil folks and techniques need to be put in the sunlight, exposed, and then killed.

2. The very odd dude from the video I posted is named Gary Ruplinger and he has a lot of infomercial type videos on the Interwebs. In the comments someone tries to get this guy on the phone.

3. Paul Fisher:

There is still value to be gained in actively acquiring links to a website, but this should be done with a view to providing high quality traffic and not for SEO purposes. If you have a clean site with good content and high quality, traffic producing inbound links you can forget about SEO and leave the results pages to the search engines. Take it from an old pro. Don't waste your time on SEO forums, products and companies. Spend your time on your content and on building quality traffic producing links.

4. Neil Patel offers me a challenge and I accept with conditions (see comment over there).

I offer he following challenge: I can take your blog and increase your daily search traffic by a minimum of 10 to 20% after 30 days of putting my changes into effect. I will NOT be doing anything "shady" or unethical and will even point out all the changes that will be made to your blog. You can even have your own designer/programmer make the changes to your blog; I will even layout everything for them using step-by-step instructions.

5. Valleywag is on it.... now we know the issue will really blow up.

Feb 8th 2007 3:14AM
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1. I'll add to this and say that the SEO people who constantly e-mail me asking to buy 12 month text links on every page of every site I publish where it's a generic word like "tickets" or "shopping" that will be linked are bullshit. The SEO people who e-mail me asking to trade text links and they will put my link in the footer of 50,000,000,000 websites are bullshit. The SEO people who e-mail me offering to get me to the #1 spot on all search engines IN WEEKS!!! are bullshit. The SEO people who work for companies and know how Search Engines organize data and help build websites with structured data that is easy for search engines to get at and understand are probably mostly decent folks.

Posted at 5:14PM on Feb 8th 2007 by sean bonner

2. Ha-ha-ha... Whatever you do SEO always will be essential part of any blog, that's cruel true!

Posted at 3:00AM on Feb 9th 2007 by Rod

3. Danny let you off lightly

Based on the Google webmaster guidelines, a blog network could be regarded as a link farm

Don't participate in link schemes designed to increase your site's ranking or PageRank.

I am sure you also realise that all the sidebar cross linking at Weblogs Inc boosts every single blog's Technorati rating, even those that haven't posted anything for 18 months

Posted at 7:32AM on Feb 9th 2007 by Andy Beard

4. SEO is essential part and has to be follow up by SEM...

Posted at 5:29AM on Aug 29th 2007 by Archna

5. Thanks Guys Great info

Posted at 6:31PM on Mar 11th 2008 by SEO Company

6. lol.! Do you expect something really very different when it comes to SEO?

heh..

Posted at 6:58AM on May 24th 2008 by Tina

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