1. That's pretty low of someone to do that. I really hate SEO as an "industry". One of my jobs as a lowly intern for Newsvine is to sort through new users and discard the spammers and SEO'ers. These are people who could care less about your product or the health of the Web in general -- they're just out to make a quick buck at the expense of the rest of us.

Keep up the good fight man.

Posted at 1:19PM on Jun 18th 2007 by Rob Goodlatte

2. Thanks for the link, but I can't take credit for the Adwords jackassery. That'll happen when you piss off an entire industry, though, JC. At the end of the day, it's still more people talking about Mahalo and I KNOW you can appreciate that.

Posted at 1:50PM on Jun 18th 2007 by Brian Provost

3. I showed your site to a SEO friend of mine. Its like when you show Ubuntu Desktop to a Windows Vendor. The wierd emotional defensiveness kicks in as you can see them jam fingers into ears and sing out loud "not listening, not listening".

Here in the UK the IT Crowd is fairly small and sooner or later you meet people youve met before, so having a reputation for being the guy that calls SEO "SnakE Oil" gets around. Your on the right track with this theres been to many "Magic Square" salesmen convincing my clients that with the right words and phrases they too can be number one, providing those words and phrases are the ones they can win with.

I for one would like to move from hearing "Just F**king Google it" to "Maybe Mahalo" along with the relevant links within Mahalo.

keep moving forward on this one Jason, please keep moving it on.

Posted at 4:49PM on Jun 18th 2007 by Nicholas Butler

4. Wow. I'm sure thats just an SEO extremist - though it actually seems like a good bit of promotion for you. Controversy (e.g. Passion of the Christ) oftentimes translates into press attention and success.

Posted at 10:04PM on Jun 18th 2007 by David Mackey

5. Wow yeah that's kinda lame to be doing. /ignore the SEO community.

Posted at 7:08AM on Jun 19th 2007 by Timmy

6. So are you against all SEO or just the B.S. snake oil selling, blackhat crap.

I too hate the spammyier side of SEO but I do think that the whole above the waterline part of the industry is essentially where the majority of marketing is today.

Isn't SEO essentially just reverse engineering search and benchmarking?....is that really that bad of a thing?

Posted at 7:47PM on Jun 20th 2007 by ryanol

7. I'm an SEO and I find your comments about the industry amusing enough, a little strident perhaps, but you're putting the cart before the horse. Since we know that Google's results can be influenced, do you honestly expect that people aren't going to try to do it? I mean, it's the same in absolutely any field of human interaction - you are going to meet some people who are scammers and out to make a quick buck.

When you talk about SEO guys, you are actually talking about the human race, right? After all, you said exactly the same thing yourself in an interview a couple of years back:
"Every system has fraud, look at credit cards! Should we stop using credit cards just because there is massive fraud?"
(That was with Jennifer Slegg of Jensense, BTW)

So, why do you want to move away from Google again? It looks like you've changed your mind 180 degrees in the last couple of years, from 'why should we stop?' to 'OMG! Stop!' I get the feeling you just say whatever suits your purpose.

I like Mahalo by the way. Seriously.

Posted at 8:50AM on Jun 21st 2007 by George Drumer