Friday, October 05, 2007

SEO Means Squabbling Endlessly Online

The S in SEO stands for Squabbling because that's all they ever do, all day every day, Endlessly and Online.

What do they squabble about?

The usual crap, same thing they've been squabbling about for years about hat colors, search engine spamming and on and on ad nausea.

This week they're raking Rand over the coals because he outed a site selling paid links calling it "unprofessional". Sadly, Rand caved to peer pressure and removed the link to the outed site so he lost a little respect here because if you have an opinion and say something you feel righteous about, stick to your guns and stand behind it.

Besides, can anyone believe the same man that obviously flaunts fashion faux pas with the brightest yellow shoes just so you can see him a mile away at a search conference would give a rats ass about someone's opinion about outing a site?

I'm stunned.

The thing that stuns me even more is that the SEO community obviously wants these sites hidden from view because many of them use those paid links to game the search engines.

Think about this, you wouldn't want your favorite paid link juice site publicly outed would you?

Might cramp your style and you would have to do SEO the old fashioned way with a compelling site and content people naturally link to instead of gaming the system.

What did Rand really do wrong except expose a site violating Google's guidelines?

I think people were worried it would start an avalanche of outing paid link sites and they would quickly become a thing of the past.

Assuming Rand doesn't use those types of sites and doesn't live in a SEO glass house, I would stick to my guns because it's an educational thing for the novices out there to see and avoid, a public service actually, with a real live example of what Google's guidelines tell you not to do.

Doesn't matter what I think, Rand already caved, let the squabbling continue.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Starting a new independent site 101:
- Head over to Yahoo, Express Submit
- Take an editor out to dinner
- Donate for a PR9

The new site should start with 50 pages and be updated on a regular basis.

You can waste time watching the green bar or you can attack the log files. If you chose to attack the log files while building new content you will never be looking for links again.

SEO hasn't changed much. The very good ones don't even want the title of "SEO".

Anonymous said...

Brass balls:
that is what everyone needs to find, if they want to out something.

take the heat.

thank you Bill for having them

Now something interesting: about 3 months ago google made an annoucement ( via matt) reguarding paid links, and other issues. within thier chat, they dropped some clues about what/whom they are going to smack around. well...
I finished a study, covering 3 industries that I felt they were going to smack, and since august, thier page views are dropping ( data used was alexa and a few others ).

get ready, for those of us that have large volume web sites ( within those catagories), pay real close attention to your stats. I would think that your long tail key words are bringing in a larger percentage of clients than before.

mojomike