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Bad Business – The Sad State of SEO Perception
in the Mainstream Media
By Jim Hedger, StepForth News Editor, StepForth Placement Inc.
March 18, 2005
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Die-hard baseball fans have spent the past few days watching heavy hitters
like Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire testify in front of a US Congressional
sub-committee about the use of steroids in baseball. That the world of professional
athletes is deeply enmeshed with performance enhancing drugs use is not
really a shock for most people. Compounding their need to perform as well
or better than their competitors, there are tremendous commercial and financial
pressures placed on athletes in our culture. Civic economies are affected
by the performance of their sports teams. Multi-million dollar endorsement
contracts are awarded to star athletes. An increasing number of athletes
are falling to the temptation to boost their performance with artificial
assistance. Every major professional league in North America has been contaminated,
calling the ethics and integrity of professional sport into question. Based
on a few recent articles appearing in the mainstream press, the SEO/SEM
world is risking a similar censure.
Yesterday, an article by Adam Pennenberg ran in Wired Magazine under the
title, “Search
Rank Easy to Manipulate”. The piece focused on
Greg Boser, CEO of WebGuerrilla, a search marketing firm in Ventura California.
Boser has represented the “dark-hat” side of the industry at
search conferences and is candid about his use of tactics that nearly everyone
else in the sector tend to shy away from. The article, which is a must read
for anyone who wants to defend the SEO sector in the future, also mentions
link-density tactics used by SEOInc and Submit Express that rely on obtaining
thousands of links from seemingly unrelated sites, including, “…cheesy
guest books, online diaries, blogs, zany products, porn sites and anyone
who honors link exchanges…” The article sums itself up by noting
a few other techniques used to fool search engines, including cloaking,
blog-link spam, and doorway-pages. It concludes with Boser’s statement
on spam, "It's any site that ranks above mine.”
After reading Pennenberg’s piece, one might be led to believe that
search engine optimization is entirely about manipulating search results
by deception. This view is obviously held by long time tech writer Tom Foremski
who equates SEO with “black magic” in his recent SiliconeValleyWatcher
entry, “The
purity of search results challenges Google and offers an opening to rivals”. Foremski has been writing about tech issues
since before some of us were born so let’s not dismiss his ideas too
quickly. His article actually touches on a familiar lament for many SEOs;
the results at Google have been horribly tainted by the massive interest
in PageRank exploits. Foremski does mention that there are ethical SEO firms
but the thrust of his thoughts goes towards manipulation of Google by the “…few
bad ones that have given SEO a dodgy reputation.”
Both writers miss the point about search engine optimization and both make
a number of assumptions that are simply not based in the reality most of
us work in. At the same time however, both point out one of the greatest
challenges the sector faces as it and the search-environment mature. The
SEO industry is facing a distinct lack of credibility in the mainstream
world. Like the taint of steroids in baseball, the lack of credibility isn’t
news to most in the sector; it is a bit of a setback though.
For years, many in the SEO industry have tried to demystify our sector
to combat the “dark-arts” myth. Starting with the granddaddy
of search-journalism, SearchEngineWatch, a growing number of publications
give our “secrets” away for free, everyday. SEOs are not magicians
but rather a mixture of good writers with technical knowledge. There
is no hidden text, slight of hand, or weak links in our chains of success,
just very hard, focused
work. As an SEO, I spend more time trying to figure out how a particular
client’s server is set up than I do thinking about how Google’s
are. Realizing how important long-term credibility is to the growth of our
sector, several SEOs have taken individual and associative stands on SEO
Ethics though no standard definitions or common codes of conduct have been
adopted by the industry.
Nick Wilson, editor of search-focused ThreadWatch.org notes this in his
posting, “Search Marketers
Divided, Time for New Definitions?” Wilson
sees two distinct types of SEOs, one of which uses aggressive algorithm
manipulation, the other using search friendly design and content. He
correctly suggests, “Although both groups call themselves Search Engine
Optimizers, it's been clear for many years that neither group considers
the other to
be part of their own.” Wilson makes brief points about both groups
and offers an important disclaimer for the necessity of generalizing
in his explanations. He sums up his post with a call for clarification,
one
which was echoed by well known SEO Scottie Claibourn when writing about
Pennenberg ’s
Wired piece, “It's this quote that bothers me, “An entire
industry of search engine optimizers, called SEOs, has sprung up, many of
which take advantage
of
loopholes in the way rankings are calculated.” Again, lumping
SEO's into the "taking advantage of loopholes" category and
ignoring the fact that many of us make real improvements to sites, removing
technical obstacles, improving navigation, targeting in on better
keywords, and actually
building content worth linking to. Oh, silly me... it's all about
loopholes and buying links... I've just been doing it the hard way,
I guess.”
There is a deep divide in the organic side of the search marketing
industry and mapping the edge of the ethical abyss is often seen
as a matter between
practitioner and client. There are serious penalties for failing
to note the edge of the ethical abyss as clients of a couple of well
known
SEO-Spam
shops found out last year when they slipped and fell out of Google’s
index.
Even though the penalties are harsh, some SEOs continue to use dodgy if
not outright deceptive tactics as, for the most part, it is the client not
the SEO who suffers most in the end. It is important to note however, most
SEOs don’t use deceptive or illegal tactics. Most are honest hard
working combinations of writers and techies who feel a comparison with Web
Guerrilla is like comparing a cattle-rancher with Jessie James. Stories
of gross manipulation of search engine rankings through deceptive tactics
do not serve the honest in our industry well.
The search marketing industry is almost ten years old. So far, only a handful
of initiatives have been taken in forming industry associations. The first,
SEMPO has recently elected a new board of directors and is again starting
to release studies and whitepapers. Two others, the SMA-UK and SMA-NA are
struggling to emerge.
This will be a decisive year for many in the SEO sector. The stakes are
getting higher and the practice is getting harder. SEOs are cautioned to
stay away from use of deceptive tactics. The temporary gain one might get
from cheating and spamming is much like the temporary high baseball had
two years ago when Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa were chasing the Home Run
record. All highs end, and like with our home run hitting heroes, the bigger
they become, the harder they fall.
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