Increasing the Profile of the SEO Industry
A recent post at SEOmoz once again brought up consider the plight of the Search Engine Optimization industry; as effective and needed as SEO consultants are, blackhats and webspammers have given the industry a black eye.
People see the search community in two camps: Search Engines (good) and Spammers/SEOs (bad). The way they see it, the search engines work diligently to reduce spam, and show the most relevant results for their queries. On the other side of town you have the SEOs and spammers, who try to make sites rank for their own ends, therefore throwing off the good, pristine search engine results.
What the public needs to realize is that real SEO isn’t about making pillspam or other useless garbage rank - SEO is about ensuring that relevant content ranks in the SERPS for related queries. For most site owners, there is little or no value in ranking for non-relevant queries. Often, the pursuit of rankings by SEOs forces them to review the content, make it more relevant and of better quality to induce links, and all around creates better websites and an overall better user experience on the Internet.
I think the SEO community needs to reach out to the public in some way to raise our profile in the public eye, differentiating ourselves from the communities of webspammers and other devious characters. We need to present ourselves as a legitimate, valuable industry. I think that we are on the right track as far as it goes, but more has to be done.
Does anyone have any suggestions how to better clean up the SEO image? I would appreciate your thoughts.
IMO credibility always naturally rises to the top. Quality is usually unmistakable.
The problem with trying to strengthen the SEO’s is that there are no publicly familiar standards by which the SEO operate.
No publicly familiar standards make it hard for the public to compare BH SEO with WH SEO
While leaders of the SEO community continue to embrace spam tactics like paid links that guarantee #1 ranking to the highest bidder and put their own needs above community needs (e.g. Wikipedia/Digg community) by railing against nofollow or SEO articles getting buried, there is no credibility to be had.
The SEO community needs to show some maturity, and prove that they respect the needs of communities outside of SEO circles. Does SEOs care about Google trying to clean up the serps? Does SEOs care about Wikipedia’s plight with spammers? Does SEOs care about Digg’s community getting bombarded by SEMs digging links not to contribute to the conversation but to steal a few links?
While SEOs show a total disregard for the needs of others, SEO’s notoriety will not die.
Remember, Walmart bought their way into #1 position for a hugely competitive phrase, “car insurance” in the span of just a few weeks.
“SEO is about ensuring that relevant content ranks in the SERPS for related queries.”
SEO *should* be about that. But money corrupts people. Instead, as long as the price is right, SEOs will help rank garbage.
For example, cre8asiteforums - an SEO forum - gets paid ~$450 / month ($150 a link) for 3 TLAs with anchor text like “cardboard boxes” and “legal information.” I’ve emailed one of the mods, who acknowledged that they are TLAs but regardless of the fact that they are completely off-topic, after 2 weeks they’re still up.
Like DaveN said in a recent podcast, sing the right tune, and you can get anyone will link to almost anything.
SearchCap: The Day In Search, May 30, 2007…
Below is what happened in search today, as reported on Search Engine Land and from other places across the web:……