22 Links To Coverage About The SEO Is Bull Debate

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Feb. 9, 2007 at 10:48am Eastern by Barry Schwartz

22 Links To Coverage About The SEO Is Bull Debate

Over the past two days, there has been a ton of debate over Jason Calacanis's post calling SEO "bull." Since then, Danny's done a long response, Jason's been challenged (and accepted) to have his site SEOed and much more. Here's a rundown and a rough timeline of developments:

Why people hate SEO... (and why SMO is bulls$%t) from Jason kicks things off.
Jason Calacanis takes another cheap shot at SEOs from Threadwatch has SEOers pushing back.
Social Media Marketers Need to Accept Some Responsibility from Greg Boser pushes back also at the idea that SEOers are responsible for social media site abuses.
Why The SEO Folks Were Mad At You, Jason from Danny spins out a defense of SEO, with a lot of history and questions.
Are 90% Of SEOs Snake Oil Salesmen? has Danny talking about the issues on The Daily SearchCast podcast.
Diggers Can't Handle The Truth (About SEO) from Danny covers how his story made popular on Digg but disappeared quickly because Diggers apparently hate SEO.
CalacanisCast with SEO folks..., kind of enjoying watching what is going on from Jason announces he wants to have an SEO person on his podcast.
Trust About SEO from Scott Karp of Publishing 2.0 shares views on SEO.
Talk Talk Talk from Aaron Wall shares views at SEO Book about the debate.
Greg Boser and Todd (Oilman) Friesen hope to talk to Jason on their podcast, SEO Rockstars.
Danny Sullivan Schools Jason Calacanis in SEO has cool and calm Lisa Barone gets into the mix at the Bruce Clay Blog.
The NEO of Search from Joe Whyte has him sharing his support for SEOs.
Jason Calacanis Has Never Had to Rank for Viagra, Has He? has Li Evans commenting.
Danny Sullivan 1 Jason Calacanis 0 has 901am scoring the debate in Danny's favor.
SEO Results You Deserve covers the issue at The Commerce 360 Blog.
SEOs - Slimebuckets or Geniuses? from Andy Beal at Marketing Pilgrim weighing in
Calacanis Plays SEO People Like A Fiddle from Jeremy at Shoemoney has him and I talking about the issues.
On linkbaiting, SEO’ing and all that other crap has Ben Metcalfe concerned that SEO and SMO is going to harm social media sites.
Jason Calacanis Hates SEOs, But Loves What SEOs Do has Kevin Newcomb at the Search Engine Watch Blog lending a voice.
Gary Ruplinger: The Aleksey Vayner of Social Media from Valleywag covers the guy in the video about getting links from Digg and other social media sites that kicked Jason off in the first place.
Following up with a Some "SEO is bulls#$t" fallout... from Jason has him keeping a running account of responses to his original post, with comments also on what Danny wrote.
Open Challenge to Jason Calacanis has Neil Patel offering a challenge to Jason -- let him do SEO and see if Jason's traffic rises. Jason accepts, with the caveat of it being all white hat

That is just some of the coverage out there, much of it found via Techmeme. If you have your own story, feel free to add it to the comments below.

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By Barry Schwartz Permalink Jump To Comments See Related Stories In: SEM Industry: General, SEO: General, Search Engines: Digg, Search Engines: Social Search Engines, Social Media Marketing

Reader Comments

I guess this means it's a slow news week in searchengineland because these unwarranted defenses of SEO are getting old.

Comment by Michael Martinez

| February 9, 2007 12:13 PM

You know, when I first heard his remarks I thought Calcanis was a moron. Now I'm convinced he's a bloody genius. In one week he can make a half apology to play nice with the major players, and what does he get out of all of it? Thousands of links to his site and free SEO services (in the guise of a "challenge").

Genuis.

Comment by Rob

| February 9, 2007 1:32 PM

I have to agree with Michael and Rob. This is getting old, and the industry ends up looking bad just by replying. Time to ignore the Rant-Bait.

http://www.smallbusinesssem.com/2007/02/08/why-do-we-keep-biting-the-rant-bait/

Comment by Matt McGee

| February 9, 2007 2:26 PM

Well, let me reply.

(1) I also think this whole thing is out of hand. I personally did not post this at the Search Engine Roundtable or my personal blog.

(2) I think Michael's comments are a bit too harsh.

Comment by rustybrick

| February 9, 2007 2:42 PM

Individually, people spend an excessive amount of time weighing in on these issues. For example, I can't imagine taking the time to actually do white hat SEO for Jason. Collectively, the debate isn't too bad. For me, some of the comments actually manage to inspire some good ideas that I think can benefit clients or win over a prospect. I'm mostly concerned about helping businesses develop a sense of urgency abour ROI or how to counter a large prospect that ultimately says "I can do this myself."

Comment by Mike Murray

| February 9, 2007 10:07 PM

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