Dilbert: SEOs Control Content On The Web

Feb 5, 2013 at 8:59am ET by Barry Schwartz

A new Dilbert cartoon once again takes a jab at SEOs and what they do or can do.

The latest comic reads:

Woman: Asok, your meeting stole an hour of my life.

Woman: According to international law, I may now claim you as my indentured servant.

Man: Wow. That…. Actually is a law.

Woman: (Thinking) Or I’m really good at SEO.

It is a play on you cannot always believe what you read on the Internet and that SEOs can create content that ranks well on the Internet that may be completely inaccurate.

Postscript: Today, yet another cartoon on SEOs was released.

Here is a snippet from it:

See the whole comic at dilbert.com.

Other Dilbert Cartoons Related To SEO:

About The Author: Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio over here. See more articles by Barry Schwartz

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http://www.delivra.com/ Cody Sharp

Just had a sales guy bring this over to my desk. Pretty funny.
Eoin McInerney

Love it. Reminds me of Barney doing the Lorenzo von Matterhorn from the playbook episode of How I met your mother.
http://twitter.com/sharithurow sharithurow

I think Scott Adams is a closeted SEO. He gets the irony of our industry.
http://www.noggindigital.com/ Zach Kasperski

I sort-of disagree with this. At the end of the day, “The Goog” knows all. It knows bad content from good content. And it knows how to interpret the links you attain to drive rankings.

We all know how important it is to get those highly relevant, authoritative links from the right sources, and that could take a great deal of online PR. It’s hard to significantly inflate websites or content due to the whole PR aspect of SEO. I’m not saying that you couldn’t boost the rankings of SOME content artificially, but it really doesn’t work that way for long-term, strategy driven SEO.

Maybe I’m looking too far into this :/ I just don’t want the industry to suffer because of a comic.
RyanMJones

I just went and made sure I ranked for “do seos control the internet.”
http://alexwebmaster.com/ Alex Garrido

lol, so true, We tend to think that content on the first page is both real and coming from an unbiased source. It is not always the case.
http://twitter.com/MichelleRobbins MichelleRobbins

Actual conversation I had 2 days ago with a friend:

Her: “I need to get a new microwave”
Me: “What have you found so far?”
Her: “Nothing. It’s impossible to find anything on Google – even using model names and numbers.”
Me: “Why?”
Her: “Too much junk everywhere because of SEO, impossible to sift through it to find real stuff and actual reviews. I’m just going to have to go to Best Buy.”

Is this a Google problem or an SEO problem? [shrug] At the end of the day, her negative perception lies with SEO, not with Google’s SERPs.
http://twitter.com/krystianszastok Krystian Szastok

I think SEO is just a plot put together by Illuminati to make public think we control the internet…
http://twitter.com/rachnaranjan Rachna Ranjan

Ranking on first page of #searchengine is all about #SEO.