Why The SEO Folks Were Mad At You, Jason

Jason Calacanis is

riled up about SEO today, telling the world that "90% of the SEO market is
made up of snake oil salesman" and still confused over why the "SEO folks" were
mad at him when he said "SEO is bull"
during our keynote
conversation at SES Chicago last December.

I love Jason. I really do — he says what he thinks, with passion and clearly
deeply cares about things. And I’ve enjoyed some of the arguments we’ve had via
instant messaging on this topic recently. But Jason — and a lot of other people
— need some more education about the myths and misperceptions of SEO. So let
this open letter do both.

The Bad SEO Video

First, let me deconstruct what Jason wrote, no holds barred. Starting from
the top:

This video is so cheesy you have to think it’s a fake… but I don’t
think it is. (Hat
Tip)

Jason’s talking about a video that we mentioned in our headlines section of
the SearchCap newsletter
yesterday, one that
that the Pronet Advertising team

alerted the world to as a bad example of how not to do

social media optimization — getting on Digg, Netscape and the like. To be
absolutely clear, this isn’t Pronet’s video. This was Pronet, a leading SMO
firm, telling people not to act this way.

Hehe. Yes, it was nice advice. It was also nice

linkbaiting. Jason took the bait. Pronet thanks you for the links, Jason.

Where the unfairness comes in is Jason taking this video as the model for the
entire SEO market — that all of SEO is like this. It’s not (and the video
wasn’t even about SEO, but more on that below).

How To Piss Off An Industry Through Ignorant Remarks

This misperception leads me to the next part of what he wrote:

The SEO folks got really pissed off at me for saying "SEO is bulls@#t."
last year, but the truth is that 90% of the SEO market is made up of snake oil
salesman

They got upset because about 90 percent of the audience you were speaking in
front of made their living doing some type of SEO work. And the vast majority
of them were not snake oil salesmen — or women, for that matter. SEO has
a huge number of women working in it let’s not forget.

Jason, you work for a VC firm now. Tell you what. Next time, have me come and
speak in front of a VC conference. Get lots of VCers all in a room, and I’ll
tell you how 90 percent of VC firms are snake oil salespeople who don’t know
what they are talking about — that their ability to pick winning companies is
all bull. Let’s see if they get pissed off with me.

They should, because I don’t have the background to make such a wide-ranging
statement. I’ve talked with a number of VC companies over the years and am often
less than impressed with the knowledge of search they have, despite wanting to
back some search company. I’ve watched from afar how VCs have sunk money into
search firms that aren’t going to go anywhere — but man, that money certainly
helps the press release spam I get and
attention grabbing in
general that pulls away from efforts that deserve more love.

I could use my limited knowledge and characterize an entire industry. Maybe I
would be correct. But there’s a good chance I’d be wrong. And that’s what’s
happening with you about SEO. You’re dead wrong, and you insulted (and continue
to insult) a lot of good people with such wide-ranging generalizations.

They All Look Alike To Me

To understand how wrong, let me go back to something I
wrote
about this issue back in 2005:

It also behooves everyone not
to tar the entire industry with the same brush. For all the bad things that
people want to lump under the umbrella of SEO (and really search engine
marketing, of which SEO is just a part), there’s also plenty of good. Decry a
particular SEO tactic, if you want — but don’t decry the entire SEM industry
as being rotten. If you want to do that, then here are some other stereotypes
you’d also better buy into:

• All car salesmen are crooks
• All lawyers are crooks
• Teachers teach because they can’t do
• Bloggers don’t check facts
• [Insert Race/Culture/Nationality Here] is [Insert Derogatory
  Comment/Stereotype Here]

Yeah, they had good reason to be pissed at you, Jason. You walked into the
room, acted as if you knew everything about their industry and told them they
all sucked. They might have accepted the criticism if you knew what you were
talking about. But you didn’t.

What Is SEO?

Let’s get our definitions straight, as part of the education process:

• Search marketing is the umbrella term that encompasses any act of
  generating traffic from search engines. The two main areas under search
  marketing are search advertising and search engine optimization.
   
• Search advertising — or paid search — is the act of buying
  listings on the search engines. You know,
  Google AdWords, Yahoo Search
  Marketing, Microsoft AdCenter,
  Ask Sponsored Listings. No
  snake oil or black hats there! Let’s not talk about misleading ads, arbitrage,
  clickfraud, blackbox pricing systems or other concerns some have, of course.
   
• Search engine optimization is the act of getting listed in search
  engines for free. It is PR for the search engine world. There are things that
  you can and should be doing to improve your listings with search engines, in
  the same way that there are things you can and should be doing that can
  improve the coverage you receive for free from television, radio and TV.

SEO: In House & Third Party Firms

SEO started out originally as a heavily third-party industry. IE, people who
understood the ins-and-outs of search engines were hired to work with designers
and others who wanted to rank better. Today, SEO has huge numbers of people who
do work internally.

I haven’t seen good figures on this recently. SEMPO literally just
released a new State
Of Search Marketing report today, so maybe there’s a breakdown in there, when I
get a chance to go through it. For now, I’m giving you that based out of my gut
experience from running the largest shows in search marketing over the years.
I’ve had to add first a session then an entire track to cater to the in-house
marketers. The New York Times runs SEO in-house, for example (say
hi to Marshall Simmonds,
who runs things over there). Lots of firms large and small do it. Search engines
like Yahoo and AOL
themselves do SEO internally.

So when you came into the room — or wrote your post today — dissing SEO as
snake oil, you were dissing a lot of people who aren’t trying to rank some
AdSense scraper site or Digg their way into traffic heaven.

Oh — but you’re not talking about the in house people, all the "good"
people, right? It’s the 90 percent of SEO firms, the third party vendors that
suck. After all, you write:

These are guys in really bad suits trying to get really naive people to
sign long-term contracts. These clients typically make horrible products and
don’t deserve traffic–that’s why they’re not getting it organically so they
hire the slimebuckets to game the system for them.

Google Says: Only Worry About A Few SEO Firms

And which survey did you run to come up with these figures? Which "firms" do
you count in them? Will any small company be weighted the same as some large
company with multiple clients? How about I turn to a source that’s seen more SEO
firms than you ever have. Google. What’s Google says about SEO firms?

Let’s see:

SEO is an abbreviation for "search engine optimizer." Many SEOs provide
useful services for website owners, from writing copy to giving advice on site
architecture and helping to find relevant directories to which a site can be
submitted. However, a few unethical SEOs have given the industry a black eye
through their overly aggressive marketing efforts and their attempts to
unfairly manipulate search engine results.

A bit different from your 90 percent hucksters figure. In contrast, Google
puts many SEOs as doing useful things and only a "few" being an issue. That’s
pretty much the opposite of what you wrote.

By the way, those guidelines sparked a huge outcry when they first appeared
in 2002. Some focused on the helpful, sensible advice Google offered in making a
wise SEO choice as an attack. I didn’t, as
I wrote:

At the end of last month, Google rolled out a new page offering advice to
those seeking a search engine optimization firm. Since being unveiled, there’s
been both support and criticism of the tips and recommendations that Google
has posted in various SEO forums.

From my perspective, most of what Google has posted is sensible advice and
positive for the SEO community as a whole, especially compared to what was
said by Google previously about SEOs, within its help area:

"Be very careful about allowing an individual consultant or company to
‘optimize’ your web site. Chances are they will engage in some of our ‘Don’ts’
and end up hurting your site."

A brief and fairly negative statement, to say the least. The impression one
comes away with is that most SEOs are likely to cause you problems, so you’re
better off avoiding them. Compare that to what Google’s now saying:

"Many SEOs provide useful services for website owners, from writing copy to
giving advice on site architecture and helping to find relevant directories to
which a site can be submitted. However, there are a few unethical SEOs who
have given the industry a black eye through their overly aggressive marketing
efforts and their attempts to unfairly manipulate search engine results."

So, congratulations, SEOs! Google, in my opinion, is legitimizing the
majority of you and certainly the industry.

SEO Is Bull? Todd Spits Coffee Almost Through His Nose

Google — legitimizing SEO companies, and this back in 2002. Skip forward to
2006, and you came to Chicago and dissed a lot of good third party SEO companies
who work with other companies to do solid work to increase traffic.

Need to understand more about that? Say hi to Todd from Range Online, who
recently
pushed back at the latest wave that SEO is a waste of time and that he’s
somehow carpetbagging snake oil (and also who nearly spit out his coffee through
his nose, as he writes, when he heard your "bull" comment while watching you in
Chicago):

We do a fair bit of SEO at Range and we recently have a great success story
that involved online revenue moving from 6 figures a year to 7 figures a year
(and I don’t mean from 9M to 10M). Most of that campaign was the fundamentals
that weren’t in place prior to our involvements. We fixed Titles and Metas,
URLs, ALTs, internal linking and did some external linking work. We also
rewrote thousands of pages of content. Go ask the CMO what we did and you may
hear terms like rocket science and magic and to that CMO it is rocket science
with a huge payoff in revenue.

Back to your post. You do throw a bone out to third party SEO firms:

Note: There are some whitehat SEO firms out there I know, but frankly the
whitehat SEO companies are simply doing solid web design so I don’t consider
them SEO at all. SEO is a tainted term and it means "gaming the system" to 90%
of us.

I’ll come back to the it’s just "solid web design" and smack you upside the
face about that, which you so richly deserve. Remember, I’m smacking with love!
But first let’s talk about SEO as a tainted term.

SEO Is Not A Synonym For Spamming Or Gaming

Hey, well you certainly don’t help. I really appreciate you taking that term
and continuing to make it a negative, rather than trying to educate people about
the difference between SEO and spamming.

SEO does not mean "gaming the system" to 90 percent of us if you’re talking
the SEO industry itself. Heck, I don’t even know if 90 percent of the general
public thinks that. Most people in the general public still don’t even seem to
understand that there is even a thing called search engine optimization. Go talk
to some search marketers who have had to explain what they do and hear what they
have to say. My own conversations tend to go like this.

Them: What do you do?

Me: I write about search engines and search marketing.

Them: Blank Face

Me: You know, how Google…

Them: Oh, I use Google!

Me: …Yahoo, and Microsoft and Ask and search engines like that work, and
how people can get found through them.

Them: Oh, can you get me at the top of Google? We have this web site,
and….

These are conversations I have with cab drivers, hair dressers, random people
I encounter. They don’t know what SEO means, much less that it is practiced by
scum-sucking evil doers.

Blog Spam & Trackback Fallout

I know a lot of thought-leaders in the blogosphere see SEO as tainted. I’ve
written about this before. It formed the title for my
Worthless
Shady Criminals: A Defense Of SEO article back in 2005, when we last had an
SEO reputation crisis as we do every two years (and somehow, it keeps rolling
along).

• Worthless was Seth
  Godin, who
  
  wrote in 2004, "SEO is the purported science of optimizing your
  webpage so that you rise to the top of the listings in Google and Yahoo …
  The theory is that a huge number of people find what they’re looking for via
  search, that virtually all of these people only look at the first page of the
  results and that if you don’t tweak your page, you’re doomed. I just got a
  note from someone asking me for a recommendation, and when I said I didn’t
  think that most SEO was worth the money."
   
• Shady was Movable
  Type’s Anil Dash, who
  wrote in
  2004, "I’ve always had a pretty low opinion of the Search Engine Optimization
  industry. Though there are of course legitimate experts in the field, it seems
  chock full of people who are barely above spammers, and they taint the image
  of the whole group …. So, in order to prove that real content trumps all the
  shady optimization tricks that someone can figure out, and because I figure I
  deserve an iPod at least as much as the Star Wars Kid, I’m entering the
  contest."
   
• Criminals was Mary
  Hodder, who
  wrote in 2005 during a Search Champs session at Microsoft: "There are
  about six search engine optimization people here. Kind of like being at the
  FBI and having criminals helping out in the room."

Statements like these mainly come
out of the most egregious marketing tactic out there, blog spamming. That’s what
most bloggers see, so they can be forgiven from forming an opinion that SEO is
all about shoving a gazillion trackback spams for Viagra into blogs.

My first response is a big chunk
of the blame for this goes to those who create blog software. You set up a
completely open system and didn’t think it would get abused? This is the
internet. We have long experience in knowing that any open system (say email)
will be heavily abused by a relatively small number of users (most people who
send email are not email spammers). Dudes, what were you thinking?

My second response is not to
equate blog spam with SEO. Someone buying software that automatically shoves
junk into blogs might not even be hoping to get into Google. The clicks alone
might be all the "marketing" they need. Link building is an important component
of SEO, but link spamming has and does exist independently of SEO. Links are an
independent traffic channel.

Mainly, however, I apologize. I’m
sorry that my industry — search marketing — hasn’t done more to make this
particular tactic go away. But then again, it has done a lot. Many leaders —
even leaders in the "black hat SEO" world — have pushed against this. My call
to action back in 2005,
Can We Agree
Automated Comment & Link Posting Is A Bad Thing?, covers a lot of this.

I’m Proud To Be An SEOican…

With SEO seen as synonymous with
spamming by some, you recently encouraged me to promote some new term. Abandon
SEO to the spammers, was your plea.

Well, I did try to encourage
people to understand the flavors of SEO in that
Worthless
Shady Criminals: A Defense Of SEO article I mentioned earlier:

So how did SEO turn into a
synonym for many people to mean tricking search engines through bogus links,
comment spam, and other unsavory tactics? It’s happened because there are
other flavors of SEO that have developed and dominated the impression of the
industry.

Consider the above tips as part
of "content-based SEO." Need an acronym? Perhaps CSEO or SEFO, for "search
engine friendly optimization." I won’t say that this is the "true" SEO,
because for as long as there’s been content-based SEO, there’s also been other
flavors of SEO and tactics designed just to generate traffic from search
engines regardless of content. For example:

• Doorway pages: Maybe you have existing content, but you don’t feel your
  content optimization is effective enough. Maybe you aren’t allowed to make a
  site more search engine friendly by your management. Maybe you are an
  affiliate who simply wants traffic to send to others. In any of these cases,
  you might create new pages designed to get traffic and serve as a "doorway"
  from which you send people to other pages.
   
• Link Building: Even before search engines relied on them,
  building links was an online marketing tactic. Link building has its own
  flavors, which range from making requests and hoping a link will be granted,
  to buying links, to using automated tools to create links in guest books,
  blog comments, forums and other areas allowing open access.

But really, when you tell me to abandon the term SEO, I think back to a
letter I once read from someone who wanted homosexuals to stop using the term
"gay," because this person liked to use the word gay to mean happy and didn’t
like that it had gained
another usage.

You can imagine the letters that came back in response from gays. They
weren’t about to go find some other word. And neither am I.

I’m gay, and I’m proud! Well, I mean I’m an SEO, and I’m proud. I might not
be a flaming blackhat SEO like some. I’m certainly not a scum-sucking trackback
spammer like others. But I’m not going to come up with a new name simply because
you and other thought-leaders are often too ignorant and too lazy to fully
understand something you want to attack. Rather than educate, you toss out
linkbaiting, flame-producing lines that do nothing to solve the problems you
perceive.

I’m certainly not going to try and come up with a new name when it’s taken so
long for many people to even understand basic terms like SEO and search
marketing. Not having been in the space — not having had to deal with clients
or others seeking help — you are clueless to them asking about things like:

• search engine submission
• search engine positioning
• search engine marketing
• ppc
• cpc
• seo
• search engine optimization
• search engine ranking

And more. When I
suggested
going with "search engine marketing" as an umbrella term back in 2001 when SEO
wasn’t encompassing enough, I had a huge positive
reaction.
Five years later — half a decade, a generation in internet terms — I’ve been
educating people about SEM, SEO and search advertising using particular terms.
I’m not going to switch terms midstream just because of the latest SEO
reputation crisis. Why? We’ll just have another one in 2009.

Designers, SEO & The Third Browser

Let’s kick back to you post, for that promised slap-upside-the-face:

Frankly the whitehat SEO companies are simply doing solid web design so I
don’t consider them SEO at all…

Now, if you make great content, keep your page design clean, and stick with it
you’re gonna do just fine in the rankings. Don’t smoke the SEO-crack… you’ll
just wind up chasing your tail as digg and
Google closes the
tiny SEO loopholes and put your domain on the black list.

Look, I’ve worked with web designers. I like web designers. But web design is
NOT SEO. A good web designer should think about SEO issues, such as unique title
tags, directory structure, page assembly order and other architectural issues.
They don’t. They really generally do not.

I keep imploring them to do so. I keep explaining that search engines are
like a "third browser," that collectively more visitors use them to "browse"
sites than Internet Explorer or Firefox combined. Still, designers fail to often
do even the "basic" SEO they should. And that "basic" SEO remains basic to you
because you’ve learned some of it along the way.

If you haven’t, then it remains a mystery. My
Yes Virginia, SEO Is
Rocket Science – Defending Search Engine Optimization Once Again and
More Rounds In The "Is
SEO Overrated" Debate go into much more depth about this.

If it’s so easy, if it’s just simply web design, why do I have all this from
the search engines themselves:

• Google’s Webmaster
  Help Center
• Yahoo Webmaster
  Help
• 
  Microsoft Live.com Webmaster Help (use the drop-down box to reach Live
  Search Site Owner Help. Microsoft’s absurdly makes help sections impossible to
  bookmark)

In particular, notice how much both Google and Yahoo especially provide in
terms of help. There is lots and lots of advice. That’s because SEO, while it
might not be rocket science, still can be pretty tough.

Not Everyone Knows Or Wants To Know SEO

Remember the great
sex blogger crisis of last December? Tony Comstock is

struggling (note, some adult content) with Google playing funny with his
site again. We’ve had about six emails go back and forth as we try to understand
what’s going wrong with his site. But he just needs good design, right?
Apparently not. Here’s some of the frustration he’s shared in our emails:

It’s bad enough that I have to be a part-time SEO to keep my business
running. I should be making my next film, not trying to figure out if we shot
ourselves in the foot or if Google is having a bad hair day. I should be
working on my next film (which so tendersweetsexylovely I can hardly stand
it!) Does everyone who keeps a blog need to be an avocational SEO just so they
can have their namesearch? That just doesn’t seem reasonable.

No, it doesn’t. But sometimes things go wrong. And sometimes, that’s when
having a professional — someone who lives and breathes SEO — might help. For
one thing, they understand the importance of keyword research (something Robert
Scoble forgot
when he did
SEO "blogger style"). They also see a lot of sites. They read a lot of material.
Many of them aren’t selling snake oil. Many of them can diagnose problems.

Speaking of diagnostics, Tony emailed me about a friend’s site,
Wilful Damage (again, note: some
adult content), that’s not appearing on Google for its
own name. I’m trying
to figure it out, seeing things like Google perhaps thinking

most pages are the same, as you can tell when I force it to

unfold things and discover many of the descriptions are the same.

Is it just a problem with Google seeing the snippets the same but the pages
are still unique? Are the pages seen as duplicate? Is it just a Google bug? I
asked Tony — has she used Google
Webmaster Central to check on any potential problems?

It’s a just a hobby for her. I don’t know that she’s done any big
diagnostic work.

So much for just good design. Yes, good design plus good basic SEO is all
many sites need. And yes, people can learn SEO — just like they can learn
design. But like Tony, I’d rather write articles than figure out how to make my
page design look nicer. That’s why I hire a designer — and finding a good one
is tough, when anyone can be a designer (and potentially do bad things to your
site from a search perspective). Similarly, finding a good SEO can be tough,
because anyone can say they are an SEO. But that doesn’t make SEO evil, bad or
worthless.

Linkbombing Jason Calacanis

You’re also engaged in this
challenge with some
SEOs who want to get into the top rankings for your name, as you write:

PS – And to the SEO idiots trying to "take over my SeRP" on Google you’re
proving my point exactly. Grow up.. the only thing you’re ever going to prove
by trying to game my SeRP is that you’re low-class idiots.

Yeah, it’s childish. But then again, what did you expect? You told a roomful
of people that SEO is bull? I find linkbombing campaigns a poor way for anyone
to prove their SEO power — but they can do that, sometimes. And as for "gaming"
your SERP, how? Some of those pages are actually now relevant for you. Your
action in slapping at the SEO community sparked this, so it’s kind of relevant
some of those pages come up.

Then we’ve got your closing paragraph:

PSS – This whole gaming of digg/Netscape/MySpace is being called
SMO–social media optimization. That’s the worst thing I’ve ever heard of.
Anyone who hires an SMO firm is an idiot. The whole point of social media is
TO BE REAL NOT FAKE!!! Just be yourself and participate… that’s all it takes
(and note, participation is not just putting in your own links, it’s
voting/commenting on/submitting other people’s content too!).

Wow. First you make SEO to be 90 percent junk, now you suddenly call an
entire new rising industry to be gaming?

SMO Facing SEO’s Challenges

Wake up, Jason. Social media sites are growing, as you well know. People want
to be found through them. And the sites themselves encourage this. What, Digg
rolled out all those new,
improved buttons this week that
many of us shove on our pages because Digg doesn’t want site owners to be
listed? Of course they want people to get their own content in the system —
just like the search engines do. And of course people want to do this in an
appropriate way. And of course people are going to want to know the most
optimized way to do it.

DO NOT make the mistake you’ve already made with SEOs and start out wrong
with the social media optimization crowd. That group can help encourage and
support social media search engines in the same way that many SEOs already serve
as an active, engaged, non-gaming support structure for the major search
engines.

DO NOT act like anyone submitting anything without some knowledge of how the
various social media sites work is just going to magically shoot the top of the
lists. Sure, it happens. But optimization helps. Respect for the community
helps. And some good SMO firms can make that happen, in the same way good SEO
firms can help with search engines.

Right now, I continue to be bemused watching SMO and social media sites go
through all the same growing pains that the search engines went through back in
the 90s, when they had to slowing start protecting and altering systems that
were far too open to abuse. You’ve heard me talk about this many times on the
Daily SearchCast over the past year.

Digg will one day have some decent help files (so we don’t have to do their
work explaining how Digg
Friends works). They’ll one day have a formal reinclusion process. I’ve no
doubt we’ll see Digg Webmaster Central or something similar emerge.

The SMOers have their own work to do, of course, if they don’t want to go
down the road that SEO has found itself in. I was going to talk about this in
more depth, but long-time search marketer Greg Boser already beat me to it.

Social Media Marketers Need to Accept Some Responsibility from him covers it
well. From the conclusion:

Since SEM/SEO is where I spend the majority of my time, I’ll take
responsibility for the guy who auto posts to 50,000 abandoned blogs with the
anchor text “Buy Viagra