Is Your Field Tarnished?

Frank Schilling and Andy Hagans both wrote posts about the bogus worldview of the role of SEOs. Frank also highlighted that most every industry gets this treatment:

It seems to me that the only groups "incapable of doing wrong" on the Internet are either the browser, operating systems or Google. Even when these groups are clearly doing wrong they are incapable of doing wrong in the media's and public's eyes. Everyone else eventually gets maligned as a dark-hearted "neer do well" or "rounder".

Yet in spite of this treatment, people like Rand give tips on things like segmenting search intent nearly every day, Blue Hat SEO shares real world SEO examples, Shoemoney shares his designer, Eric Enge interviews search engineers, and DaveN is even willing to tell you when new link buying algorithms roll in.

Don't forget that the people telling stories about fighting spam or fighting for good are often full of crap. Take Collactive, for example. Here we have a company backed by Seqouia (which also backed Google) which is creating a marketplace for spamming social media sites. The same company behind Collactive was originally behind Blue Frog, which aimed to stop email spam. Why did they shift for being against spam to promoting it? Money. That is all most businesses are interested in anyhow.

Google doesn't care about spam if it is through AdSense. The lines between signal vs noise, ethical vs unethical, and friend vs foe change depending on where the stack of money is largest. Anytime you read a business drone on about ethics make sure to think about the self serving nature of their advice.

Published: May 16, 2007 by Aaron Wall in marketing

Comments

spiker
May 16, 2007 - 10:55pm

>>Anytime you read a business drone on about ethics make sure to think about the self serving nature of their advice.

Hidden agenda always stinks from far off.
Only ppl who dont get this are spammers.
It really requires different point of view to understand this.

Whatever google does it makes sure that user gets some relevent info in return.

spiker
www.seductioncommunitydb.com

May 16, 2007 - 10:59pm

Nice site design, broken navigation, and hard sales copy spiker. I am sure that is the type of quality content Google wants to rank.

Jordan
May 16, 2007 - 11:40pm

In a post back on April 17th called Changing Business Models you were concerned with the lack of value your current business model was providing. Maybe Collative and others like you and I are just trying to provide a better value so that we can see a better return. Without question many opinions might change and where the money is made will most likely be where the business will side. However at the end of the day the self serving nature is the root of the topic.

Patrick
May 17, 2007 - 3:58am

I'll start worrying about 'ethics' when it comes to SEO, when artifical intelligence advances and search engines start to have feelings or (I'll spare you with my other points for now :-))

spiker
May 17, 2007 - 6:21pm

>>Nice site design, broken navigation, and hard sales copy spiker

Thanks for the comments Arron. I am sure you have gone through the path I have traveled. so you get it.

The time I have good contents and Google ranking it on the top is just a matter of time (relax... Google has not ranked me on first page so far.)

keep your finger crossed.

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