Stymiee, a moderator at SitePoint, in a thread about learning SEO claimed:

Read forums and websites dedicated to discussing SEO. You'll learn more and won't get only one point of view which is usually a bad thing. Remember, those who can, do; those who can't, teach.

In the thread they dismiss the -950 Google ranking phenomena as a myth, when it clearly happens to many websites (likely due to filtering and local re-ranking of search results). Misguided group-think lead by an alpha male ogre is a bad thing.

The guy who claims teachers are bad has about 19,000 posts and carries around his SitePoint SEO Guru badge. In the same thread, he talks crap about my book, deletes my response, bans me from the forums, as he claims the forums provide more opinion diversity. Charles, the person who notified me of the hate thread, had the following to say

Have you ever run into him before? He is an unbelievable dickhead. I hate to sound unprofessional with someone I have never met, as it is not my style but, he roams the sitepoint forums spouting off at the mouth like he wrote every single SE algorithm. Not to mention how he does it in a belittling way to people who are truly ignorant through no fault of their own. I have no idea why sitepoint allows him to be a team leader. I have written them with links to posts he has made offending comments on so many times I can’t even count.

I am willing to bet that your post will be removed within hours. That is what happens every time I make a valid point against him.

Since my comments were deleted from SitePoint I will post them here for posterity:

Nice to see you delete my comments while running a hate thread about me... which shows how accurate and balanced this forum thread is.

[QUOTE=stymiee;3416219]Remember, those who can, do; those who can't, teach. ;)[/QUOTE]

And it only took him about 19,000 posts to figure out what group he belongs to. Congrats Mr. SEO Guru of 2006.

What a joke!

Price points are a reflection of value. Set them too low and you attract the wrong people. If information is personalized free is almost always the wrong price. Some people will warn how little money they have, in spite of spamming for a half dozen sites in competitive high profit verticals. If they ask for services with the little or no money warning they are probably worthy of little or no attention.

Some customers will search for your old price or old offers on other sites and demand hours of your time and/or full refunds. No matter what you do that customer was going to want a full refund. You just have to determine how much of your time you want to give them for nothing.

Some clients have subsidiaries that will try to get free information out of you. If a company does not pay directly then they are not taking you seriously. To best appreciate this, it is worth noting that an advertising firm for a high touch fashion website (which tried squeezing free SEO information out of me) just emailed me an advertising request for advertising on Threadwatch. Could they be any more clueless?

Much of the free information also isn't worth listening to. Some platform speakers drone on about how everyone else in their industry is an idiot. If they hate themselves so much why are they still in the field? Why don't they move into a field they enjoy?

Fantomaster had a great comment about whether automated content generation is moral:

I don't really get the "moral dilemma". Would you say the same about press releases, product announcements, ads, commented statistical tables and other forms of corporate droidspeak? And if not - why not?

I mean, it's not as if the Web as a whole were particularly dominated by high end literary prose, deeply suggestive well crafted poetry or similar feats of human creativity.

And, when you think of it, what is Mahalo but a human compiled scraper? Why is it ok that the WSJ publishes auto-generated looking advertorials? Thompson, like search engines, already produces automated content.

Journalistic integrity matters most to those who need you to believe others are unethical for their business models to work.

Spyjax allows you to view the browsing history of website visitors. You upload a list of competing URLs and see which ones the browser visited before visiting your site, which can be used to let you know what competing sites people typically visit before seeing your site. By tracking this, you can replicate the features and/or marketing strategy of other well visited sites and move yourself earlier into the buy cycle.

Danny Sullivan's recently made a post highlighting the downside of human review for search engines:

[Tim] Mayer reminded that what's relevant for a query can often change over time. Google's Udi Manber, vice president of engineering, made similar remarks when I spoke with him about human-crafted results when I was visiting at Google yesterday.

One example he pointed out was how Google's human quality reviewers -- people that Google pays to provide a human double-check on the quality of its results, so they can then better tune the search algorithm -- started to downgrade results for [cars] when information about the movie Cars started turning up. The algorithm had picked up that the movie was important to that term before some of the human reviewers were aware of it.

Obviously human review is used at all major search engines, but even when outsourcing reviews humans have limits just like with producing content. Even if Google has 10,000 quality raters those people can only be trained to find and rate certain things.