February 17th, 2007
Blog Herald Column: How SEO Confronts Its PR Challenge In The Blogosphere
I got a lot of attention from the search engine optimization (SEO) community this past week for a post on “What Gives SEO A Bad Name†— the example I used, a parked domain appearing as a #2 Google search results, turns out to be Google’s fault, not the work of an unethical SEO. Or so it appears, based on some very plausible explanations posted by some smart SEOs in the comments of the post — but I can’t know with 100% certainty what’s going on inside Google’s black box, and that’s a problem for SEOs.
Some SEOs got upset with me for appearing to unfairly perpetuate negative perceptions of SEO — but if my post was a mistake, it was an honest one (I posted a correction). The point I’ve been trying to make to the SEO community, not always successfully, is that because they live in a black box, SEO’s PR challenge involves correcting a lot of misperceptions. Many of those misperceptions are unfair, but they are not always intentionally malicious — and they exist among potential SEO clients, like me.
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Scott Karp / Publishing 2.0 : Blog Herald Column: How SEO Confronts Its PR Challenge In The Blogosphere
SEO and PR are two funny businesses. SEO will never understand PR, and PR will never understand SEO — yet the two are inextricably linked and could benefit hugely if they did master one another.
http://publishing2.com/2007/02/17/blog-herald-column-how-seo-confronts-its-pr-challenge-in-the-blogosphere/
Digg Is The Apotheosis Of Niche Media 5 hours 49 min old Will Online Video Remain A Monopoly? 1 day 11 hours old Blog Herald Column: How SEO Confronts Its PR Challenge In The Blogosphere 2 days 9 hours old
So now we’re blaming Google for the listing… should we wait for a Google Rep to come and tell us that if they remove a site instantly upon domain expiration or site outage than listing volatility will further increase and site-owners who face occasional interruptions (every server/site has a glitch at some point) will see big interruptions in their business? Or that due to the breadth of servers that power Google, there is a natural lag between cause and effect?
I’m just joking around. It’s just important to realize here that whenever you have a group of people (SEO’s) who are passionate about their trade, the only thing worst than someone who bashes them is someone who bashes them without having facts lined up.
You’ve illustrated the PR problem perfectly. The public doesn’t understand SEO, yet they speak out against it in posts like these.
So we know the problem… What are SEO’s to do? Should we create hundreds of blogs and forums that explain SEO? Should we send a delegate to Newsweek to explain SEO? Should we hold big massive conferences for people in industry? Oh wait… we already do those things.
Should we do more of those things… or is the massive education assault perpetuated by SEOs every day ineffective? Perhaps we need some more celebrity SEOs to oversimplify the craft and create more ignorance about it. After all, that is what the detractors do;)
BostonScott,
Matt Cutts, a very high-profile Google representative, did in fact take responsibility for the probelm — see his comment here.
He seems to indicate that the algo can be improved to better handle these situations in the future. Not sure I would classify this as a mistake on Google’s side where “fault” would be attributed, although far be it for me to question an implication made by Cutts:)
Anyway, you at least deserve kudos for allowing an open discussion on your blog. Perhaps you will have the last laugh… Controversy is, afterall, one of the ultimate forms of link bait! The SEOs you offend help you to improve your links, traffic, and readership.
[…] With Scott Karp, his scrape with the SEO community was definitely more low-key and he managed to turn it into some goodwill and probably some friendships within the SEO community he could turn to for help. Where he messed […]