Derek Powazek stirred some shit up with his recent blog on the evils of SEO (titled “Spammers, Evildoers and Opportunists” lol) and the the inevitable backlash from the SEO “community” has been somewhat amusing to watch. For instance, Lee Odden’s “The Truth About SEO” points out that SEO ranked #3 in a recent poll of “top digital marketing tactics” among readers of a popular search marketing blog. Hmm… there may be some sampling bias in there.
Anyway, as a guy who’s spent a fair amount of time being talked to about SEO, I wanted to share a few observations about why it is that both sides of this debate seem to have such a hard time acknowledging each others’ arguments.
- SEO experts are a bunch of haters! – Or vultures or negative Nancies. Whatever you want to call it. It’s totally understandable why this is the case, I mean… this is how they put food on their family, right? But my point is, they go over the helmet of competent, professional web developers and play on the technophobe fears of their bosses in order to secure a consulting contract. Listen… Web developers (good ones) spend a *lot* of time thinking about extremely nerdy stuff like information architecture, keeping content & presentation seperate and cross-platform accessibility. After all, it’s their job! So when some guy in a polo shirt shows up and starts talking about how they’re going to need to perform a site “audit” it’s often interpreted as a thinly veiled attack on the professionalism and competence of the web developers responsible for the creation & maintenence of the site. Sometimes this is an over-reaction, sometimes it’s not. But anyway, I’m just sayin!
- SEO is a weapon of message destuction! – Many of us who have grown up along with the internet relate to it in a very personal way. From the early days of newsgroups and email listservs, we have understood the net has been a means of BI-DIRECTIONAL COMMUNICATION, and while we accept that change is inevitable, we find it pretty important to preserve as much of the net’s egalitarian nature as possible. As a means of publishing information, the web is without parallel, and the ability to search through all this stuff instantaneously via Google is nothing short of miraculous. SEO profanes this miracle. Consider the following example. A man in Kansas begins selling obscure electronic components on the web. Since he is the only supplier for these components, he becomes Google’s #1 result for related searches. Over time, a number of other people begin selling similar products and competition eventually unseats the pioneer from Kansas. Google keeps track of which merchants garner the most links and feedback from customers, and for John Q. Public, a search for “Magnetic Diode X344″ leads to rapid & satisfactory results.
Enter SEO.
By means of some creative string pulling, a less reputable diode supplier rises to the top of the search results. Eventually both Google and the honest merchants realize what is going on and “fix” their sites to resolve the issue. Order and balance are restored. More strings are pulled. The honest merchants get fed up with waiting around for Google to take care of things and resort to pulling some strings of their own. Lather, rinse, repeat.
On some level, this is simply a natural extension of the same competition that Google encourages by “ranking” sites based on their relative influence among web users, but there’s something else decidely more sinister afoot as well. Becausewith each escalation of string-pulling and search “optimization” the simple act of offering a quality product for sale and taking care to provide adequate customer service, becomes less and less important. In traditional brand marketing, this is standard operation procedured (so much so that blind tests often reveal that there is no discernable difference between competing brands) but viewed through the idealistic eyes of the web native, this is nothing but a pointless arms race that creates spam and makes it harder to find what you’re looking for on the web. (And, by the way, we all know who the only real winner of an arms race is… The people manufacturing the weapons. Like Geto Boys said: “Fuck a war”.) - Adwords already exists! – Not only has Google seen fit to make searching the web absolutely trivial, but they *already* provide a means for marketers to reach extremely specific and well-qualified groups of users by means of keyword bidding. This is something that any company 15 years ago would have killed for, and you’re telling me you’d rather dick around with hiring spam factories in India for thousands of dollars a month to raise your organic search result a few notches when you could use Adwords to have the #1 result for pennies a click and not only that but only pay for the users who actually click through? WTF is wrong with you!?!
Anyway, that’s just my $0.02. Feel free to tell me why I’m wrong.
