Why people hate SEO… (and why SMO is bulls$%t)
This video is so cheesy you have to think it’s a fake… but I don’t think it is. (Hat Tip)
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. 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.
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.
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.
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.
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!).
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[...] have some interest. You can read about him at Wikipedia, of course and you can check out his very opinionated blog as well. Suffice to say Mr. Calacanis doesn’t have a high regard for SEO and that is the crux [...]
Pingback by July Comic for Ranked Hard | Big Oak SEO Blog — September 6, 2008 @ 8:50 am
Jason I could not agree more. Web 2.0 and
social media optimization is just so easy and it only
requires a small amount of knowledge. Why people should need
to hire monkeys is beyond me. Seems the way it is now going
with the evolution of new search algorithms and web 2.0
integration, it will be just a case of compose and post and
job done. What will the future hold.
Comment by Mark Leonard — September 19, 2008 @ 9:39 am
[...] optimization, Social Networks Last year Jason Calacanis wrote a blog post how he thought that SEO and SMO were bullshit. Now I know in some parts Calacanis is approaching demi-god status and in other parts he’s [...]
Pingback by SEO and SMO are conversation starters. « Direct Marketing Observations — October 6, 2008 @ 4:09 pm
[...] year Jason Calacanis wrote a blog post how he thought that SEO and SMO were bullshit. Now I know in some parts Calacanis is approaching demi-god status and in other parts he’s [...]
Pingback by SEO and SMO are conversation starters. : Internet Mastery Secrets — October 7, 2008 @ 1:15 am
[...] I still think SEO is WAY overstated. Take a look at this article by Jason Calacanis entitled “Why people hate SEO…and why SEO is bulls$%t” This is a great example video (and yeah it’s real) of how 90% of SEO companies do [...]
Pingback by the Diary and Soundtrack of Joshua Garrett » SEO What? — October 10, 2008 @ 10:56 am
Amen brother! SEO *is* snake oil. Glad to see that there is at least one human with brains left out there.
Comment by BrotherFromAnotherMother — November 19, 2008 @ 12:57 am
lol I like the comments. Glad to hear someone else making them
, I thought it was just me. Now I can see it’s not an echo in
my head.
Cheers
M7levels
PS I never
heard of an SMO Wow. See I even learned something
today
PSS Tell me that not you in that Video?
Comment by m7levels — December 6, 2008 @ 4:56 pm
[...] SEO: I am not a fan of agency/consultant based SEO and ascribe to the Calacanis heretical view that if you need to perform SEO as an overt tactic then you’re doing something wrong. But SEO [...]
Pingback by Triage for tough times — The Dour Marketer | Churbuck.com — December 15, 2008 @ 8:20 pm
Wow, that guy is creepy and does convey the impression of a used care salesman.
Comment by Chris — January 5, 2009 @ 5:55 pm
see..I got some points why they really hate a tricky seo
Comment by dani — February 3, 2009 @ 7:31 am
[...] has issued an interesting challenge to Jason in an effort to prove that not all SEO’s are in Jason’s words “snake oil salesmen”; even though he does try to give some leeway: Note: There are some [...]
Pingback by Let the match begin — Shooting at Bubbles — April 22, 2009 @ 12:31 am
[...] of my favorite Calacanis posts is Why people hate SEO … and why SMO is bullcrap. 90% of SEO is simple rules for building clean HTML. The other 10% is that SEOs are really just [...]
Pingback by Podcast #56 - Blog - Stack Overflow — June 4, 2009 @ 2:49 am
That’s why they hate seo, but they don’t understand that seo is the most powerful weapon in the web and that there are more wonderful things that seo can help achieve than
Comment by seo company — June 21, 2009 @ 2:15 pm
[...] beautiful city that has been polluted and needs to be cleaned up. That is why for awhile he was very outspoken against Search Engine Optimization and created Mahalo to make the internet a better place for humans, not robots, spiders, and [...]
Pingback by Startup Philosophies: Loic Le Meur vs Jason Calacanis | Viralogy Blog — July 7, 2009 @ 9:50 am