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
I Agree and Disagree. Much of the SEO done today is gaming,
but that is not the bottom line. Pure White Hat is a solid
business model. Business owners need to know how to market
their website and that is what true White Hat is. Helping
users of the web find a valuable service that they are looking
for. True White Hat SEO should actually be called UO for
user or CO for customer optimization. We should not be
targeting spiders, but users like Google intended.
Comment by Mike — July 17, 2009 @ 10:37 pm
I agree with 15 because we work together. The problem with
SEO today are the Black Hatters messing it up for not only
SEO companies but for the end users of the internet and
business owners end up paying for it. It gets more
difficult to provide a valuable service and acquire well
deserved visibility when there are so many “cheaters” out
there disregarding guidelines. True White Hat SEO is
valuable and it is a shame the name is starting to go bad.
Lets rally to find a new name for the “White Hat” industry.
Comment by SEO Solutions — July 17, 2009 @ 10:42 pm
[...] Jason Calacanis clearly hates SEO but that doesn’t carry much weight with me as it is just one person’s opinion. He puts his pants on one leg at a time, or so I’m told. Furthermore, Mahalo and Weblogs inc have done little to alter how I personally use the internet in anyway. I would take it much more seriously if Sergey Brin had a blog post on his dislike of SEO. But I question whether Google cares at all. In fact, I think Google encourages SEO provided you’re doing it right and not trying to pull one over on them. Bruce Clay had an interesting post called: Does Google Hate Search Engine Optimization? Bruce makes the case that “…if Google hated SEO, we’d know it. Google isn’t just tolerating SEOs; they’re going out of their way to help them and give them access to more information.” From my interactions with our SEO firm it seems like that really is the case. [...]
Pingback by What’s wrong with SEO? — July 22, 2009 @ 12:43 pm
wow, the powerful of backlink builder
Comment by Mapuc — August 1, 2009 @ 6:55 pm
[...] Why people hate SEO… (and why SMO is bulls$%t) « The Jason Calacanis Weblog Everything old is new again. (tags: seo bullshit video) [...]
Pingback by Derek Powazek - links for 2009-10-15 — October 15, 2009 @ 10:01 am
web developers constantly feel threatened by SEOs. It’s their own resentment and insecurities because we make you look bad. Boohoo crybabies.
Comment by Nick — October 15, 2009 @ 3:10 pm
[...] really believe what they say. Take Jason Calacanis, for instance. He’s said some pretty mean things about SEO yet his company, Mahalo, is basically an SEO play. And uses some pretty aggressive [...]
Pingback by 10 reasons people criticize SEO « shankarsoma; Nothing is faster — October 16, 2009 @ 11:16 am
[...] Why people hate SEO… (and why SMO is bulls$%t) Memorable Quote: There are some whitehat SEO firms out there I know, but frankly the whitehat SEO [...]
Pingback by 7 Great SEO Bashing Articles — October 19, 2009 @ 12:35 am
[...] really believe what they say. Take Jason Calacanis, for instance. He’s said some pretty mean things about SEO yet his company, Mahalo, is basically an SEO play. And uses some pretty aggressive [...]
Pingback by 10 reasons people criticize SEO | SEO Essex Company — October 19, 2009 @ 10:40 am
I honestly believe the main reason people hate SEO is that they are so frustrated. I actually feel for you.
If you don’t believe you can rank for the good stuff (the big keywords) of course you’ll hate it. Because you’re fighting over the scraps. And the majority of people fighting for the scraps aren’t even going to come up with a result.
That’s the nature of search. You have an incredible number of people competing for just a few spots. So unless you are among the top few in your industry of course you will get disgruntled especially if you’re paying someone to deliver that result. But you have to realize that you MUST hire the absolute best people because there are just a handful of spots available that count.
If these SEO haters KNEW beyond the shadow of a doubt that they had the skills or the people to outrank the big boys for the big money terms, would they still be shouting about how evil SEO is?
…probably not.
Comment by Scott — October 19, 2009 @ 8:51 pm
SEO can be a binder, there are lots of tools out there, some
good, some bad and some that need putting down:) but like it
or lump FREE SEO Tools often do the job better than paid ones:)
Comment by Nigel — November 12, 2009 @ 9:53 pm