Some "SEO is bulls#$t" fallout… (I'll keep updating this post)

1. The very smart Danny Sullivan takes me apart and makes a great point that the blogosphere leaders think SEO = comment spam (because comment spam folks are looking for SEO):

• I know a lot of thought-leaders in the blogosphere see SEO as tainted. I’ve written about this before. It formed the title for my Worthless Shady Criminals: A Defense Of SEO article back in 2005, when we last had an SEO reputation crisis as we do every two years (and somehow, it keeps rolling along).

My response to Danny is that I’m sure 90% of the good 10% of SEO folks are the folks who show up at his excellent conference. The 90% I’m talking about are the ones who operate on the fringe. Also, we’re basically getting to the point in the discussion where it’s obvious that we are talking about two different things when we say SEO. People on my side of the argument hear SEO and they think “scam” and “losers,” and Danny–who knows a lot more about SEO than I–thinks “which SEO firms are you talking about, whitehat or blackhat?”

So, it’s time to make two buckets: good and evil.. and the evil folks and techniques need to be put in the sunlight, exposed, and then killed.

2. The very odd dude from the video I posted is named Gary Ruplinger and he has a lot of infomercial type videos on the Interwebs. In the comments someone tries to get this guy on the phone.

3. Paul Fisher:

• There is still value to be gained in actively acquiring links to a website, but this should be done with a view to providing high quality traffic and not for SEO purposes. If you have a clean site with good content and high quality, traffic producing inbound links you can forget about SEO and leave the results pages to the search engines. Take it from an old pro. Don’t waste your time on SEO forums, products and companies. Spend your time on your content and on building quality traffic producing links.

4. Neil Patel offers me a challenge and I accept with conditions (see comment over there).

• I offer he following challenge: I can take your blog and increase your daily search traffic by a minimum of 10 to 20% after 30 days of putting my changes into effect. I will NOT be doing anything “shady” or unethical and will even point out all the changes that will be made to your blog. You can even have your own designer/programmer make the changes to your blog; I will even layout everything for them using step-by-step instructions.

5. Valleywag is on it…. now we know the issue will really blow up.