Why Danny has to use the f-word

Author: Bill Marshall

Date Published: 19 September 2007, 12:00

We SEOs are generally pretty patient types, used to painstaking logical analysis of sites and telling clients for the fourth time why thay can't use Hidden text or get number one positions for all-Flash sites. So when one of the top SEO's in the world, the universally liked and respected Danny Sullivan, uses the f-word on his blog you know there has to be a good reason.

Danny has spent more time than was perhaps sensible in the last few months defending the Search Engine Optimisation industry from a number of commentators who have been trying to tar it with the brush of spammers. They get away with it because there is still a lack of understanding about what it is that we do and a lot of misinformation from the less reputable end of the industry. The average big businessman reading the New York Times or whatever doesn't have much knowledge of SEO and will take anything he rereads for granted.

Two people have contributed greatly to the negative stories, Jason Calcanis and Robert Scoble. Both appear to have vested interests but both have a large number of readers who are susceptible to this type of attack. The latest one is Scobles video called "Why Mahalo, TechMeme, and Facebook are going to kick Google’s butt in four years". While complaining that Google can't index content inside videos he describes the Mahalo and the others as "SEO resistant" as if that were a good thing. The answer apparently is to move everything to social networking sites and they'll keep out the SEO generated "noise".

For those of us that have been practising ethical SEO for years - trying to make sites as useful and relevant as possible to their target markets and removing any impediment to search engines finding ther content - this gets pretty tiresome. Danny has had enough, and his use of the f-word shows just how fed up he is of this rubbish. But also being Danny he uses a long and well-reasoned argument to demolish the content of the video as well as taking on a variety of other articles along the way and showing that social networking has been tried and repeatedly failed to provide any useful search capability. If you want an historically educated and surprising calm commentary on the situation then Danny's posts are recommended - even when he's angry!