Am i the only one who thinks that SEO is more a plague then it is a real profession? Google making it hard for SEO is exactly the right thing to do. Making it impossible for SEO should be the ultimate _goal_ of a good search engine.
If you mean people whose goal it is to help site owners learn how to structure their data intelligently for dissection by machines, people who make companies think very hard about their content, people who encourage high-quality crosslinks and meta tags, and people who generally help sites manage data, then no, SEOs are great. They help users and companies alike.
If you mean the dirtball black hats, then yes, they are a parasite that deserves no mercy and should be eliminated at all costs.
Yes, SEO has clearly a negative notion for me. To deceive the search engine and make it less useful for me is practically the job description of SEO, in my opinion.
For all the "no-evil" stuff, it's just plainly the work of a website programmer. Properly formatting your HTML, making it accessible and easily "readable" for machines is part of your job when you create a website. Same for creating a robots.txt. If you say many people don't know how to do that, then those people are just bad in creating websites and they need help of a professional website programmer/creator. No need for a term like SEO here.
I can see what you are saying but I see SEO a bit differently than being simply good web programming. It's about content organization as well as information flow. Some of the time that comes naturally to a webmaster, but there are so many content rich sites with poor web programming and poor organization. SEO is a niche side of web programming that fixes that specific problem. The skills of an SEO sometimes don't even cross the mind of a "good" web programmer because of the unknown unknowns factor. They just haven't thought about even attempting to rank a website on Google. They aren't investigating the competition to see where they fit, and how to be better.
I think it would be reasonable to understand the underlying algorithms in order to optimise what white hat SEO to spend effort on. But I accept that this is probably a rare breed.
This is true. But there really are hundreds of thousands (probably millions and millions) of sites that are structured horribly where you can simply rely on knowing how the heck to structure a page correctly.
For instance...
I recently moved a corporate site for a major national law firm from Joomla to WordPress. They had 200+ pages with multiple H1 tags, nearly 300 pages missing descriptions, dozens and dozens of soft 404s, hundreds of pages with bad titles or URLs that are too long, dozens of pages with duplicate content because of bad sitemaps, and every single page was over 100 links because of the dummy that made the original nav toolbar put every subpage in there.
White hats can work for the next decade simply trying to save companies from themselves, their stupid CMS systems, and former well meaning SEO efforts that are now banned or deprecated.
Short term effect to fixing these issues? A nearly 20% increase in traffic since the switchover and slightly raised ranking for related firm content on OTHER sites.
Is the first group SEOs, or information architects? Good information navigation design will consider searchability and, more importantly, human accessibility (a large part of which will be searchability, but search serves the primary need of people to find information efficiently).
Making your site easy to crawl and find can be spammy when taken too extremes, yes, but it's also about quality basics. Good titles, site structure, URL structure, relevant internal linking, etc.
As an analogy, making your restaurant easy to find (relevant name, standard names for things, signs out front, etc.) is important unless you're so well-branded that can get by on having a secret, unmarked door.
Sometimes, that statement is fairly accurate, then in other times when google boosts its own commercial properties to increase their ad revenue, it wouldn't be.
The story really didn't dissuade me from thinking about the profession of SEO as the sorts of people looking for easy money at the expense of others.
I'm sure MLM operators and spammers didn't do well in school, were hostile to the people around them and love flashy clothes, big checks, and fast cars as well.
I think this is a common view, and I share it: I really don't like SEO. The thing is, SEO does provide real value, but it provides value because the system is broken: your website should reach the top of search results based on merit, not based on some arcane black magic.
I think it's somewhat akin to lobbyists: I don't blame them for making money off and taking advantage off the political system, and they certainly provide something of value to their customers, but I dislike the fact that they can exist at all. But that's not the lobbyist's fault, it's the system. In this respect, I applaud Google for keeping people on their toes and making SEO less relevant. That's their job after all.
I understand where you're coming from, but that's crap. Just because there is always someone willing to do ethically questionable things that fall within the letter of the law, doesn't mean that those types of people shouldn't be treated with disdain by the rest of us.
I disagree. Let me quote Cutts: "I’ve said it before, but SEO is in many ways about change. The best SEOs recognize, adapt, and even flourish when changes happen."
There's a saying that goes something like "A computer will only do what you tell it to do". That said, merit is important, but you have to show Google merit with code. That's by on page content and structure and appropriate tags, etc or by off-page, with links. That's it. There's no other way. There's no black magic. Cutts speaks to SEOs but he calls he channel GoogleWebmasterHelp . That's the clue to website owners, but many times the owner is not a webmaster. So they can hire an SEO that knows a bit about ranking websites, or they can hire a web programmer. Not all web programmers have ideas on what to do. They likely will want to make a new site for the customer that is not even necessarily any better than the existing, as far as Google cares.
That got a bit preachy but it's not as black and white as you make it out to be. There's a niche for SEOs that involves improving existing websites that a web programmer might not be suited for, might not want to do, or might be too expensive for.
