SEO is today’s snake oil

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Full Tilt Boogie
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Posted: Wed May 13, 2009 2:51 pm Post subject: SEO is today’s snake oil

If this is in the wrong place, then please feel free to move it. I was forwarded this article by a mate in the US, whose next step for his board (like me) is to seek to get it more widely publicised and better known on the web, using any means at his disposal, including SEO tools/methods. Any thoughts on this article - agree/disagree with it's content/message? EUNOIA - A Fun Place To Be

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Posted: Wed May 13, 2009 3:11 pm Post subject:

It is very "crude" for the sake of simplistic presentation and probably reflects the authors own ignorance of what is a complex field. But for all that, the core message is true, there is a lot more snake oil on sale than there is real medicine, and as with snake oil and real medicine the real stuff is not magic and is probably quite unpalatable. e.g. hard work solutions that do not give instant or top results. _________________ Family Friendly Shareware \| \| Web Design/Services \| Free Forums

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Posted: Wed May 13, 2009 3:46 pm Post subject:

admin (no pm's please) wrote:

It is very "crude" for the sake of simplistic presentation and probably reflects the authors own ignorance of what is a complex field.

But for all that, the core message is true, there is a lot more snake oil on sale than there is real medicine, and as with snake oil and real medicine the real stuff is not magic and is probably quite unpalatable. e.g. hard work solutions that do not give instant or top results.

Bingo Martin!

This is how another guy I was discussing it with in the US described the area of SEOs:

Joe S wrote:

A six year old on a two-wheeler looks like an "expert" to a three year old on a tricycle. Imagine, balancing on only two wheels! Kind of like an SEO-savvy person looks like an expert to most everyone else. Reminds me of the early days (1998-2000) of designing and building company websites when corporate execs were like three year olds on tricycles and were buffaloed by site designers and programmers. The Web was a mystery then and a site that can be designed and built for $75,000 today cost $1 million back then. ( I know, because I was CEO of one such web design firm.) Nowadays one of the mysteries of the web/internet is search engine ranking or placement. So there's no mystery as to why all these "SEO experts" have appeared out of nowhere. Are they snake oil salesmen? My take is that they're just taking advantage of the "three year olds" who haven't learned the "secret" of riding a two-wheeler, and in this case the two-wheeler is search engines. I knew that "SEO optimization" was snake oil when a 60-ish PR person whom I've known for over twenty years contacted me a month ago and asked me if my organization's site was search-engine-optimized. The term SEO was so new to him that he didn't even connect it to the web design firm I ran - and he did PR for - from 1998-2003! As they say in reference to the stock market, when the small investor gets in it's time to get out; now that 60-ish PR people are into SEO it's way past the time to think of it as leading edge.

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