I Quit SEO

[petermeadit]

Martin Macdonald gives a great article about why it is not cool to call yourself an SEO these days and what kind of crud these spammers are dishing out, and why they keep doing it.

http://martinmacdonald.net/i-quit-seo/

 

[mjonezy]

Phew, looking at the title, i thought you were leaving the industry Pete!

I do agree with the article. It kind of disheartening being in the industry and seeing the stuff that passes as SEO... and companies are still selling "guaranteed rankings" and keyword packages and then servicing the clients with optimising only their homepage, and then building links through business directory links, blog comments, free article directories and links from directories they have put on their clients sites without their knowledge

 

[helloworld]

I prefer digital marketing expert/professional No end users ever understand what SEO is. I'm sick of explaining it. It's easier just to describe it from the get go and never mention SEO.

 

[petermeadit]

... i thought you were leaving the industry Peter! ...

Pretty hard to leave something you have put so much work into! But I am going to start using 'Online Marketing' or 'Internet Marketing' rather than SEO.

I had a friend of mine, who said they didn't want to Friend me on Facebook, because they knew I was into SEO and that she did not want to get spammed. She said "it's what you SEO guys do isn't it?" I asked what she meant, and she said "I just don't like spam". This lady does not even own a website and not even interested in one either. I was only thinking of her as a friend on facebook, sheesh.

This really struck me, as to the level of pessimism people have about the Internet now. It really helped me to reaffirm the importance of quality.

I think people have got built-in crap detectors these days. I mean, you would not buy crap yourself, so why expect others to buy it. Even if they are fooled, when they realize they won't come back again.

So for me it has to be all about quality, that is most important.

 

[James]

Martin Mcdonald is a bit of a talker, at my old agency I worked with an ex college of his. They said that he never even did any work for clients and was only interested in presenting at conferences LOL....How true is that I don't know but I know this person was not the type to make things up.

Sure enough SEO does have its fair share of jokers and spammers, I personally do a bit of every thing these days an I act as an Online Markter (SEO and Social is just my area of specialty)
You end up working on a whole range of things.

 

[jockp]

Honestly if you have a solid site, aren't doing anything stupid then SEO is a great traffic source.

 

[findtim]

SEO is a thankless job, one minute they love you next they hate you, that's why I NEVERRRRR promise results. It just got to be far to stressful.

tell them up front " I do not own google or the internet so we will just do what we know we should and see what happens BUT tomorrow you might disappear because google changes something......... that isn't my fault ....OK and we will work on correcting it ? " then I say " so, do you want to go ahead with this or do you want to go find someone that is going to tell you what you want to hear and pay them more money" ?

50% of them go find someone else and 30% of those come back after spending S*^TLOADS of money.

once they are back they end up staying.

tim

footnote: its funny how many go find someone else and then phone me for advice on what they should be asking the new person to do !!!!! WTF ,

SEO not only has baggage it also has undeserved low respect for the amount of knowledge that is needed to do it well.

 

[Honan]

Pretty hard to leave something you have put so much work into!.......snip

I think people have got built-in crap detectors these days. I mean, you would not buy crap yourself, so why expect others to buy it. Even if they are fooled, when they realize they won't come back again.

.

Hey Peter, you don't follow the drops eh?

 

[James]

Honestly if you have a solid site, aren't doing anything stupid then SEO is a great traffic source.

Exactly people are still driving 100,000's of organic SEO visitors to their websites each week with the right strategy.

If you think SEO is dead you are probably just not doing it right, check out a presentation I did this year on the subject:

http://www.slideshare.net/connections8/seo-is-not-dead-you-are-just-doing-it-wrong

 

[petermeadit]

Hey Peter, you don't follow the drops eh?

Not has much as I would like to. Usually when there is something I am interested in.

 

[Alex]

Hi Peter if it makes you feel any better I am disliking SEO very much right not. And I am just starting

 

[petermeadit]

If you can stick it out while learning, it is well worth it. Good SEO skills take a long time to learn. Good results sometimes take longer than expected.

SEO is sometimes associated with cheap questionable practices. So does Online Marketing have a better reputation?

There will always be the need for proper SEO practices, this can take effort to explain to clients.



Sent from my HTC One X using DNTrade mobile app

 

[Alex]

Can any of you SEO gurus out there confirm Hipster.com.au is now on page 3 of Google for keyword Hipster? I bought 10 PR 9 links from fiverr and have jumped over 30 pages!

 

[CyberClick]

Can any of you SEO gurus out there confirm Hipster.com.au is now on page 3 of Google for keyword Hipster

Don't need to be an seo guru. Go to Google.com.au, search for "hipster" and there it is (in all it's glory) on pge 3.

I'd be careful with any such links though, they might be gold today but lead tomorrow.

 

[Honan]

Can any of you SEO gurus out there confirm Hipster.com.au is now on page 3 of Google for keyword Hipster? I bought 10 PR 9 links from fiverr and have jumped over 30 pages!

which google?
are you signed into google when you search?

 

[Alex]

Google.com.au ... I think all the links are very high quality. Wordpress.org is one of them etc etc etc!!!

If any of you would like a list sent to you just pm me.

The thing is I have been trying to outsource the SEO for awhile now. Have found a really good contractor, but he is telling me I likely have been filtered by Panda due to publishing duplicate eBay content and that the Hipster.com.au domain may be ruined as a result.

Maybe this is why I cannot get Hipster to rank for anything other than Hipster? There are plenty of other major onsite things like Robots.txt, XML Sitemap, title tags so very likely I am jumping to conclusions.

Does anyone know how I can find more info about this? I have checked my Google Webmaster Tool and there are no messages indicating I have been. it does mention I have duplicate title tags, which I have read is an indication of duplicate content.

Thinking about tagging all affiliate links with "no follow" "no index" or "Canonicalization" or 301 redirect. <--- Is this a good idea?

Worst comes to worst I have another domain I can work on. This time there would be affiliates / eBay, but would prefer to stick with Hipster. It really is a lot of fun!

Kind Regards,
Alex

 

[zhenjie]

Have you been monitoring keywords with software? If you can can find out when rankings fluctuated and compare with historical penguin/panda releases. If you don't have this data it will be hard to really analyse

 

[findtim]

i have you as page 3 number 4

there seems to be some easy targets infront of you, i'd be research their backlinks etc to get some scope on whats going on.

tim

 

[johno69]

Go to Google.com.au, search for "hipster" and there it is (in all it's glory) on pge 3.

I'm hardly surprised though.

Meta title is just the domain, no meta description or keywords. Keyword density on the homepage is poor too.

The logo could be text rather than the image it is (with no alt or title text too I might add).

Surprised it ranks as high as it does really.

 

[Data Glasses]

Is this still relevant

http://www.businessshow.tv/2013/06/seo-link-building-in-depth-1-welcome/