Negative SEO blog : SEOassassin

Well, a fast moving story, this one. The VERY first response to the Threadwatch story is from Elisabeth Osmeloski, denying everything, essentially :

you’ve got it completely wrong, FYI. This is a result of a simple miscommunication between me & the developers - i was asking them how to update the blogroll, so I could add SEL, as well as a few others I thought could get added.

trust me, it’ll get fixed - I have no intentions of ‘blackballing’ my colleague & friend, and he knows that… to say otherwise, well, that’s just ridiculously catty, and clearly you don’t know me at all.

NFFC quickly counters with :

So to get this straight, you asked them to add Search Engine Land but they thought you said remove Daggle and SearchCast?

Excellent points there… miscommunication is one thing, but this smacks of taking your ball home, basically.

Now, I may be reading too much into some of this, but I get the feeling that Elisabeth is majorly pissed off. I also think that she’s pissed off not so much at Threadwatch, as at the SEW crew for taking this, um, questionable action in the first place. It’s always hard to get emotional nuance from a post, but some of the language used sure suggests it to me.

Continuing the thought, what on Earth possessed whoever made that change? Did they think no-one would notice? Did they think no-one would care? Do they seriously think that denying Danny the oxygen of SEW exposure will even make a dent in the rise of SEL, and SMX, and any other damn thing he cares to lend his name to?

To make a hollow laughing sound.

The industry is bigger than any one man, or any one company to be sure, but that doesn’t mean that indivuduals don’t wield considerable influence, and frankly Danny is one of the few that just about everyone would agree is on that pretty exclusive list.

If it’s any consolation Elisabeth, I believe you. I can’t imagine that you would be dim enough to request the removal of Danny’s links from SEW mere days after the announcement of his going into competition with SEW / SES. I sincerely hope you take the TW thread, and use it to beat sense into some heads over there, try and induce some semblence of sense. They are doing NOBODY any favours with what’s going on, least of themselves…

From a marketing / PR viewpoint it’s very obviously a catastrophe waiting to happen - it makes Incisive look weak and scared. The implication is that they seriously consider a brand new forum which officially launched yesterday, and a putative associated conference series that isn’t due to even start for 6 months as sufficient threat to warrant taking down any links that might lead their precious user base there.

And yet… a nagging feeling persists. Surely, no-one could be so petty, so mean minded as to begrudge a former employee, who has done so much for SEW, and the industry in general, his own time in the sun? Danny has served his time in the trenches, and has acquired huge personal and professional recognition for that. He left when he did because he couldn’t come to mutually agreeable terms with the new owners of what is essentially his baby.

Odd that, I thought at the time. Whilst Danny = SEW, or Danny = SES certainly aren’t true, he was a BIG part of the success of both. This industry is still small enough to be quite personality driven. Then I found something on the Incisive site. A search for “incisive media” throws up a result with the following snippet :

Proposals for the acquisition of Incisive Media plc by Apax Summer - Scheme of Arrangement 25 September 2006…

Incisive are up for sale, and quite a way down the road to being sold, if I interpret this doc correctly. The PDF is 160-some pages, and I will freely admit to being less than fluent in this part of business mechanics, but if you were selling yourself, and your most recent, and possibly crowning, acquisition was in the process of having about 90% of the value sucked out of it, wouldn’t you react?

If I’ve misunderstood what’s happening with Incisive, I promise you, I’m positively AGOG to hear about it. Please, fill me in