Negative SEO blog : SEOassassin

It seems that someone out there is trying to push the SEO blogging community into writing “more interesting stuff”. To quote the perp directly…

Why I’m doing this?
1. Because I want
2. Because I can
3. Because lately the SEO industry is LAME and BORING - Want a proof of that?
- The SEO industry is just a bunch of self-proclaimed gurus making more money from their “guru” status than from SEO.
- The blogsphere (God I hate that word) is filled with countless “SEO blogs” syndicating what other “SEO blog” syndicated from another “SEO blog” that syndicated some bullshit guru.
- The most insightful and fun thing that has happened recently in the SEO industry (and anyways It was a looong time ago!) was the freaking search engine spammer who indexed billions of pages in Google thanks to a bug in Blogger, some DNS wildcards and a PHP content generator. Oh boy, people over webmasterwold and digitalpoint where going crazy about it!. So I’m about to bring back some fun to your lives…

I get where he’s coming from, I really do. One of the reasons I started a blog was because I’d like to try and inject some more useful stuff into the mix. I’ve done, and published, some genuinely original SEO research (not much, yet, but some). Whether you actually like it / agree with it / were bored by it is irrelevant - it’s real research, freely available. If any aspect of it troubles you, go do your own!

However, I don’t agree with him, not in all respects. There are several points I’d pick up here.

1) SEO isn’t hacking - Brian Turner has written a post about this over at SEOmoz. Since FuckingPirate seems to object quite strongly to “countless “SEO blogs” syndicating what other “SEO blog” syndicated from another “SEO blog” that syndicated some bullshit guru”, I won’t bore you with the details here - suffice it to say that Brian points out exploiting software security flaws isn’t SEO, it’s hacking (which is ACTUALLY illegal).

Whether you attempt to justify your actions as “linkbait”, or “cutting edge SEO”, it’s not. Choosing to put pharma links on a high-value domain (the whole Donald Trump thing), or hijack an SEO bloggers site through their blog software to add your own defacement, or hiding links to one of your own money sites - hacking is hacking (NB for the pedantic - I’m aware that technically the term is “cracking“), and in most jurisdictions is taken sufficiently seriously for legislation to have been created to deal with it specifically, often with fairly severe penalties attached.

Some people may not like some SEO tactics (guestbook / comment spamming, social media bots etc), but when you can actually go to jail for it, it’s not SEO. Robbing a bank in a T-shirt with your URL on it, so it’d be picked up and reported on “Crimewatch” isn’t SEO - it’s robbing a bank. The analogy is exact, in my opinion.

2) “Because lately the SEO industry is LAME and BORING”. You’re shitting me. From my perspective, it’s getting fun right now. Yahoo are trying to reorganise fast enough to stop all their talent from jumping ship, Google are going back to “What term would Sir like to rank for today?” with the keywords-in-the-URL algo they are running at the moment, and MSN are almost starting to look like they might be worth bothering with this year.

Danny quit SEW / SES amid much rumour and speculation to start up Search Engine Land and Search Marketing Expo. NickW has just quit at Performancing. Neil Gaimans’ son has gone to work at Google. DMOZ (ah, DMOZ) has been up and down like a whore’s drawers. AOL made an offer for TradeDoubler. There’s no shortage of stuff going on, really, there isn’t.

3) Most serious SEOs don’t blog a lot because they are busy. There are a lot of very good SEOs, even ones WITH blogs, who don’t post much because they spend much of their time doing actual SEO (sort of a “those who can, do” thing, except here the second line is “those who can’t, blog”). It’s not universally true, of course. There are excellent SEOs who blog a fair bit, and bad ones who blog only occasionally.

Then there’s another subset who use their blog as a primary driver for other things (SEOmoz and SEOBlackHat spring to mind here), so they don’t fit the above pattern at all, and I personally would characterise neither of those as “LAME” or “BORING”.

4) There’s a limit to what most of us will say publically these days. Hands up all those who remember the “-link:” operator? And the “_link:” operator? Yup, thought so. For those of you who have no clue what I’m going on about, way back in the dim and distant past, Google used to not only return a more-or-less COMPLETE list of backlinks for link: queries, but if you used the “SEO secret club” -link:www.domain.com version, the links were sorted into PR order, and PR even mattered back then.

You can imagine how useful we all found that particular little gem, especially when doing competitive research. Then someone talked about it, in public, over at Webmasterworld. Something like 48 hours later, it was gone. Broken. Kaput. No more. It had ceased to be.

Fortunately, for those of us with an enquiring turn of mind, we discovered that the function hadn’t been killed off totally, but remapped to a different special search operator, “_link:”, so the happy days returned, and we went back to ripping lists of each others top links.

Then someone talked about it over at Webmasterworld again, in public. This time it took but 12 hours for the function to be killed off, this time for good, I think. I haven’t either seen or heard of it’s return, and I don’t think todays Google would consider resurrecting it.

That unhappy episode wasn’t the only example of the SEO industry being slapped for talking about things in public, but it was one of the first, and I think it was a rude awakening for many SEOs, on a par with the whole “blueline.gif” debacle. I’ve found it VERY noticeable that certain people just don’t talk about anything of much real substance in public since then. In private, it’s a different story, but you just DON’T put anything of any real value where a search engine rep could see these days.

I have found or been told of two neat methods for getting potentially high-value links from quality, high trust domains recently. One I’ve shared with a very small group of friends, the other is staying mine. It’s a tad selfish, but if I start talking about these methods, it would be childs play for the SE’s to shut them down. If I keep quiet about them, both myself and my clients can benefit from them (and some of them already are).

If you want to see the hot’n'heavy action going on in the SEO world these days, you need to find a small, private group and get involved. You need to give some, and not talk too much about what you hear. And you also need to not be a cock, and cause other people arseache, because you still find software exploits funny. People who work for themselves can ill afford time off from productive work, whether for themselves or clients, because one of their primary sites has been illegally defaced.