When Seth Godin decided to cast the professional “search engine optimizer” in a less-than-flattering light, it reminded me a bit of the time I naively decided to critique the Open Directory Project. Silly me. I assumed the audience reading would be sympathetic to a conceptual argument drawn (at least to some extent) from the sociology literature on “degree of professionalism.”
My audience, however, was not sympathetic, because it wasn’t made up of members of the general public, it was made up largely of people who were volunteer editors for the Open Directory Project. Fortunately, at least one person, an ODP co-founder, has forgiven me for this harsh appraisal, probably because he recognizes that the argument was principled, not personal. I still think the analogy is fair: I don’t mind a volunteer firefighting force doing a great job in a small, remote town. If I had the time, I might even join one. But in a big city, I want real, paid, full-time firefighters. Too much is at stake.
Professionalism matters. With a professional code of ethics that is actually enforceable, there is recourse against poor practitioners. Engineers, lawyers, doctors, and psychologists can be decertified, sued, etc. if they don’t adhere to the standard.
Unlike Godin, I’ve done SEO work for money (though I now focus elsewhere). I’ve never discussed this with him, but I’ve often said that the side benefits of shifting my consulting focus to paid search took me off guard. It turned out to be a more predictable exercise. At the heart of marketplace (and journalistic) scepticism about SEO is the thorny question of deliverables. What are you doing for the client and how can you prove it? Today’s “white hat SEO’s” don’t admit that the salad days of SEO (in many SEO’s eyes) were those days when you could glide by on mystique and monthly “web ranking reports.” (And these pretty rankings on obscure search phrases make the client money how, exactly?)
The client requests we began receiving, after I ditched SEO a couple of years ago, started coming from companies who had something called “advertising budgets” – companies who therefore were more likely to have business models that could sustain a fairly-priced market for clicks. This does give us a taste of what search engine marketers might indeed aspire to someday – a future that Godin portrays as “a day when Tivo has Java and TCP/IP and there’s a million channels”? We might actually get this new world. If we keep at it, “companies with advertising budgets” might actually come to agencies that look more like us, the way they traditionally went to the big ad agencies.
Relying too much on free clicks is analogous to a low-dollar policy or protected trade: it props up the weak. Long term, it’s unhealthy. The companies that are heavily dependent on penny clicks or entirely free traffic as their only marketing method tend to be weaker companies. Changing my consulting focus to help stronger companies made my job a lot easier. It’s easier to help someone who already knows business than someone who expects miracles. So that’s the SEO business as I encountered it. Not only were a good 25% of the consultants in the field downright shady, casting the rest of us in a poor light, but 25% of the prospective clients were bad apples of one sort or another. It takes one to know one, or something like that.
(Boring, yawner of a caveat: if you can get some nice natural search traffic, it’s great and it can help your biz. Ho hum. That goes without saying. Now back to infuriating people.)
Like Godin, I want search engine marketers to stop being so thin-skinned and realize that maybe we aren’t solving all the world’s problems, and if we do our jobs too well without regard for the consequences of that work, we might actually be creating problems. Many SEO’s regularly and unapologetically bite the hand that feeds them — namely the up-to-now vastly generous hand of the search engines, which do cost money to run. A recent comment by an unnamed
poster on Search Engine Watch forum where this topic is being discussed went along the lines of “I don’t have a lot of sympathy for a billion dollar company, so I’ll worry about myself first. It’s not like they’re hurting.” Sure, Google’s doing well, but in spite of SEO, not because of it. Indeed, they’re arguably the first major algorithmic search engine (Teoma is another that springs to mind) that has not been bankrupted by search engine spammers who gamed the system without giving anything back to it. Remember AltaVista? They, along with Inktomi and others, fought a losing battle with search engine spam before moving to paid inclusion and/or selling out to Yahoo. Google may stay a step or two ahead of it, if it can get its next-generation personalization technology out soon.
Many in the SEO game would think nothing of criticizing an SUV driver or oil company for adding to air pollution. But heaven forbid that we take a hard look at whether our own activities might be adding to the level of pollution in search results.
Godin popularized and advocated something called permission marketing, which as we know was roundly abused by various large corporations who thought nothing of adding to the clutter in inboxes under the guise of permission. But Godin was at least frank enough to admit it when life in permissionland didn’t turn out perfectly. Indeed, he questioned whether permission marketers blew it.
The argument that there is such a thing as “benign” SEO is well taken. There are probably less honorable professions than helping someone improve their content or make better use of title tags, assuming for the moment that this is all a good SEO might do. (Most, of course, throw a little algorithm-gaming and low-level link-farming into their service. They, and their clients, just can’t resist.)
But can’t we ever just admit that in a perfect world – in a world that truly served searchers — things would be better off if we just left well enough alone?
Take the example of someone with a popular name. Getting your site to the top of the rankings, if your name is Brian Smith, might be worth something to you. The problem with that is, Google’s job is to reward the site that ought to be at the top, not YOU. Since hundreds of Brian Smiths might be worthy in different ways, in this case we’re at an impasse. We can’t even look at the results and say anything like “Google’s doing a good job,” or “a good SEO can easily tell you how these sites got their rankings, and should be able to do so next month.” On a search for “Brian Smith,” I see nothing but a confusing mess.
This Brian Smith ranks #2, whereas this Brian Smith is way down on page 7 or 8 of the listings. Who knows why. Do Kobe Bryant fans get the nod over political science doctoral candidates who claim a fondness for the writings of the Scottish Enlightenment and F.A. Hayek?
So why not do a little optimizing?
Maybe a better question would be: why not shell out ten cents for a sponsored listing referral if it means so much to you to break a virtual tie amongst thousands of almost-identical results? Going to so much effort in the pursuit of “free” traffic is like driving 100 miles to save a dollar on a tank of gas.
Basic search-engine-friendly design and content creation are never mistakes (yawn). But we didn’t really need to explain that to Seth Godin, surely. After all, doesn’t he blog, and don’t people link to his posts out of genuine interest?
When white-hat SEO’s are done feeling sorry for themselves that Seth Godin or reporters from the world’s major newspapers want to lump them in with the “black hats,” it might be time for some serious introspection. And the idea of a set of professional standards might serve to head off embarrassing muckraking by clueless 60 Minutes investigators, though they won’t fool a smart cat like Godin for a second.
Bruce Clay, a veteran of the SEO business who maintains a popular “search engine relationships chart” on his site, has been a strong advocate of the idea of an SEO code of ethics. A few SEO firms have already signed onto the fledgling initiative. It’s a start, but as I argued on Search Engine Watch forum, it could create as many problems as it solves. For starters, if I don’t do SEO, but rather other forms of online marketing, I don’t have the SEO seal on my site. At some point, some competitor is going to whisper to a prospect that I don’t believe in ethical standards because I lack the
official-looking seal. I suppose my response would have to be to go looking for a better-looking seal from an organization of longer standing.
Larger advertising and marketing agencies who now “also do SEO” would likely shun the seal, because it would marginalize them. And there is the “thou doth protest too much” aspect. The SEO Code of Ethics could wind up working like reverse psychology, much like “I am not a crook,” or “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.”
Let’s be clear. Building bridges, fixing broken bones, and representing accused criminals are genuine professions worthy of societal attention, worthy of serious, sustained, and deeply-studied standards. Worth of a Royal Commission, even. It’s not at all clear that gaming search results — or even “helping clients create content to achieve more organic search traffic,” or whatever — should be seen in the same light. As Clay and others are now arguing, any professional code of conduct should begin with the obvious: a pox on “scammers” – those who take money for services not rendered, fabricate fictitious stories about search engines, and clearly commit fraud in ways that would be punishable by law. Even here, the line is difficult to establish. One side says it performed a service, the other says it did not. A matter for small claims court, or some informal watchdog site run by a gaggle of random members of the industry? Both?
The goal of shunning scammers seems somehow too modest. Of course, any self-respecting SEO company already does that.
Even if a modest exercise in moral suasion towards better standards is pursued, it leaves at least three major (but not insurmountable) problems: first, the governance problem of how to ensure impartiality in accreditation and prevent corruption in enforcement; second, the lack of a commonly-agreed definition of search engine spam and the likelihood that many leading SEO practitioners will simply deny that their “link farm” is indeed a “link farm” (etc.); third, the question of what disincentives and penalties might be applied to those who don’t comply.
When MarketingSherpa released its first guide to SEO firms (now in a third edition), it boldly waded into an industry-cleansing role that others wouldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole. We got a taste of the potential for disagreement when one prominent firm was left out of the guide, which includes definitions and judgments about methodologies along with information about firms. (Tests of SEO effectiveness have now been de-emphasized in Sherpa’s guide, a good thing considering the fact that some included firms, including my fledgling company in 2001, were able to game them by pointing to great rankings achieved on behalf of clients — rankings which later turned out to be temporary.) The aggrieved firm decried the potential injury to its reputation and made noises about legal action.
Sometime soon, associations and standards codes for the SEO business will be created in spite of it all, and some will simply keep their distance from them, along the lines of the jealous relationships between practitioners and guardians of “mainstream” medicine and purveyors of alternative medicine. From here, it’s impossible to tell whether the current SEO discontents will be a mere footnote of marketing history, or whether stable search marketing governance bodies will emerge and provide fodder for a future generation’s M.A. theses.