No naming names, as I don’t meant this to be anything personal – as the same theme has popped up in a number of places – just making some observations 🙂 See if you agree…. Divided We Fall The SEO world has never been united. There are no industry standards and qualifications like you’d find in the professions, such as being a doctor, or lawyer or a builder. If you say you’re an SEO, then you’re an SEO. Part of the reason for the lack of industry standard is that the search engines never came to the party. Sure, they talked at conferences, and still do. They offered webmasters helpful guidelines. They participated in search engine discussion forums. But this was mainly to do with risk management. Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer. In all these years, you won’t find one example of a representative.
From a major search engine saying
Hey, let’s all get together and form an SEO standard. It will help promote and legitimize the industry!”. No, it has always been decrees from on high. “Don’t do this, don’t do that, and here are some things we’d like you to do”. Webmasters don’t get a say in it. They either do what the search engines say, or they go against them, but make no mistake, there was never any UAE Phone Number List partnership, and the search engines didn’t seek one. This didn’t stop some SEOs seeing it as a form of quasi-partnership, however. Hey Partner Some SEOs chose to align themselves with search engines and do their bidding. If the search engine reps said “do this”, they did it. If the search engines said “don’t do this”, they’d wrap themselves up in convoluted rhetorical knots pretending not to.
This still goes on, of course
In the early 2000’s, it turned, curiously, into a question of morality. There was “Ethical SEO”, although quite what it had to do with ethics remains unclear. Really, it was another way of saying “someone who follows the SEO guidelines”, presuming that whatever the search engines decree must be ethical, objectively good and have nothing to do self-interest. It’s strange how people kid themselves, sometimes. What was even funnier was the search engine guidelines were kept deliberately vague and open to interpretation, which, of course, led to a lot of BRLists heated debate. Some people were “good” and some people were “bad”, even though the distinction was never clear. Sometimes it came down to where on the page someone puts a link. Or how many times someone.
