There was a typical Slashdot article today about how Bing lost the search engine “war” because they didn’t focus on the long tail.  Since nobody should take things on Slashdot too seriously, I rarely do more than scan the comments.  This article contained a comment from someone about how “Bing sucks” because his website which is the absolute authority on a very obscure keyword is #5 on Bing.  Some professional SEO replied to that comment and called the guy a moron.  I have to agree.

Maybe the guy should call up Microsoft and tell them that searching for some obscure keyword doesn’t bring up the most authoritative result.  I’m joking of course to make a point.  Should the search algorithms for Bing be changed because some moron’s site doesn’t show up where he thinks it should?  By his own admission the keyword is obscure, so what would be the point?  I don’t know!  I witness the same thing with Google and Yahoo as well.

Is it at all surprising that SEO has a bad reputation?

I don’t think it is a mystery at all.  SEO has a bad reputation because the public has little or no understanding of how search engines work.  Is there fraud being committed by less-than-honest SEO companies?  Of course!  I don’t necessarily think this is the problem.  The vast majority of customers we get at ELW have problems with their websites that are so easy to fix that people don’t think we deserve our pay.  The bigger problem with SEO reputation is that people think there is magic involved when there really isn’t.  Should the SEO community start bullshitting our customers more?  Content, metacontent, and links.  Everything else is blackhat.

There really isn’t any value left in being an expert in search engines.  Having a graduate degree in computer science isn’t very useful if all your customers have the same problems:  No titles, text, or links.  There really isn’t much that can be said about the situation.  The reason Amazon.com shows up #1 in a search for “online bookstore” isn’t because they know some secret about SEO that you don’t.  I don’t know what else to say.

So, what can we do to give SEO a better reputation?  Who says we even want SEO to have a good reputation?  Maybe the opposite is true!  SEO should embrace the reputation it has, because we all know some of it is a load of crap.  Be honest, how many of you have optimized sites for keywords that you know nobody will ever type into a search engine?  How many of you have sat back and done nothing, while your client watched in amazement as their site’s ranking improved for no reason?  These examples are true stories I have heard from clients!

The SEO bubble will disappear long before the reputation is repaired.  Search engines are at most a few years away from completely negating all reasonable attempts to influence rankings.  I think they are already there, but many SEOs benefit from the illusion that it is still 1999 technology at work.

I say we try to keep the bad reputation, even if it isn’t deserved.  There are still plenty of sites out there with no text that will keep paying the bills.