Shock and Awe Marketing Tutorials in Plain English

Ever wonder what Tim O'keef of Spider Jucie thinks about me, Black at SEO, SEO and well, technolgy in general?  This is... besides the comment where David Gibbons said  my advice would "Google would break" my favorite comment ever from one my favorite other REnet bloggers and literally the first REnet blogger I ever read (bet you didn't know that, Tim, did ya?).

In response to: Is Mary McKnight a Black Hat SEO? Comment from: : Tim O'Keef

Mary-

One thing  I love about SEO & the net is that we the SEO'ers have created our own labels. Of course Google has helped us all to create a vocabulary that serves their purpose. The reality is that white, grey , black are made up words that in the end are meaningless. Create enough sites of white, grey and black matter and one realizes that these three words are not very useful.

I think most start off delusional in their first SEO efforts. They want to do Google right, as if that would make Google like them. The only thing Google is motivated the most by is in that right column of the results. That's what G likes.  Other than that, one's "white hat" effort might dissapoint. The best comparision that I can think of is the green horned salesperson's notion of "professionalism". Traditionally short hair, a suit, Proper English. etc. Naive.

Try a one size fits all sales approach and you will find a broke salesperson.You fit to the prospect and give the prospect what she wants. The sales vet also know that the prospect rarely reveals what they truely want. A conversation with a Jersey guy is much diferrent than with the Bible belt woman. I have been known to drop a few f bombs with a crass but loveable Jersey clients. This would certainly repel others in say the Bible belt. I learned this early in my sales career when I showed up  in a suit on a Sunday at a clients house right after Church. He was ready to go out yachtingA. My professionalism was killling his vibe! (Hey its LA). He told me to loosen up. My "professionalism" was hurting my rapport with my client.

I believe the minute one embarks into SEO, one embarks on a mission of manipulation. Take that as a good or bad word. Totally up to the reader. Use influence if you like. Whatever, as it doesn't matter as the idea of a certain ethic or morality I think is ridiculous. G is a machine.Metaphorically and Literally And as such will use its minions and math to achieve its goals. Which as a public corporation is by dictate-profit.

As such when was the last time that Google paid you to list your content? That doesn't seem to be talked about much but it does work both ways. And yes you need them more than they need you. But there is a reciprocal relationship nonetheless.

 Thus, a more honest approach to SEO is that this notion of colors to match ethical quality can be useful in some cases but not very useful in most. The very act of SEO itself is manipulative. You slap an H tag only because someone told you (or for heavens sake you tested it yourself) that it works. Most people do not even know what an h tag is until they looked intogetting more traffic.  So we do SEO to get Google to like our page. Otherwise why bother? And since you are "optimizing" to get G to like your page, you are being persuasive/manipulative.

So I think the better question for a self SEO'er or a vendor is will the work hurt the site? Will it hurt from an engine perspective &/or human view? Knowing that in fact it might. And the funny thing is you will never know for sure from the engines.

People report in forums that they got penalized by Google. Hmmmm. And that was where? At the Google penalty page of evil page dooers?  No, for whatever twist of fate the big G  changes, not penalizes 99.8% of the time. And unfortunately, often a big drop from a top position is just a damned hiccup in the algo.

A line I love in SEO going way back to the pre-Alta Vista days, "one mans spam is another mans marketing". Well, one mans penalty is another mans fortune (high position). Google just shifts and thru its brilliant math tries to figure out what page should be tops. I have seen too many black hat sites rank  at the top. And I have seen too many well intentioned white hat sites at the bottom. And I can make a valid argument in some if not many cases that they were not really white or were not really black. Because G itself has not defined what that means. Their TOS is a fuzzy declaration that "its our toy and we will play the game as we chose." As they should.

As a for instance. you have an all flash site. What do you do? Some may say, "Oh Google indexes flash now." Sure ok. Let me know how that works for ya.

 Ok so do you throw some noscript in there? Frame tricks? Eee gads, cloak? Because if you do not do something then we know how the story ends. The real answer is abandon the flash and deal with it. But what if say you have to SEO the flash.

 Ya gotta go with the some work around that you would not be willing to do in most cases because they are thought to be on the edge of black.  But as in the famous BMW case ( I believe it was BMW) G "dropped them like its hot" for cloaking thier flash site. Was that merely a proganda move by the spin machine at G, a penalty, or just an algo shift? I will chose to believe the the first one.  

So to wrap up this somewhat comspiratorial diatribe, I think it much more useful to respect your site and brand and be careful. BMW would have been smarter to stay away from the flash.  But do not be so careful you fool yourself into thinking you are doing anything useful. Do the basics of SEO which Mary has mentioned a jillion times. And get lotsa lotsa links. From a variety of sources. No long list of big(whatever that means in todays environment)  links, then no Short Tail success.

Tim O'Keefe
Spider Juice Technologies
http://www.houseblogger.com

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