Does SEO need to evolve

I have read a number of posts recently which unfortuntely in my opinion do not portray Search Marketing in particularly SEO in a particularly good light.

In particular there has been a long running thread over at Joost De Valk’s blog regarding DMoz, where a number of quite respected Search Marketeers and Dmoz editors have been involved in a sometimes quite heated debate. This followed of the initial post by Jeremy Shoemaker (aka Shoemoney)’s post regarding DMoz.

Whilst this is probably not the biggest, and probably not the ugliest of such examples (lets use the recent Scoble example or Dave Pasternack (Rocket Science) as others), however it does show what a powerful medium we are working with and unfortunately one which can have knock on effects.

With traditional advertising, spats were generally kept private, with maybe a few industry commentators privy to them, perhaps leaked out ocasionally to the press (if the company was big enough), however the Internet is different.

Having such a ‘discussion’ means hundreds if not thousands if not hundreds of thousands of people can read about your discussion, which in itself is not a bad thing (lets face it as SEO’s most of the discussion forums I would suggest are optimised - and thus probably feature more highly). However using the above example (Dmoz) as an example, somebody coming across such a post is hardly likely to look favourably on Dmoz, and may alter their perceptions of SEO as a result. Perhaps that example may be slightly far fetched, however the issue still remains that many of these conversations should be kept professional at all times, and in line with other more established professions.

People like Danny Sullivan and others have always worked hard to establish SEO and Online Marketing as a respected profession (rather than the Dark Art it is/was referred to as), however surely we have to act professional at all times, in order to earn respect, particularly from other sectors, both within advertising/marketing and externally.
At the end of the day, just because we have the power to do something, doesn’t mean that we should. Just because we can linkbait, doesn’t mean the tactic should be used willy nilly. Just because we have a strong opinion, doesnt mean that opinion should be shouted about on a public forum. In any other profession such activity (dare I say) would be frowned upon, and whilst we are different from other professions, at the end of the day, maybe we can still learn something from them.

7 comments August 30th, 2007