SEO is Amway
You’ve heard of Amway, right? UK people may not have, but US people probably have. It’s a business that sells cosmetics, dietary supplements and health products through multi-level marketing. Amway sells clients shampoo and soap, but it also sells them the opportunity to be rich. Yes, they sell “biz opps” to use the lingo. The thing about Amway that’s so scummy is that they tell people that they can become really rich by doing this-and-that, and then keep stringing them along. The payout will be Real Soon Now. Amway, or so the critics of it say, doesn’t make most of it’s money from selling cosmetics and vitamins - they make money selling sales seminars to their multi-level marketing sales representatives. The whole thing feels very sleazy, even though it’s difficult to say why. I’ve heard stories of people who have turned Amway into their religion: like with many superstitions, they actually ignore the misses and overemphasise the gains. They don’t do the accounting properly, basically: they sit down and calculate all the income that they’ve brought in, but they don’t deduct the cost of the sale, or the cost of the product. There are people who are losing money or barely breaking even on Amway-like marketing scams, but their brain tells them they are making money. All of this is doused in religion: Amway and businesses like it use religion, especially evangelical religion, to get people to turn their brains off. It’s bad enough that people turn their brain off in church, but it’s really bad when turning their brain off in church leads to them making dumb decisions in business.
Damn the overzealous libel laws of the United Kingdom: Amway is a cynical, money-grubbing scam perpetuated by dumbness and greed. The only people who will tell you otherwise are people in the Amway cult.
The same is true for Search Engine Optimization or SEO. It’s a strange and cynical money-grubbing cult too. “SEO” is the normal-facing side of this cult. SEO practitioners are the same people who a few years ago were telling everyone that the way to Internet fame and fortune was to post links on spammy ‘Free For All Link Pages’, to make sure your site is included in ten trazillion search engines using their hyper-mega-submit-a-thon tool, and using goofy ‘click trading’ sites where you spend all day clicking through moronic websites and in return some other idiot clicks through your website and gawks at it for fifteen seconds so he can get a credit. Before selling SEO, the SEO consultant was selling webinars and “biz opps”. What is a “biz opp”? A business opportunity. You know, because the business opportunity is so good that it’ll make you millions, but it’s not quite good enough for the person selling the business opportunity to make money from.
Derek Powazek has a fantastic post up. No, scratch that, he has two fantastic posts: Spammers, Evildoers, and Opportunists and SEO FAQ. Jeremy Keith has a followup with this brilliant line: Ask yourself this: do you think Wikipedia ever hired an SEO consultant in order to get its high rankings on Google?
This is one thing we’ve had to deal with at Citizendium. There’s lots of moaning in the forums every so often about how high Wikipedia gets on Google, followed by suggestions that we need to spend more time on SEO. And I always end up responding that an hour spent on SEO is worth so much less than an hour spent on producing good writing. Writing a good article or helping to improve an article makes all the difference. We could spend a day working on SEO. But that’s a day we could spend writing a great article. I don’t particularly care if Google ranks the article sixth or tenth. The reason Wikipedia is so high on Google is because they’ve got 2 million plus articles (in English), that are linked together sanely and are updated frequently. And that, at least for some things, Wikipedia has earned the trust of the web community, who collectively decide to link to Wikipedia articles.
Getting ranked highly on Google should just be a neat side-effect of producing great material. I’m sure Google are working hard to actually make SEO less effective. There’s lots of facets to this: personal search. I see so many spammy SEO type sites when I search for things. But I can click the little ‘X’ button next to the result. I’m guessing the smart folks at Google are going to start aggregating that and working out what it is about certain pages that makes people click the little ‘X’ button. There’s also the slowly emerging Semantic Web stuff. Section 3 of OWL Semantics and Abstract Syntax should be enough to make the average SEO consultants head go boom (I was going to make a joke about ordered pairs and Wiener-Kuratowski devices, but I couldn’t quite fit it in).
In an ideal world, SEO just disappears. You can help: stop paying for SEO. Instead of worrying about SEO, worry about how to become a better writer or photographer or programmer or whatever it is that you do. Go and read Orwell or Plato or Shakespeare. Polish your craft every day. Read Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years and HOWTO: 149 Surprising Ways to Turbocharge Your Blog With Credibility!
