You can just sit there and wait and you can be sure that every now and then somebody will come along who has the urge to bash the whole SEO industry.
First Mr. Pasternack who started a series of attacks against the industry last November to continue this year to go into round two and three.
Shortly after Pasternack did Mr. Calacanis show up and made his comments on how messed up SEO is and how useless. He became a bit more careful with his statements about SEO after he accepted the SEO challenge by Neil Patel who increased Mr.Calacanis blog traffic over 20% after only a few of his suggestions were implemented by Calacanis’ web developers.
Now did another prominent blogger take his bite out of the SEO industry, Mr. Robert Scoble from Scobleizer.com. He created a video series where he explained how Google is going to be crushed by Mahalo, Facebook and other social media projects and how the days for SEOs are numbered (once more). Rand Fishkin from SEOMoz (link fixed) took the time to check the statements made by Mr. Scoble and respond to them, one after another. See Rands post here. It also contains the references to the Scoble videos to which I will not link for SEO reasons. 🙂
I did not see Rands post in the track-backs of Scobles post where he refers to his three videos. I hope they will show up, because it would be a very bad, if a social media A-Lister like Mr. Scoble would demonstrate that he just talks the talk, but not means what he says. Keyword: “Conversation” with people. “Conversation” does not imply consensus Robert. Sorry, but those are the rules.
The only good and at the same time bad thing about all those attacks is the fact that they are always without any legs to walk on. There are undoubtedly issues in the SEO industry that are not resolved yet and not very pretty, but those attacks are never addressing those real issues. The comments made are always badly wrong and show how little the people who try to bash it actually know about SEO and search engines in general.
Who is coming next?
I do not know, but I am sure that there will be a next person and from what it seems will that person probably be as constructive and correct in his criticism like the previous three experts.
Carsten Cumbrowski
SEO Resources at Cumbrowski.com
