Warren Pattison: Search Engine Marketing & Internet Strategist

SEO tactics seem to be taking a beating recently.

AMEX recently announced that SEO is useless in an Entrepreneur article.

Don’t waste money on so-called Search Engine Optimization (S.E.O.) specialists. Search engines are very quick to penalize sites that try to trick their filtering techniques, and once your site has been put on Google’s blacklist, it will take forever to get off.

I would imagine there are many online-managers  who would agree with AMEX, albeit with great regret.

I don’t believe proper SEO is a disservice. However, I do believe the SEO industry is in a current revaluation period as a lot of the so called services provided by agencies are becoming more widely scrutinized by search engine algorithms.

A recent question posted by Search Marketing top-dog, Kevin Lee of Did-it that more or less tackles the valuation topic.

The question as posted on LinkedIn.com

Which SEO tactics are responsible for the greatest degradation in the quality of Google (et-al) SERPs?

Of the following, which do you think pollutes the quality of the SERPs more:
1) cloaking
2) blog comment spam (automated or manual)
3) discussion forum spam (automated or manual)
4) paid links
5) press release spam
6) link swaps
7) link farms
fake blogs
9) other
Clarification added 5 days ago:

I did say degradation and pollute, meaning the techniques and tactics that make results less relevant. Those will be the tactics the search engines crack down on sooner, if they can.
Clarification added 5 days ago:

The same tactics can often be used to make results more relevant, but I’m getting at the pollution factor.

I responded

Dare I answer SEO Agencies/ consultants/ in-house associates who use any of the above? However, I do think you need to further explain paid links. Paid links done as advertising that balances good customer experience and counts toward SEO is good. Paid link strategies that serve no real advertising purpose and used primarily to inflate SEO rankings are of course bad and should be penalized.

When I see link farm’s masquerading as directory results in site explorer, it doesn’t surprise me to see a site overly reliant on questionable directories “sand-boxed/ penalized/ unlisted” in Google.

Essentially gambling with your website, albeit your own or your clients is not good practice. Anything that is easy that requires little strategy or effort will eventually collapse. “House of card” tactics are weak and are never a good idea for building a long term ROI strategy.

SEO’s using “get ranked now - get sandboxed later” that then blame Google for their customer’s falling seo-rankings need to change or just go away altogether. Even AMEX has claimed that SEO is pointless…kind of similar to the Borg’s “resistance is futile” line in Star Trek 2.0+.

Google is not the Borg, but they are running a business that is largely dependent on advertisers paying for user clicks. User clicks are generated through retaining and acquiring new users. Google has to return relevant results to user search requests to retain its user base. When SERPS become less relevant due to the tactics listed above, users attrite and Google loses revenue, advertisers, market share and market cap.

Sound familiar?

You don’t have to look far to see a correlation of revenue and relevancy — look at comscore data and relevancy of results for search engines competing against Google.
Clarification added 10 hours ago:

Balanced Paid Links:
I want to prevent anyone replying who may think I support paid links that increase SEO rankings.

I only support paid links that are done properly that serve the advertiser and the user being advertised to. I want to clarify that SEO ranking improvement should only be tertiary to the primary purpose of a good advertising experience for the user.

Please let me know what you think