Internet Marketing
June 6, 2008
SMX Advanced Goes To The Dark Side
Mere seconds after the much anticipated Give It Up session ended on Wednesday, Virginia and I jetted to the airport to meet up with the rest of the BC team. We gathered in the Alaskan Lounge at Sea-Tac to wait out our one hour flight delay while unwinding and reflecting over cheeseburgers and beer (Bruce opted for the stew).
It may sound odd, but even though my office is literally next door to Bruce, I don’t get to have nearly as many face to face chats with him as I’d like. His travel schedule is among one of the most hectic I’ve seen and it’s rare that I see him more than a few days out of the month. But the conversation I had with him Wednesday night in the middle of a busy airport restaurant bar is something that will stay with me. It reminded me why I work at Bruce Clay.
Coming back from this show feels different than the others. Normally when I return home from SEO conferencing, I’m left feeling a bit wiser and a bit more assured of the industry I work in. This time I came home wiser, but also a bit confused.
Don’t get me wrong. There were a lot of great moments at SMX Advanced. The speakers, the venue, the friends, the networking, the desserts – they were all top notch. SMX Advanced is still one of the best shows around. The highlight for me was really the Developer Track. It was something I absolutely fell in love with. It was an entire track on how to build great, accessible Web sites. Those sessions gave attendees valuable insight that they could take back and use to make improvements to their site TODAY. It wasn’t about developing workarounds or exploiting algorithmic loopholes, it was about doing things right and avoiding problems from the start. That’s something every search marketer can get behind.
But at the same time, I couldn’t help but notice that this year’s Advanced show seemed to lean a whole lot more to the grey/black hat side of things. I couldn’t help but wonder: When did advanced search engine optimization get confused with being a black hat?
Here are some of the “advanced search engine optimization” techniques I picked up during my time in Seattle.
- There are lots of old sites lying around on the Interwebz with great link juice. Buy them and capitalize on that. But do it carefully or Google will pick up on it and reset the score.
- Conditional redirects are teh awesome.
- Search marketers don’t need ethics. They’re marketers. Check the ethics at the door.
- You can never have too many .edu links.
- I need to grow some balls, stop fearing Matt Cutts and start buying links.
And though I can’t even mention the Give It Up panel for another 28 days, look at the folks who spoke. No judgments; I’m just saying that it looked very different from last year’s panel. You can’t tell me the SMX folks weren’t gunning for a certain shade of information there. When the embargo lifts for that session, SMX is going to get a lot of press.
But did attendees get what they were expecting from the show? I know I was certainly surprised by a lot of the content. I wonder who else was.
Microsoft’s Nathan Buggia seemed to be. During the Search Engine Friendly Development panel he specifically noted that he had to revamp his presentation after hearing what people were talking about the day before. He also wanted to stress that advanced search engine optimization was about analytics, not being a black hat. I was right there with him.
Where were the white hat advanced search engine optimization techniques in Seattle? Why was most of the material presented pushing grey and black hat? Are we supposed to believe that that’s what advanced SEO is – spamming? If so, that’s a bunch of crap. Or maybe SMX just thinks there’s no one qualified to teach advanced white hat techniques. I guess those folks were out drinking with all the ladies NOT on the Give It Up panel.
I don’t understand.
To me, advanced search engine optimization is about analytics, it’s about siloing, it’s about perfecting your site architecture so that you don’t have to even worry about tactics like cloaking for conditional redirects. There have to be other white hat advanced search engine optimization techniques out there. Why weren’t they covered?
The Developer Track started to take a really advanced approach but there just weren’t enough sessions. But that’s the stance I would have expected from a conference billed as advanced and being led by Danny Sullivan. If I want to learn about black hat SEO, I’ll go check out a forum or certain blogs. I don’t need to have that taught to me by folks representing the man who’s arguable the leader of this industry.
Sitting at the show made me realize why I like working at Bruce Clay, Inc. We don’t go down that road with our clients. Some of the black hat techniques taught at the show may get you results, but you’re also putting your clients in serious harm. We don’t believe in that. I simply don’t have any tolerance for folks publicly endorsing black hat SEO. And it’s not because I think “Google is good” or that the idea of people manipulating their algorithm or aggressively hunting for loopholes bothers me. Black hats get under my skin because (a) they’re not SEOs (b) they very often provide a bad experience for users and (c) they make the rest of us look bad by association. Why do I need to support that?
What was your take on the show? Did you get the information you were looking for?
Related posts:
“Black hats get under my skin because (a) they’re not SEOs (b) they very often provide a bad experience for users and (c) they make the rest of us look bad by association.”
I was surprised at how much there was – some of the extreme being the praising of the completely fabricated 13-year-old’s story as brilliant marketing and statements like, “We’re not here to be moral; we’re marketers” and “You’re not going to get creamed, the site will, so don’t worry about it.”
Since when is telling a bald-faced lie brilliant marketing? And for morality I think, do you have no morality? None? You’ll just help child pornographers, arms dealers, tobacco companies, etc.? If the answer to that is “No”, then there clearly is a line that even the blackest hat will draw. So it’s just a matter of where the line is drawn, and how the line is decided.
“There’s a market for it. Somebody will fill that void. Why not SMX?”
By that logic, it’s fine to have a session on how to
- carry out an email “pump and dump” stock scheme
- develop a Nigerian email scam
- get past the spam filters and send at a million emails
The fact that there is a demand, does not mean it should be presented at a conference purporting to represent a professional industry.
I think the question then becomes strategic. Where does the industry want to be in five years? Then make decisions according to that goal and plan. It cannot be based on “anything goes” or “whatever we can get away with”. I think that just deepens the perception of “they’re just fringe geeks with their own rules and no morals” — which to most people with money means “jerky little twerps” — which means the companies with big money are going to go to Ogilvy for their web stuff. (Simplistic on Ogilvy, but I think you know what I mean.)
I am sure that most of us want to build solid, professional, long-term success for our clients, and for ourselves. I don’t think that comes from pump and dump stock schemes — or by making making completely fabricated news articles.
@doug heil I forget how much fun you are sometimes, you really should come to a conference and speak now and then. Or at least come to a networking event have a beer or two and chat.
If you don’t like the direction the industry is moving in best place to change it is there at the shows not comments on a forum or blog. Really I’d love to see you come.
Great post. Have been following the comments and had to chime in. This was my 1st SMX event, yet I’ve been in the industry since doorway pages and hidden text in 1999. (Confession: Been there, done that.)
I think Danny did a great job in putting on the show and responding above. Fortunately, he didn’t serve as a dictator and control the speakers’ content. From this conversation, I imagine he’ll implement some guidelines, however, for future events. So the discussion is valuable.
As Michael mentioned, where does the industry want to be in 5 years? Let’s pull together and work toward that. If there continues to be backbiting and so much Black Hat, then we give fuel to our SEO Trademark villain who thinks trademarking the term will set us straight and provide standards, his.
Give it Up? I actually enjoyed it, however. Yes, some of the content was like the steroid approach mentioned above. But, some VALUABLE strategies and insights were delivered as well. It was like an R-rated movie. The R delivered some approaches I don’t want in my SEO life. Most of the people I spoke with after SMX said the 30-day silence period didn’t matter to them. They weren’t planning on going down that road. There was some good PG stuff and a little PG-13.
In my rating system, PG is true Optimization. PG-13 is Gray. R is Manipulation. If it’s not squeaky clean, we loose reputation.
@Doug
“That’s all nice, but blackhat is NOT SEO. Never has been and never will be.”
SRSLY? That’s just inaccurate. Blackhat SEO might not be ethical SEO, *YOU* might not label it SEO, it might not be good SEO, but if SEO is a collection of techniques, skills, strategies, aimed at making sites more visible and rank higher in search engines for certain target phrases, then black hat SEO *IS* a form of SEO. Might not be a good one, but it IS one.
@Michael Linehan
If it was an email marketing conference, I would suspect sessions like that would get a very high draw as well. And at the one small email conf. I went to, that’s pretty much the stuff the more wiley vets were interested in hearing and sharing. Plus, I equate search engine *spam* more to splogs, doorways, and scrapes, *maybe* even crappy thin sites and parked domains. Ya know, stuff a user doesn’t want but it’s delivered to them anyways. Not quite the same as site aquisition, siloing, sculpting, strategic redirecting, etc. Those techniques can and should be used in accordance to guidelines and for the benefit of the user AND the site owner.
Listen, I am not waving the flag for blackhat techniques. I don’t even practice them. I’m just saying ethics and tactics are two different things. IMO it’s imperitive to have a wholistic knowlege base of how to rank sites. That means knowing the good, and the bad, and the ugly. Doesn’t mean you shoud DO the bad and the ugly. Just means you should UNDERSTAND it inside and out.
Head to head, somebody who understands both sides, and everything in between, stands a better chance against someone who understands one version of it. Plus, if you wanna be holier than thou, then how can you even REPORT sites if you don’t fully understand the strategies they are using that got them ahead of you?
It’s like an MMA fighter vs. a boxer. Uness they match-up in a pure boxing match, the MMA fighter will usually kick a boxer’s ass. Because they are more well rounded. People who refuse to fully embrace the rest of the game are left only with their hands and no legs so to speak. Uhm, that analogy was a stretch but you catch my drift.
On the flip side, I do understand why Danny in particular would want to limit the shadier stuff. I agree that’s best for the industry’s reputation. But if we are teaching morals, call it as it is. It should have a disclaimer that the techniques shown here only inlcude tactics approved by these [x] individuals. Anything against SE guidelines should ALSO be disclosed as such.
In the real world, as long as there are loopholes, and as long as there are people raking in dough from exposing them… knowing only half of the equation puts you at a competitive disadvantage. Those willing to push the limits will continue to kick ass a lot of your verticals.
It’s BS, yeah, but it is the reality of what’s out there. And we all gotta deal with it.
So to sum it up, let’s just separate church and state already. This is getting old (tho it doesn’t really ever get boring IMO)
Doug isn’t one of the “ole boys club” so the only way he sees a show is if he’s willing to shell out the rediculous $s they charge to listen to industry brown nosers.
Funny thing is that 90% of what is called advanced SEO here is just uninspired web promotion. Buying domains isn’t optimizing a thing but the clients wallet! I wish we could just all agree the off page stuff is just so much “SEO BS” it’s not SEO, it’s web promotion!
“We all know that people are the same where ever you go. There is good and bad in everyone. We must learn to live, learn to give eachother what we need to survive together alive.
Ebony and Ivory live together in perfect harmony…”
This is one of the best threads EVER! Thanks Lisa for sharing your thoughts. Special thanks to Danny for being the best possible “Godfather” of the industry. I am proud to be a part of it, even with all the controversy.
One other thing I want to comment on… Shari Thurow’s SEO strategies are not dribble. She is a pioneer in the perfectionistic approach to SEO. Her approach is as advanced and challenging as any technically-driven work-around or black hat technique.
I love you all!
–Derrick
Hi Rob (evilgreenmonkey)
You wrote:
“Yay, Doug! I missed your rantings and conspiracy theories, where have you been all this time?”
Well, been busy with clients and at one of the few places that does not teach spam. Thanks for asking.
Rob wrote:
“Are Matt Cutts and Danny still giving black hat advice? Don’t worry, we’ll get them eventually.”
Danny does by virtue of being associated with spammers for money and that feeling of being loved by everyone I guess. Matt? I didn’t know he did. Must have been before my time… 1996.
“That tin foil hat looks good on you man, keeps those evil frequencies out.”
I have a daughter your age Rob. I don’t whether to sit you in the corner or spank you. Maybe when you grow up you will realize that praising the fake content deception that lyndon pulled was in fact very unethical.
Michael (Graywolf) Thanks, but no thanks. Terry wrote that I’m not in “your” good o’l boys club, and I am not. Besides, the conference would not be able to get me to show up even if they paid me to sit in the audience. Just like at the old builder shows I attended, spammers were thrown out.
Someone asked what the industry wants to look like in 5 years. I’m thinking some form of governing body will reign supreme over the industry by that time since the industry doesn’t seem to have any morals or ethics to speak of, and certainly cannot police itself as this thread clearly shows. It was also very evident with the fake content fiasco of which many in this thread and at spin praised lyndon for being unethical in every way possible.
Nice job guys and gals.
Oh, I forgot:
Derrick; Kudos to you for standing beside Shari and speaking the truth. You work for Microsoft right? what do they think about conferences teaching spam? I believe they do their very best to fight spam because we all know spam is the one thing that can ruin a search engine for it’s users real quick. Since that’s the case, it’s hard to believe that any major search engine loves spam being taught at these conferences as it seems it goes against many things you all try to do, right?
The idea that people should know the blackhat tactics is just crazy stuff. Do people who make up other industries need to know how to cheat their industry in order to do well in them? I don’t think so.
Hey evilgreenmonkey, I have absolutely zero interest in antagonizing you but I was just reading your last response here and thinking back about your very enjoyable give it up presentation and having trouble reconciling the two.
Too Black vs. Too White. Wow – there’s a new arguement:) You folks keep discussing this, and I’ll be over here figuring out what works today versus what’s going to work 10 years from now, and what level of risk I’m willing to take on both.
Maybe a way to get past all the black-hat talk is to put together the white hat stuff we need to know more about to really be advanced.
My list includes:
a) Testing. I like Rand’s tests and results, but there is a paucity of information on developing good tests (and measuring their results). Too many in the industry (as Josh wrote earlier) just talk about and implement the latest verbal fad.
b) Analytics/Measuring. Posts on the analytics track made it sound really good (wish I had been there). The industry needs to talk more about what measurable business benefits a tactic brought (whether on-page, on-site or off-site), how much it cost (development labor dollars and marketing dollars), and whether the ROI was worth it. Even better if we can get past the “we can’t guarantee anything and therefore don’t predict anything” to the “based on our past experience we think these types of results are probable with this tactic”. How do we get from here to there?
c) Process and methdology. Turn SEO into a well defined and repeatable process that managers can understand and junior folks can be trained on. And then plug tactics in to be tested, measured and prioritized. Would love to hear more about what this process looks like for others.
d) Scaling. It’s fine to get one page ranking high for one broad phrase, or a small number of pages for a small number of phrases. But how about enterprise sites that have 1,000,000 pages with 2,000,000 target tail keyword phrases (ecommerce and directory sites)? Which tactics do you prioritize?
e) International SEO. Good to see there was a panel on this. Enterprises want to go global – how do they get global traffic from Baidu, Naver, Yandex, etc. How do you handle language issues? What are the material SEO differences among the engines?
My 2 cents on advanced SEO…of course, the black hat stuff is more sensationalist and always interesting…
Great post Lisa
I agree totally with you.
Yes Todd; Many of us know how you view things. The prevailing thang in the industry now is mainly about how do we trick Google now and in the future without getting caught.
Kudos to you for following that wisdom. Not me. I won’t get caught with pants down when some group comes around and doesn’t include the blackhats in the group.
I’m late to the conversation, I know, but I wanted to say that I’m glad this conversation is taking place. It’s especially encouraging to read Danny’s comments that he recognizes there is a problem and will work to fix it at next year’s conference.
I’m in the group that feels the topics of this year’s presentations veered too far into black hat territory. It isn’t what I expected from an “Advanced” conference. To me, advanced means that you are beyond shilling for links and scurrying into different corners when the light shines.
I agree that it’s important to understand the more blackhat techniques so you know them when you see them. However, I don’t recall any of the blackhat information being presented that way. If a presentation had been called “Blackhat Techniques And Why You Need To Know Them” then that could have been useful. But that’s not how they were presented. They were presented like a group of teenage boys giggling about what they were getting away with.
I agree with commenters who have said that it would be great to have more content for those of us at agencies with large clients and the SEO challenges we face. I couldn’t really go to them and say “How bout we buy a lot of spammy links and point them at your competitors?” which was suggested by a presenter. That wouldn’t go over so well.
But like I said, it’s great to hear that this isn’t what Danny wanted and hopefully next year “Advanced” will have a different definition.
I’d like to thank everyone for the comments all around. It’s been really useful for me to get this type of feedback, and I appreciate it deeply.
Just as I had some people say privately to me that they felt I was being too defensive or hostile to Lisa earlier, I’ve also had some feel that I’m trying to sell some of the speakers down the river, so to speak.
I’ll clarify that a bit more. I’m proud to have had those speakers take part. They’ve shared blackhat things not in some smoky bar with a few select individuals but openly on stage, in the full glare of search reps watching. And I did consistently hear them warn about risks.
Yes, there were a few things I was embarrassed about, especially as I realized we had beginners in the audience who might not know better. I’ll single out Jay Young. No, I don’t think it’s anything goes. I do think there are ethics in marketing and limits you don’t go past. I don’t want to blog spam a tribute page to someone’s dead friend, as Mike Grehan once wrote about happening to him. And it is embarrassing to hear someone say that if some of those people are coming away with the idea that the conference overall is endorsing it, or that I’m promoting it.
That’s a difficult struggle — that people may not understand the idea of various opinions and ideas being presented with their responsibility to choose for themselves. As a conference organizer, I need to do more to setup and prepare people for that, especially when there are beginners around.
But while I might disagree with Jay, I’m glad to have had him take part and raised the issue. There was value in it.
I also want to go back to what Lisa wrote before:
“Where were the white hat advanced search engine optimization techniques in Seattle? Why was most of the material presented pushing grey and black hat?”
I don’t know that it was most of the material. I honestly do not know. I think there was more than I would have liked, because I know I want whitehat people to come away with practical tips, not just an education about what others are doing. And I certainly reacted and noticed the blackhat stuff more.
But there was a lot of whitehat. And in fact, there was a lot of whitehat even from “blackhat” speakers. So I think they deserve a little more credit that they are given — though I take nothing away from Lisa voicing her impressions as she saw it from the show. I do appreciate that.
I could go on and on as I do. So I did
Where were the white hat advanced search engine optimization techniques in Seattle? Why was most of the material presented pushing grey and black hat? Are we supposed to believe that that’s what advanced SEO is – spamming? If so, that’s a bunch of crap.
No, Advanced SEO Does Not Mean Spamming
http://searchengineland.com/080609-103200.php
That has a lot of thoughts from me on the show, the importance of design, the role of blackhat coverage, what SEO “is” and more.
I think the most useful whitehat info was in the Developer’s sessions. It was especially helpful that during the Dev sessions Vanessa Fox was accessible on Twitter to answer questions about the topics being discussed. After Day One’s litany of shady tips, Day Two’s Dev sessions were a breath of fresh air.
This is a comment / response directed towards Danny… please do not apologize for the content. Although I was not there, I agree that information needs to be shared and I’m sure the [black-hat] information did provide a lot of value for those present (whether or not they know it yet).
The majority of us detest lawyers and blame doctors for sky-rocketing health care yet we all want our kids to have a respectable career… like a doctor or lawyer. What gives?!
Black hats are out there and they are coloring your landscape. Why pretend they aren’t there? Do we pretend lawyers don’t exist? More importantly, why not try to learn from them? They wouldn’t be where they’re at if their collective strategies were worthless, correct?
Thank you for helping bring black hats out of the “smoky bars” to share their views and suggestions; thank you for allowing beginners to see just how “advanced” and speculative SEO could be; thank you for not pretending a big chunk of the industry doesn’t exist; and thank you for not censoring too much.
Could you have done things better? Of course! That is optimization and that’s what you do best.
I was present at both SMX advanced conferences. Yes, last years was a bit wimpy white hat, and this years had a lot more of a black hat element. As if we didn’t know it was there. Hell, I would have liked to go to the London conference to get a closer look. Instead I got some of it here.
I stuck with organic throughout last year while I found a lot of good stuff in the SEM/Developer tracks this year.
Most of the anguished posts here on all sides have links to their websites. Of course that is completely white hat. Are any of them self serving in some way? Of course! Who is more self serving and self promoting than the SEO/SEM community?
I do want to thank Danny for a very interesting conference, and bloggers like Lisa and others for the great coverage and and thoughtful analysis.
I just don’t understand why most of you are angry and seemingly not part of the problem.
Honestly now-a-days who isn’t buying links? EVERYBODYis! Do you advocate creating content which attracts links? Oh my you have to pay a writer. Why are you creating this content? Oh its for links.. seems like your paying for links.
Are you creating content on other sites? Wow you have to pay people to write that content! Your buying links.
Are you competing in a competitive space? Wow you have to pay people to write content on sites, buy directory links at “authority sites” such as yahoo’s craptastic directory, submit to dmoz forget about it then bribe a editor because google likes dmoz’s dead directory, create link bait, pay programmers to create a blog & a forum, pay graphic designers, pay lots and lots of writers etc. etc. etc. and thats ‘white hat’
Hmmm. Seems like i am paying for links even though I’m white hat… wait I’m not, and nobody else is if they’re competing in a competitive industry worth the time.
If I can pop a squidoo page up and rank for you’re keywords your not in a competitive industry…
If you don’t know black hat techniques you aren’t going to be good enough for your clients.
I was late getting to this post but chimed in on Danny’s post on Search Engine Land http://sphinn.com/story/51693
All in all, I did enjoy the conference and it stimulated a lot of thought. I especially liked the developer and analytic tracks. I think you’ll have a lot of takeaways and look forward to SMX Advanced next year.
My tome is in the thread, but on the subject of what is advanced:
idea: SMX Blackhat
What a great thread. Thanks Lisa. I find this conversation stimulating as it makes me think through events of the past as I relate them to the dialog here. What a line up! This conversation is filled with long standing SEO professionals and industry giants. Surfing the web for SEO tips brings a sea of who knows what. Can you imagine what it must be like for someone that is new to SEO to sort through the myriad of online opinions and techniques and try to sort it into actionable items? Being able to place something at one end of the spectrum, Black or white, is a little easier because some stuff just fits nicely into one of those “hats”. I am wondering how we can include the context into the discussion for the “gray” items (the color, not the wolf). I think everyone has an example of a technique that works and could stand up to the legitimate technique test when x is true. i.e. Some paid links make absolute sense and represent no risk, and some don’t. How can we communicate the context of the middle ground, “gray hat” to a new person in a way that increases their understanding so they can learn to apply the “invisible discretion” sooner?
I’ve seen Danny write this in the past at a few different places:
“We do not teach spam at the conferences.”
If he wishes, I could find all the references.
Now; not only are blackhats asked to speak at conferences and getting all the credibility associated with that, AND gaining new clients because of that, but they are also actually teaching spam and giggling about how they are getting away with it.
I find all of this astonishing. It’s hard to believe the industry has sunk to such a low level. Many leaders out there were totally silent on the lyndon fake content fiasco. … danny included. He never once wrote any type of article about it, but certainly will wrote stuff when it directly affects his conferences.
Someone asked above that blackhats should be touting their tactics instead of in smokey bars. I just got to ask why? Can’t the people in this industry see and understand the road the industry is going down? Why is it that only a very scant few of us totally understand what is happening, but people who are close to the conferences don’t see it?
Is it a money thing? How about a friendship thing? Or maybe a combination of the two? I truly don’t get it. Others don’t get it either… believe me. Those others just do not speak up as a very few of us do.
Danny; you are living in your own little bubble. You just don’t get that many SEO’s out there do not attend your conference for the same reasons I don’t attend. I know this for a fact.
You also never take a phone call from a site owner who hired a firm, and they do not understand what the firm is doing. At least you have not taken that kind of call in years. I take them. I take quite a few each month. You would not believe the goings on out there. Much of it stems from the site owners trying to verify a tactic by reading what ALL the experts are saying. Most owners are just totally confused about what is what. Your conferences are not changing this at all, but are confusing all the issues more than ever.
It use to be that blackhats were criticized widely in this industry. Not anymore. Matter of fact; it’s more of how much money can you give me for advertising today? It’s more of how can we do a better job of tricking Google without getting caught?
I am amazed.
Danny and others can ignore me and the things going on by spinning the same tune over and over. The fact is that there are many more people out there who are not a part of this industry. There are people truly wanting to do the right thing. There are people truly trying to understand. The atmosphere in the SEO industry is totally not conducive to learning at all. Too many have vested interests in keeping blackhats close to them. This blurs the lines greatly between right and wrong. Anyone saying they don’t see this is either totally blind or totally naive, or morally corruptive.
1. Somewhere around half-way through my twenty years of Aikido, I realized there were no “basic” techniques or “advanced” techniques — that applying the apparent basics really, really well was as profound and powerful and any apparently advanced technique. That is at least as true here. Perhaps even more so, since the fancy tricks won’t do much if the basics aren’t in place.
2. Name-calling or attempting to blanket paint what others are saying with negative emotional trigger phrases are no substitute for having a valid point, expressing it clearly and backing it up well.
3. Framing the discussion as right v wrong or moral v immoral is limited and is not the most useful way to look at all this. More useful, I think, is business and simple survival. Internet marketing is extremely rapidly being understood to be, primarily, MARKETING. A wonderful read though Neuromancer was, that’s not where we are going, in the foreseeable future. Those who don’t want to conduct themselves in a business-like and professional manner, and who want to carry on thinking they are some kind of post-punk, Neuromancer techno-outlaws, will be brushed aside as mainstream marketing and PR firms move more and more online. The role of conferences in fostering a professional and powerful industry is crucial.
Doug, when you dig things out, don’t forget how you were happy to abandon all your issues with me if we could just reach some business arrangement, apparently:
http://www.threadwatch.org/node/8828
“By merging our views, I believe it would be a great help to our industry as a whole. Let’s face facts; if you continue on with another group, or even with your own group, you will always have that “pesky” IHY group who will be pretty much against many speakers, etc. I have a great way to get rid of all of that, and even keeping your own core people intact in some way.”
Hello Lisa and Kudos for a great post on your experience at SMX Advanced. I’ll be writing my own blog post this weekend and will likely incur Mr. Sullivan’s wrath as I will not be contacting him before hand to vet my impressions and experiences.
I am intrigued by the “Give It Up” session and will home for more detail once the “cone of silence” lifts. It is a credit to the conference, regardless of glitches or random disappointments, that choices have to be made. Despite missing what was a great session, I got something out of the one that I did.
Lisa, I enjoyed your post. I have sat back and not said much because I didn’t go. I do plan on going to SMX East. I do want to say one thing, I have been discussing SEO ethics for awhile on my blog. I have received a lot of hate mail, believe it or not. I have been insulted and belittled by people that are considered very influential in the industry. I asked Michael Gray, Matt McGee, Jim Hedger, Todd Mintz and others to contribute their thoughts on ethics because they are people I respect and I hoped people would think about their comments and maybe learn from them. I had to, again, sift through jerky emails and delete comments I didn’t feel should be on the blog. I don’t know what happened at SMX because I wasn’t there, but I will say that I am shocked at how many people don’t care about being ethical and/or doing what is right for their clients. I guess we all have to choose which side to be on…I won’t be choosing the dark side and I am glad to know you won’t either.
Marianne, I didn’t mean for anyone to think that Lisa was incurring my “wrath” for not contacting me first. About the only wrath I’d direct your way is if you call me “Mr” again
I wasn’t looking for Lisa to vet anything. I just would have liked the chance for her to have known beforehand that I agreed with things she was concerned about, rather than it seemingly like I was oblivious to some of these concerns.
But hey, people rarely do get in contact before writing up impressions of things. I’m as guilty as the next person, and I shouldn’t have started out my post to her that way.
More power to those who don’t ask for permission to do what they believe to be right.
No need to apologize, Danny. For anything.
Great decision and no shame in your game!
I keep saying that advanced white hat SEO is direct-response copywriting applied to content. I’m not smart enough to do anything black hat.
Firstly Lisa, I’ll start by saying that I didn’t attend SMX. But I’ve seen some of the post conference blogs, and this is by far one of the more controversial that I’ve read.
I personally think that if so called black hat techniques aren’t discussed in the industry then this only limits our understanding of the engines.
The bottom line is that most SEO’s at one time or another have bought links, or looked at acquiring old sites, in order to reap rewards, and if we all sat at the edges of the circle, and just created linkworthy content – no one would eat, or worse still, those who didn’t mind bending the rules a little in their favour would be rubbing their bellies, laughing at the rest of us. I think pointing the finger at certain blackhats instead of saying bravo thanks for the information, and thus being informed on whether to use it or not is ridiculous.
In my own opinion its up to Google to filter the crap, and adjust their algorithm to reward white hat techniques over black hat. Until then, people are still going to be discussing techniques on both sides of the fence.
I wish I had more time to frequent the forums, blogs and conferences.
I miss this shit
BTW – Colour is nothing but a state of mind!
I strongly believe that SEO is influenced marketing at its highest point. As SEO experts, we should considered the fact that we’re helping online visitors make an informed buying decision because we’re influencing the ranking of a particular website over another in the majors.
With this in mind, we can maintain our integrity and sleep better at night by implementing white hat tactics that will produced long term sustainable results for our clients.
The thing is here that there is no black hat or white hat. You have to get that nonsense out of your head. ALL seo is ‘black hat’ if you think about it. All of it. Look at it this way. Say there are two sites and site ‘a’ has better and more comprehensive information than site ‘b’. Both sites are good but ‘a’ has just a bit better content.
Now here comes a ‘white hat’ cloaked in ethics (catch the pun?. Ok, so our white hatter sits down and says “ok, let me optimize the linking structure of this site (site ‘b’)…no black hat for me” and the white hatter goes on to optimize the site…internally.
Now, after this the white hatter says, “now I will get some links to this site, but not with software of any BH techniques as it is not ethical, I will instead ask for link exchanges via emai.” And so the white hatter gets some white links.
What is the result? Well, because the white hatter was very good at his job, site ‘b’, the lesser of the two sites, now outranks site ‘a’ even though site ‘a’ has the more valuable information.
Like it or not the white hatter has manipulated the search results to their own benefit. Same as black hat in essence.
If google were god everyone would just put content on their sites and all kinds of SEM (that’s Search Engine Manipulation) would be out lawed.
ANYTHING you do to increase the rankings of your site other than providing good free content is search engine manipulation. Period. It is not the technique which is white or blackhat but rather it is the general effect of the technique.
Ethically? I don’t see anywhere in the Bible where it says White hat seo is ethical and BH seo is not. Ethics? By whose standards? If you sell shitty products and you know it, but sell them anyway…you are unethical to me. Whether you promote these products through white hat or black hat doesn’t matter.
I’m online trying to market my business. I want to get my business in front of as many people as I can. Maximum exposure. Business principles. Does Google own the internet? Is it their house I’m playing in? Who said that Google can dictate to us what ‘ethical’ marketing is?
It is a game of skills just like the ‘real world’. All of us Seo’s are in a race to the top. There is no such thing as white hat or black hat. There are just different levels of expertise in seo.
There are no advance white hat techniques. You should know that already.
Think about how absurd it really sounds. You are “fooling’ a search engine. A piece of code. It is not human. Are we going to make the algorithm cry?
The ethics involved in seo or sem are, in the end, completely tied to the product or service being sold. For instance, if you are a WH and you promote a site that endorses child pornography is that ethical?
What if you promote a non profit site dedicated to the research of cancer but you use BH techniques? Are you now unethical?
well said, Chris. If you do something to hurt another site that could be considered criminal, that would be one thing. Doint something “Google asks you not to do” and being successful outranking others with it, that the Google’s and your competitors’ problem only. Which brings us back to the main reason why self proclaimed white hats get so out of shape when someone else figures out a more effective and easier way to achieve higher rankings than they do.
great post….lisa……!! Works great..!