Steve Rubel is alarmed that companies are being advised to launch social media programs in order to take advantage of the search engine benefits. Rubel is disturbed by this trend and in my experience, once the companies see an area that can help them at no charge, you just can't stop them.
Spammers have killed e-mail, many forums, blogs and other forms of communications. For example, unless you ave people monitoring every post and trackback ping on blogs your site will be overrun by SEO spammers.
Social networking is just the latest place these people will use to find a way to increase their sales and/or search rank. Resistance is futile in my opinion. I am sorry about the Star Trek reference but asking companies to adhere to "unwritten" rules as he puts it is just not happening.
As we can see with Enron, predatory lending and a host of other areas... Many companies don't even adhere to the laws.
Spammers have killed e-mail, many forums, blogs and other forms of communications. For example, unless you ave people monitoring every post and trackback ping on blogs your site will be overrun by SEO spammers.
Social networking is just the latest place these people will use to find a way to increase their sales and/or search rank. Resistance is futile in my opinion. I am sorry about the Star Trek reference but asking companies to adhere to "unwritten" rules as he puts it is just not happening.
As we can see with Enron, predatory lending and a host of other areas... Many companies don't even adhere to the laws.
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Rich:
With all due respect, is it not a bit hypocritical of you to refer to SEO's in such a negative light when one of your company's most highly promoted advertising vehicles is touted as a way to increase one's search rankings?
Here is a snippet from one of your media kit's
"Achieve search engine optimization, and obtain a prominent ranking on
top search engines like Google or Yahoo! for VoIP/IP Telephony, CRM/Call
Center and Information Technology terms"
I am sure your comments certainly came out wrong on this, but I wanted to point it out.
Garrett, Interesting point. It was not my intention to paint all SEO with the same brush. I should also point out that I see a big difference between legitimate SEO campaigns and ones that spam.
As a blogger, I would imagine you also deal with SEO spam. People who post links to thewir Viagra and online dating sites as comments to you blog entries about VoIP.
This is blatant spam and differes from legit SEO techniques such as supplying readers with quality content which is viral and organically builds SEO.
Having said that, I consider SEO spammers to perhaps one of the biggest problems with the internet. These people have forced us to turn off trackback pings on our blogs as we were getting up to 50 spam trackbacks a day per blog in some cases.
I would love to get your thought on the distinction I am drawing here.
Rich:
I definitely agree with you and thanks for clarifying. As someone who does "SEO" I just take offense to being lumped in with spammers, black hats, etc.
There is a distinct difference between professional SEO, paid search and social media marketers and those who uses these tactics and mediums in a "spam fashion".