Weblogs: Spam

Danny Sullivan calls that people who, like Robert Scoble and Jason Calacanis, think SEO is about spam to fuck off. Calling SEO spam is like saying email is spam, he suggests. In exasperation, he rattles off a list of previous posts that are to explain why SEO is not spam.

Is email spam?

Without automated filtering, email today would be unusable - because of the high volume of spam. If you turned off all automated filtering and manually deal with spam, you'd be very likely to abandon email and write it off as spam. But we are lucky - we have automated tools that make email a little more bearable for the time being.

That filtering is how email remains usable when 94% of all email is spam. To say email is spam today, is probably more than 95% correct. I grant the fact that less than 5% is spam, but clearly spam is the dominant characteristic of email.

Clearly the most dominant type of email in circulation is spam. Only a fraction is actually legitimate email. Out of the 400 pieces of email in my main email account today, only 6 were legitimate. On my catch-all my main domain I'm regularly receiving 1000 pieces of spam per legitimate email. Spam on email is totally dominant.

Without automated filtering email is unusable. Spam has destroyed email.

Is SEO spam?

With search engine results, visitors have no automated way of filtering out the spam that pushes out relevant pages from the front page. Spam gets in the way of relevant results largely because of the gaming of search engines. Who games search engines?

Sure, the levels of SEO spam in search engines don't come close to the levels of spam in email. But its harder, more of a manual process for visitors to weed out spam in search results. It certainly would be nice to weed out these junk results so I can focus on the ones more relevant to my task.

SEO Rocket Science

Danny's first post defends that SEO is rocket science, giving examples such as: Have you blocked off all your print only pages to avoid possible content issues, like Google recommends.. Why do SEOers have print-only pages - CSS print stylesheets are a far better option than duplicating content. That's not rocket science, that's the plain and simple benefits of web standards.

Another of Danny's examples is Hey, are you delivering all your page content through AJAX now? Are you aware this means search engines might not see any of your content?. I get the feeling that SEOers who know rocket science don't actually know the basics of web development. A healthy dose of universalism might help avoid these barriers in the first place.

These two examples don't demonstrate that SEO isn't spam (and neither does the obtuse Google postcard reference offer any clarity), it just demonstrates that SEOers are unaware of web standards, particularly the universality benefits offered by the separation of structure and content from presentation and behaviour. These quoted examples are more about polishing turds than rocket science. From the examples Danny gives, I'm sure I don't want to know about SEO, because it sounds horribly like the out-dated practices of web development of the previous century.

Danny calls on SEOers not to diss themselves, by accepting what they have learnt as valuable and good. But these practices are outdated, and are solving the wrong problem. The correct ways to solve the above problems is to use print stylesheets instead of a separate printable document, and to cleanly separate content from behaviour and presentation, using techniques like unobtrusive JavaScript.

In short this piece about SEO being rocket science highlights how far behind SEOers are in terms of web standards and web development best practice. Maybe its a symptom of people hiring SEOers rather than a failure of SEO itself? Are there any SEOers that specialise in working with web standards adhering websites?

Its not obvious reading this post that SEO is not spam. What's missing for me is an objective appraisal of the quality of the content - a simple question of whether this page or site you are SEOing deserves to be well ranked? I don't see much quality conversation from SEO on this point.

Framed and locked out

In Defending SEO, yet again Danny wheels out the example of an SEOer whose built a site around frames. The advice she is given to optimise her rankings fail to solve the real problem - breaking the fundamental basis of the web by using frames. Why were the frames there in the first place? Again, this is a good example of SEO being used to polish turds - taking a fundamentally broken site and instead of fixing it, layer enough polish to cover over the odour.

Where was the advice to ditch the frames and do the site properly? Where was the accessibility guidance that would have benefited screen reader users? Need a good book about web development, try Molly Holzschlag's Spring into HTML.

This second example shows a growing trend that SEOers are asked to assist when its too late. Surely there should be more proactive efforts for SEOers to get involved earlier in the development process so that they can head off bad mistakes (duplicate pages for printing, using frames).

Link baiting

In the furore over Jason Calacanis' remarks about SEO being bull - as a result of a marketing video that was supposed to be an example of how not to do SEO. Immediately I should point out its clear the message of This is an example of what not to do didn't come across well or at all.

Danny defends SEO by insisting that not all SEO is like that. I note the emphatic all, and note that if this video is supposed to be an example of what not to do - wouldn't this advice be pointless if no-one was doing it? Surely, the existence of this video is evidence that the demonstrated approach is used often enough to justify or warrant recording such a video to warn people against it?

Granted, not all SEOers are full of it. Jason Calacanis suggests that perhaps 90% of perceived SEO effort is spam, what percentage would Danny Sullivan suggest is more accurate? How big is the spam problem in SEO? (Danny refers to Google's Webmaster Guidelines that suggest a few unethical SEOs - how many is that?)

We may need to define this in two ways:

• What percentage of SEOers use or have used spam-like techniques
• How much of the first page of search engine listings are spam, over optimised pages, or empty ghost pages - pages that provide no benefit to the visitor?

I'm breaking this down into two facets for a good reason. The bulk of email spam comes from a hard core group of two hundred spam gangs (a number have dropped off the list after being prosecuted, including Scott Richter), so its obvious that one person can have a massively disproportionate affect on the internet community.

I'm curious about why Danny finds it offensive for Jason to claim in a Search Engine conference that 90% of SEO is spam. That to me is the same as Jason coming along to a web standards conference like @media and stating that 90% of web developers build websites that are broken by design. The fight there would probably erupt over the quoted number being too low.

I guess the implication that Danny is conveying is that the audience at the SEO conference was strongly correlated to the distribution of spam-like and non-spam like SEOers?

Danny pleads that SEO not be tarred with the same brush. Its a fair point, and it's a great pity that the good work done by SEO is largely invisible, and the one thing that stands out strongly is when a search engine listing is filled with junk results. SEOers offer a service presumably because they offer higher quality work in their field than the average non-SEOer. And yet, we on the outside are admonished for treating one industry as precisely that, one industry.

In this post Danny describes SEO as being the part of his industry that optimises organic search engine listings (the part that isn't sponsored or paid advertising). He talks about SEO as things you can and should be doing to improve search engine listings, but curiously fails to mention things you can but shouldn't be doing.

Deflecting criticism

To be blunt, I feel Danny takes great pains at diverting criticism by SEO with the argument that not everyone is bad. And that's merely deflecting the argument instead of tackling it head on.

I guess, in respects, Jason Calacanis is tired of the deflections, and has resorted to creating what he believes is a better solution to search engine spam - Mahalo. Its a constructive step towards tackling search engine spam - certainly more than the good SEO crowd have done. It just seems that the SEO industry is largely disinterested in tackling the people who give SEO a bad name, and infest search engine rankings with spam.

Watching the reactions of the SEO blogger community, they seem to hate Mahalo with great passion. On a recent podcast with Jason Calacanis (CalacanisCast Beta) I couldn't help but note how enthusiastic Michael Gray and friends were about Squidoo about how that was so much better than Mahalo. I came away with the distinct impression that the reason these SEOers loved Squidoo is because they could game it for their own benefit, while the couldn't game (or haven't yet figured out how to game) Mahalo for their own benefit.

That's the message I get from people who consider themselves professional SEOers: I like things I can game. I'm not sure whether this attitude (which seems prevalent considering the bile and vitriol I see from SEO-related blogs about Mahalo) is better or the same as the typical attitude displayed by Black Hat SEOers. I guess Danny's post offers some doubt.

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