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(rt) All his contributions towards making the search industry (and that term is by no means restricted to SEO /SEM alone!) what it is today aside, Danny Sullivan has also been quite exemplary in his knack of presenting a balanced view of just about any topic he covers without even remotely descending to the level of all those truckloads of brainless self-aggrandizing tripe purporting to convey “good, solid SEO advice” which more often than not exhausts itself in such breathtaking and earth shattering words of wisdom as “do as the engines say” – content spam every single letter of it without exception.

This is no mean feat in its own right for a highly exposed and equally prolific writer in what is essentially (and always has been) an industry fraught with rivalry and controversy. It’s not just that he has the brains and the gift of the gab to do it, and do it well – he’s also got – arguably even more important – the integrity of character to go with it.

Thankfully, this piece is no exception: after outlining the genesis of the prevailing dim view many Net marketers hold on all things (and persons!) SEO, he takes it upon himself to defend the art, pointing out that many problems related to spam are not, in truth, SEO related at all. He champions

“content-based SEO.” Need an acronym? Perhaps CSEO or SEFO, for “search engine friendly optimization.” I won’t say that this is the “true” SEO, because for as long as there’s been content-based SEO, there’s also been other flavors of SEO and tactics designed just to generate traffic from search engines regardless of content.

What he doesn’t address (at least not in this article) are the countless scenarios where classical “white hat” SEO (whether CSEO or SEFO) is simply impossible to implement for a plethora of what – we at least, and we’re in the best of companies here – deem to be perfectly legitimate reasons for taking the more assertive road explicitly not endorsed by the search engines.

Anyway, if we follow his logic of exemplarily denouncing ALT tag spam because it harasses the visually impaired depending on screen readers, it only stands to reason that this, at least, is something you cannot accuse cloaking of: on the contrary – as surfers never get to see properly cloaked pages in the first place, there’s no question of making life hard for the handicapped – an aspect hardly ever covered to date.

We would, hence, argue that rather than resort to all those “old paradigme” SEO techniques he denounces (keyword stuffing, ALT tag stuffing, invisible text layers, etc.), SEOs would be better advised to go for straight, professionall executed industrial-strength cloaking or IP delivery wherever it’s a must. (And let it not be forgotten: very often it actually isn’t – though plausibly evaluating this situation is a fairly moot issue at best as the parameters involved are anything but hewn in stone.)

No, that’s our take alone, not his – so don’t hold him responsible for it. But that doesn’t invalidate the argument as such either.

Let’s, however, reiterate here that we at fantomaster.com have never been advocates of misleading cloaking, if only because it’s downright dumb marketing in the first place.

Realistically, I don’t expect the SEM reputation problem will go away. Could the industry do anything itself to help improve it? Pushing that there’s “good SEO” or “ethical SEO” has been raised in the past and is a difficult issue for many reasons. I’m going to revisit this in a future article, plus look at some things that might help.

Well, we are looking forward to seeing your next piece, Danny – and even if we should, perhaps, have to agree to disagree in the end, we’re sure it will be well worth a read. As is this one.

Find it here:
→ Worthless Shady Criminals: A Defense Of SEO

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