It makes me sad to hear the Bombsquad talk yang about SEO guys

I'll be the first to admit that a lot of people doing SEO are short-sighted at best, and manipulative dirtbags at worst. A ton of the stuff out there being sold as "SEO" is hot garbage, that objectively makes the internet a worse place. I've been learning SEO over the past few years, and believe me, the snake oil you might see in your spam folder doesn't even come close to some of the convoluted bullshit schemes I've seen presented as "good business practices."

But we're not all bad. At least that's what I tell myself every morning.

What a nice new acronym you got there. Search Engine Optimization? I don´t see how this is so bad.. but then again, I have yet to listen to the latest bombcast.

There are probably worse people out there. Like bankers, or.. ah.. yeah you get the idea.

Well I just yesterday I actually found something useful while I was studying for a physics exam on a SEO site, it also had semi-porn on it also but hey ho it helped; even though it was probably stolen from another site.

Let me tell you why all SEO is bad.

SEO is only a term used by people who don't understand technology. "Learning SEO", is like saying, "I'm learning tires" as a car mechanic. Search engine optimization is the smallest, easiest, simplest part of web development.

Any person who "specializes" in SEO is a snake oil salesman, because otherwise you'd call yourself a web developer.

No offense.

Sony Entertainment Online will fuck you up, Bombcast

@deathstriker666 said:

Sony Entertainment Online will fuck you up, Bombcast

Glad I'm not the only person here that did that.

@deathstriker666 said:

Sony Entertainment Online will fuck you up, Bombcast

Glad I'm not the only person here that did that.

As a guy who builds websites for a living, my whole experience with SEO "specialists" let me to the conclusion that SEO is an overbloated bubble led by opportunistic assholes taking advantage of people who don't know how the internet works. Essentially, you are paying someone a ridiculous amount of money for something that happens organically with search engines.

Oh and this is probably just my bad luck, but every SEO "expert" I met in real life (not counting the SEO colonies in India) has pretty much aspirations to be a web designer and/or developer who can't be assed to actually learn how to code websites, and they keep harassing the actual designers and developers in implementing their horrible ideas. So to all SEO people out there, fuck off, stop trying to give suggestions on how a website should look and work and stop trying to turn sites into link farms.

@deathstriker666 said:

Sony Entertainment Online will fuck you up, Bombcast

That's Sony Online Entertainment. SOE.

@Sargus said:

@deathstriker666 said:

Sony Entertainment Online will fuck you up, Bombcast

That's Sony Online Entertainment. SOE.

Yeah, I was in the same boat as the other people though. When trying to figure out what the fuck the TC was talking about the only thing I could think of was the Sony acronym.

@jSlack said:

Let me tell you why all SEO is bad.

SEO is only a term used by people who don't understand technology. "Learning SEO", is like saying, "I'm learning tires" as a car mechanic. Search engine optimization is the smallest, easiest, simplest part of web development.

Any person who "specializes" in SEO is a snake oil salesman, because otherwise you'd call yourself a web developer.

No offense.

I might say that it's more like "I'm learning how to put on tires." Even though it is a very basic part of fixing a car, it's still an important one that a mechanic needs to learn at some point or another. I do agree that if you've done a good, thorough job designing and organizing your a website in the first place, a big chunk of the SEO is already taken care of. That's why I referred to SEO as something I was reading up on, rather than what I did for a living. But there ARE some other tasks and responsibilities that a dedicated SEO person would need to deal with that a web developer might not have to worry about. And I don't think that someone focusing on a certain part of a process or field automatically make them a fraud or anything like that.

@Stete said:

As a guy who builds websites for a living, my whole experience with SEO "specialists" let me to the conclusion that SEO is an overbloated bubble led by opportunistic assholes taking advantage of people who don't know how the internet works. Essentially, you are paying someone a ridiculous amount of money for something that happens organically with search engines.

I agree 110%. Well maybe not 110%. Maybe like 90%, but only because nobody is paying me a ridiculous amount of money : (

@BBAlpert said:

@jSlack said:

Let me tell you why all SEO is bad.

SEO is only a term used by people who don't understand technology. "Learning SEO", is like saying, "I'm learning tires" as a car mechanic. Search engine optimization is the smallest, easiest, simplest part of web development.

Any person who "specializes" in SEO is a snake oil salesman, because otherwise you'd call yourself a web developer.

No offense.

I might say that it's more like "I'm learning how to put on tires." Even though it is a very basic part of fixing a car, it's still an important one that a mechanic needs to learn at some point or another. I do agree that if you've done a good, thorough job designing and organizing your a website in the first place, a big chunk of the SEO is already taken care of. That's why I referred to SEO as something I was reading up on, rather than what I did for a living. But there ARE some other tasks and responsibilities that a dedicated SEO person would need to deal with that a web developer might not have to worry about. And I don't think that someone focusing on a certain part of a process or field automatically make them a fraud or anything like that.

With all due respect, like what? Whenever I’ve spent any time looking into the way modern search engines index sites, the overwhelming consensus is basically “make good stuff that people want to read don’t do anything stupid.” A lot of common SEO techniques like giant page titles and big meta keyword lists can actually hurt you by setting off red flags in Google’s algorithms. The era when SEO tricks actually worked has long since passed. Google still has some spam problems, but the spammers are using far more advanced techniques than meta tags.

There are things that some developers miss, like keeping an eye on the Google and Bing webmaster tools, relying on JavaScript for basic functionality, setting helper tags for Facebook, and writing well-structured semantic HTML, but it’s all stuff that developers are actually equipped to solve, and most “SEO specialists” aren’t.

SEO is a very small subset of responsible web design and development — if you’re doing SEO effectively, your job title is probably just “web developer.” There’s no need whatsoever for a dedicated SEO person for all but the absolute top tier of sites, and even then, their role would be to make sure problems aren’t inadvertently created by various development teams. For the average site, SEO is something you check up on once in a while to make sure you’re not messing up.

Giant Bomb does great on Google — it often shows up in game-related searches for me — and I very much doubt they ever brought in an SEO specialist. It ranks highly because they’re not trying to cheat the system, they have a lot of high-quality content, and the site is well-programmed.

I don't think I've ever had a good experience with a "SEO expert". Even socially it tends to get scuzzy and weird.

Unfortunately I think a lot of the "SEO experts" are often just as big of victims as their customers. They end up making next to zilch from what I understand. The whole thing reminds me of one of those MLM pyramid deals.

I didn't even know this was a thing. Does marketing yourself as a SEO person really work?

@GrantHeaslip said:

SEO is a very small subset of responsible web design and development — if you’re doing SEO effectively, your job title is probably just “web developer.” There’s no need whatsoever for a dedicated SEO person for all but the absolute top tier of sites, and even then, their role would be to make sure problems aren’t inadvertently created by various development teams. For the average site, SEO is something you check up on once in a while to make sure you’re not messing up.

I agree the most companies don't need a dedicated SEO specialist. What I meant when I was talking about SEO guys was firms or consultants that manage nothing but the SEO aspects of site design and maintenance, but for multiple clients at any given moment. And I think I sent the wrong message with what I said about SEO guys having some responsibilities that web developers might not. I didn't mean to give the impression that SEO by itself is at all more complex than web design and development. Quite the opposite, really. With a talented web developer working together with a search engine consultant, the consultant can deal with some of the less obvious (and less exciting) issues like keeping tabs on business directories, contacting them when their content scrapers inevitably fuck up and list a business' zip code as their phone number or something. Any web developer could do that. But some of that stuff is time consuming, and a talented developer should be free to spend their time actually developing stuff.

SEO? Boring. You're building a better mousetrap when it turns out it's way more fun to build a better mouse, i.e. search engine development.

Can you make a career out of it? Nah, not unless you get real lucky and land a job at once of the major players. But I had a course in college that let me hang out with dudes from Google and some of the founders of the earliest search engines, and while I can't say that I'd ever want to work in that kind of field, they had a lot of interesting stories to tell at the local bars.

SEO really does seem like snake oil, and all of my web developer friends have horror stories trying to tell `im to fuck off and leave their designs alone.

The whole first half of the podcast was fairly hypocritical though Ryan copped to it for the most part; it'll be an interesting day when the internet gets locked down Chinastyle.