The reason i have mentioned this .. a little late in the game is that a client of ours has said he’s worried about Link bait because of this ONE post from matt.

Funny that you now start weening about it.

Just my 2 cents.

If you say tomorrow that bombing your stephmother will bring you on top off Google( or some people might understand it out off your words) then people will bomb their stephmother.

Very simple but seems like not everyone realises that.

I think hmmm is confusing satire type sites and just other websites and not knowing if the content is bunk or crap or not. That is not the same thing at all that I’m talking about.

A SEO writes a totally false/fake article. That SEO submits it to Digg as News… not satire, but news. The SEO puts it on a page on a otherwise trusted financial website with no disclaimer saying it was false. The SEO is also saying how great the linkbait was and saying he will do it again and again and again.

SEO’s from all over the internet praise the guy for how great this is.

That’s the issue. Anything else people write to the contrary is only taking away from the real issue.

I though I posted it, but apparently, it didn’t work. (I seriously doubt that Matt removed it post facto, since there was nothing in it that could warrant that — especially considering what Dave (the Angry) gets away with on an almost daily basis — except maybe to save space, since it was so long).

Sigh…

Well, I’m too disheartened to bother to redo my work & writing on it.

When you call a lawyer to defend you, you’re simply fighting fire with fire, and hoping that your evil warlord will be able to slay the other. A lawyer is a foul weather friend at best.

The car salesmen are spot on though.

Anyway, regarding the rest:
The rubbish available online is the same for most any other industry as well — Colbert is famous for pointing out the idiocy that is always only a hair’s breadth away on Wikipedia too. Nothing is safe or truly trustworthy (truthy) online. Period. (Except information from organizations and the like with offline street cred and reputations they’re willing to protect — i.e. colleges & universities, publications which practice a traditional PhD peer review process, etc.).

When you search for almost anything online, you’ll find that the majority of what you’ll encounter is bunk (just plain wrong; outdated info; conspiracy theories and fake news… or worse).

After running a motorcycle industry website & blog for the past few years, where I offer safe riding tips, highlight useful sites, and report on industry news, etc. I can certainly vouch for the mountains of motorcyclist garbage online. And that’s in an industry with about a century of history behind it. Whereas SEO (heck, even the Internet as we know it) has been around for just over a decade — many kinks are left to be worked out.

But Google saw this lack of trustworthy information online as a business opportunity, and they did all they could to build a quest for truthiness into their algorithms from the get-go. And we’re better off for it, to be sure. Once that quest proved to be profitable, it was imitated by the rest of the search industry (of which SEO is simply a branch — with those who are ethical, and those who are not…same as any other industry on earth really).

It’s like an extreme version of walking into a Barnes & Noble. Next time you go there, take a moment and really consider how much of that enormous pile of books is really just junk…. And then consider that what you call junk might be mother’s milk to the person beside you… Now multiply that by a crazy number of terabytes of information….

The Internet is full of junk. No news there. It’s also full of great stuff. Again, no news there.

The only way to find what is truly good in any industry is to read, read, read, and learn, learn, learn. Check for trustworthy sources and relevant affiliations with the authors of said info (which is the reason we all read Matt’s blog, no doubt). And enter into an ongoing cycle of Test, Fail, Revise, Learn. There’s no shortcut for a real education… even if you use Google.

A lawyer.

I doubt people think of lawyers as an industry to laugh at. I do think this SEO industry is certainly being laughed at from the outside. At least anyone who has read any of the many, many blogs out there about SEO’s praising deception. Especially when the SEO’s are deceiving those same people…….. people who just may search on Google for information and wonder if that info is total rubbish and fake.