SEO Bashing
If you are an SEO (or indeed Web Designer) you will at some point encounter SEO Bashing whether you are a ‘victim’ of it or a participant. I’ve worked within the SEO industry for a quite a while now and over those years I have witnessed a fair few bashes and taken part in some too.
For anyone who’s work is their passion it will inevitably cause some degree of discomfort or anger when you see other providers giving a poor service or even giving false impressions. It’s no different for SEO’s but for some reason we have this mentality of “I know best, I don’t make mistakes, I provide the best value for money” and therefore feel that we have the right to ‘OUT’ other companies that (in our opinion) have done a crap job.
You will also often find that the ‘outers’ tend not to publicly demonstrate their own results either because they don’t actually have anything to shout about themselves or they (rightly so IMO) keep that sort of info as ‘available on request’.
The thing with the world of web design and SEO is that it is constantly evolving and work that was produced a year ago could easily be pulled apart by todays standards. Just as the 100% search engine friendly award winning gem you launched last week could get a big fat FAIL by 2011.
Search Engine criteria changes, programming languages improve, browsers upgrade, individuals skills develop, clients targets change. I’m not even going to go into how SEO (and it’s necessity) itself is evolving. For web design companies and online marketing agencies their staff come and go and their inhouse knowledge develops. You dont know what level of provision the client paid for. You don’t know if the client actually paid their bill. You don’t know if the client has since moved to another provider who p*ssed all over the previous companies work.
There are so many other factors that come into it that unless you have true insider knowledge on how a client/provider relationship went down, you really don’t have all the knowledge or the right to give a public roasting about it.
These days, while I still get a bit of a buzz reading the bashing (if I’m honest) I avoid taking part for a few reasons:
- It doesn’t make me feel warm and fuzzy making someone else feel like sh*t
- Karma
- I make mistakes too and would be mortified to be publicly dragged through a witch trial
- Initial observations don’t always give the full story
Rip someone else apart all you like within your own office, but think twice before letting your opinions spill out into the public domain.
If I ever forget I wrote this and bash someone on my blog please feel free to publicly out me 
I was looking for the Like button, LOL. I think I’ve been around the social networks a little too much lately. Anyway…”if” there had been a Like button, I would have clicked it.
Since there’s not, I’ll go all old-school on ya, and say “me too”. 
Bashing others’ work is so uncool regardless of the topic. As a designer turned SEO/SEM a few years back, I found myself on the receiving end of the bash from a client that I served for a decade. For eons the client rejected my recommendation to spend some extra money on SEO, instead opting to seize the instant gratification of paid search, which I handled. When they finally recognized the power of organic clicks they took my SEO proposal. Within just a few weeks after I got started they had another SEO firm in their office, bashing me to bits for an SEO project that was just getting started… and telling them how much money and market share had been sacrificed as a result of having a guy who failed to do SEO on their site for all those years. Meanwhile, I was thinking, “Duh! What do you think I’ve been trying to tell them for all these years? They told me they were so busy that they wouldn’t be able to handle more business if it came.” The moment I finished the overhaul and initialization of the link campaign, all logins were suddenly disabled and the checks stopped coming.
Two years after getting bashed and dumped, the phone rang. Now the client wants me back. When business slowed down, they found enough time to educate themselves on how SEO & SEM works, thereby realizing that I had been doing a better job than the bashers did. Even though I’m now too busy developing a new venture of doing expert paid reviews on existing PPC & SEO campaigns (AdAuditors.com), the call salvaged some pride. As for the bashers — FAIL!
Thanks for your comments
I actually would defy any SEO to look at any strategy or website and not be able to come up with at least a handful of things that should have been done (regardless of why they weren’t). It’s very easy to criticise a competitors work and easy to put the frighteners on their clients to try and win the business. The best we can do is be honest, upfront, balanced and realistic when giving our advice or opinion. Over time that does count towards maintaining a good relationship and gaining your clients trust and faith.
Thanks Donna! I think i need to go on a plug-in hunt
Right On!