SEOs Favourite Bogey Men

The search engine marketing world, like any community, has its own shared ideas, lexicon & celebrities. But like a well written fairy tail, there are bad guys and villains.

Via flickr

Some of the ‘baddies’ of them play the role for their own benefit, while other inadvertently have found themselves suffering the wrath of the internet marketing clique. Hell hath no fury like an SEO scorned.

[tag]Jason Calacanis[/tag] – Calling SEO ‘Bull’ in front of a search marketing conference is just the kind of subtle approach favoured by everyone’s favourite SEO-baiting Brooklynite. High profile social media marketer Neil Patel offered to optimise Calacanis for free and managed to help increase traffic from search engines by 20% which didn’t do much to change his mind Then he launched a search engine that was going to ‘kill the SEO industry’. Not surprising he hasn’t made too many fans in the internet marketing community.

[tag]Ted Leonis[/tag] – the pranksters at Threadwatch picked up on a comment made by the AOL chairman about wanting to dominate the search results for his own name and how he didn’t need any search engine marketers to help him. Just the kind of competitive challenge that lead to plenty of competition for his name.

[tag]David Pasternack[/tag] – Dave set the precedent for Calacanis by diplomatically asking whether SEO is Rocket Science As a president of a PPC agency he developed a bit of a reputation for bashing the natural search marketers and Threadwatch decided to give $1000 to who ever could rank for his name. Eventually they felt guilty and gave all their link love to a chef sharing the PPC-praiser’s name.

[tag]Matt Cutts[/tag] – the most visible Google-er in the blogosphere has a bit of a love/hate relationship with some of the SEO industry. There’s plenty of appreciation for his myth-busting about the Google Algo, but aren’t so friendly when he started criticising paid links.

Now [tag]Threadwatch[/tag] has died many of the industry’s bogey men might be able to sleep of night without fear of reprisal for the SEO baiting tricks.