Bucket Guild | FUBU BH Forums

--

Who?



Ugh.

Haha yeah All Marketers are Liars...it's true.

Shit works though. Sorry if I ruined any of your favorite web sites by telling you the truth about them btw. They are making a few people very rich, doesn't matter if you snicker as you read about how awesome being an atheist is, or if drool is coming out of your mouth as you look at "25 things Better than Justin Bieber" or whatever.

SEO is a scam because you are deliberately interfering with the flow of other people's information. It is no different than putting up a roadblock, squatting on public land, or fouling a river. Like roads, public lands and freshwater rivers, the internet is a public resource, and you are interfering with others' right to good-faith use of that resource.

SEO is a form of racketeering. It serves only to add useless expense to the development cycle and leeches off productive economic activity, hurting consumers and innovation. Prior iterations of the same scam were known as payola, patent trolling or graft - payments to a group of self-interested nobodies who happen to have their hands at the throat of commerce - and were illegal.

The internet didn't make "viral" a "science". As if the "science" is a productive or useful one. You are putting cart before horse and arguing that excellence of means trumps excellence of ends. No one thinks that machine politics or the Mafia are venerable merely because they have reduced the art of leeching off the efforts of others to a "science".

Good products have always been able to sell themselves; what SEO and social media marketing did was obscure good products and promote bad ones, allowing monolithic zombie corporations to leverage their wealth to shove down innovation and keep pushing crappy products rather than improving them. SEO/SM are DIRECTLY responsible for the flash-in-the-pan syndrome that is afflicting our economy, allowing shitty products to soak up enormous amounts of capital without producing anything of value.

The difference between legitimate marketing and SEO is the difference between a lawyer and a shyster. A lawyer may defend the guilty, presenting the facts in the best possible light, but he will not lie nor prevent the truth from coming to light. A shyster will undermine the integrity, credibility, efficacy and justice of the legal process by bogging it down in fraud and bad faith. A legitimate marketer sells the product regardless of quality, but does not seek to steal the medium. Of course, in this case, the medium is a public resource. Hence the analogy of the squatter or roadblock.

The only reason SEO is not illegal is lack of jurisdiction and political will. Just because it's not illegal doesn't mean it's not unethical. This is what JFK meant when he talked about "moral degeneracy...the payola culture...the confusion between what is legal and what is right."

The fact you can invent some twisted rationalization for SEO is pure selfishness. This is the sort of thing that leaves me convinced you have no real values.

Aestu of Bleeding Hollow...

Nihilism is a copout.

As you may remember from a previous thread, I quit viewing Gawker/Jezebel content after the debacle where their "doxxing is bad" journalist intentionally doxxed someone. Gawker is as bad as, if not worse than, Buzzfeed.

Your Pal,
Jubber

AKA "The Gun"
AKA "ROFeraL"

World Renowned Mexican Forklift Artiste

I have almost no idea what any of those are.

As Aaron said, I'm "21st century Amish". I still reap most of my information from books, and view social media with extreme distrust.

As I have every reason to believe my intellectual capital is of far superior quality, I see no reason to question or change this approach. Merely because something is newer does not mean it is better. Especially when the race-to-the-bottom of capitalism is in play.

Aestu of Bleeding Hollow...

Nihilism is a copout.

This is going to be one of those rare occasions in which I agree that you're probably better off for doing so.

Your Pal,
Jubber

AKA "The Gun"
AKA "ROFeraL"

World Renowned Mexican Forklift Artiste

Yeah I don't know what to tell you, Aestu.

SEO is what it is. It's how you get people to view your content or see your product. I'm not talking about gaming people, selling them a faulty product or something.


For example, let's say 10 companies sell perfectly good couches online.

They all would love to rank for the term "quality couches for sale"

Now when I google "quality couch for sale" -- I'm looking for just that. Do you propose that Google will automatically know what the most quality couches are (hint: it won't...though they try with their algorithm)? Okay...but for arguments sake...let's say they do, based on user reviews etc. they rank those 10 couch sellers for a bunch of related terms based purely on the quality of their couch. Working as intended, yes?


But now let's say a new couch maker enters the market. He's been making quality couches in his store for years, and his couches are AMAZING, make all those other companies look like shit.....

....now he wants to sell them online. He makes a new web site. But you know what? He gets no Google traffic. Sure, he has loyal customers, but they are all in store customers...they don't go online and buy his couches. You set up a web site, you can't WILL traffic to it. You could make pages upon pages....but you won't move the needle if you just tell your friends.

He can't reach people in other states etc with his couches. What is he to do? Give up on the online venture?

No, I think he needs to optimize his site for search engines. He needs to figure out how to move up the rankings and get people to find his sites. He needs to drive traffic to his sites and let people know about his couches. His competitors are all doing it...and they're going to continue to beat him until he does something about it.


Sure, in a perfect world, this guy would get all the traffic and sell all the couches because he has the best couches. Well, it's not a perfect world. The best products don't "sell themselves" -- not in today's digital age with so much noise. You of all people should know this, Aestu.


It's not an absence of morals, it's just business. Something I'm convinced you know little about.

Also, one thing I think you're forgetting.

SEO is not clogging up the internet...the internet is as free as it ever was. Anyone can make a web site.

However, Google, Bing, others...decided to try to categorize all those web sites and "rank" them to help people find what is relevant.

If someone is searching for "nanny daycares in boston" - Google can try to "rank" the best ones...but it will be imperfect. Besides, who's to say which nanny daycare should be ranked #1 and get the most traffic? The biggest one? The cheapest one? The one with the best reviews by single mothers?

By hating on SEO, you're hating on the very nature of competition. The daycare that ranks first will have the most opportunities to get new kids to enroll. This is undeniable fact.


I will only agree with your SEO view if someone has a site that is not a boston nanny daycare at all and is just complete spam. Then, I'll agree that person use illegitimate SEO practices and is clogging up the internet. But SEO is a legitimate way to promote a good or service.

Last comment...since you think I don't believe in anything.

I believe in the value of legitimate white hat SEO. You can argue with me until you're blue in the face, but you are just wrong here.


Let me know if you ever set up an online writing/contracting service btw. I'll work on your web site for free.

Unless of course you believe you could get ranked and get loads of traffic and work without anyone being able to find your site....then by all means, don't let me bother you with my shyster ways.

You should help me with my Yogurt business' website for free. My boss already got scammed for a lot by a large marketing firm :/

And by free I mean I'll give you free yogurt for life we have Philly area stores so close to your hometown if I remember correctly

I almost accepted a job at a large SEO firm...the trouble with a lot of them is they don't know their ass from their elbow, and make a lot of grandiose promises just to get contracts for a few months until they are fired for not producing any results.


In all seriousness, I'd take a look at your site and give you some ideas no problem. PM me if you want.

Thanks. I appreciate it.

You are doing what you always do when you know you are dead wrong, which is being long-winded and adopting a pedantic tone.

You try to portray SEO as a competitive practice. It's not. SEO is inherently anti-competition, because it inherently favors weak products backed by established interests. SEO perverts the market and cost structure such that a strong startup product is a disadvantage against a weak established product. That is not good for anyone except incompetent businesses and SEO workers.

Google is actively opposed to SEO because it undermines the value of the service they provide for free, as well as their main revenue stream: selling promotional placing. SEO is an unintended and undesired consequence of Google that adds nothing to the value of their product; in fact it detracts from what defines its value: empirical relevance. If SEO was allowed to do its thing, no one would Google because there would be no point, you'd only see what someone wants you to see, rather than what reality actually is. You might as well watch content consisting entirely of advertisements and promotional materials, like midday TV or Parade magazine. This is the same reason TV and print media are on the decline.

In your cute hypothetical situation, you narrow the scope of your inquiry to this one person. What you are deliberately ignoring is that this hypothetical one person only needs SEO because everyone else is doing it too. If there was a crackdown on the practice, it would remove a business expense, offer customers a better choice of cheaper products, and lower barriers to marketplace entry. This is why payola and graft were banned: because those rackets add useless expenses to business and interfere with consumer choice. SEO is no different.

The Mafia describes itself as a "business". So do practitioners of payola. No one thinks of those criminals as businessmen, because legitimate business is productive, and organized crime, payola, graft and SEO are not. Likewise, Mafiosos and other criminals always justify their actions on the basis of the world being imperfect. If you ask them why they are crooks they will always answer that it's a rough world and they're doing what they gotta do to get by. It's the lowest sort of justification there is.

To use such a justification simply means that those people have no value system beyond their own self-interest. That is the very definition of being amoral.

Aestu of Bleeding Hollow...

Nihilism is a copout.

Gawker is shitty and not good, their "reporting" is a ridiculous farce, Buzzfeed is also trash.

The Oatmeal is 90% not funny but occasionally makes me chuckle, so I'm siding with them out of principle. That said, this is a retard fight. Both sides are using mostly ad hominems and unverifiable personal testimony. I honestly don't care who has the moral high ground, because I long since stopped following links owned by Gawker or Buzzfeed, and I never read the Oatmeal unless it was posted on reddit.

Plus, search engines who discover SEO practices are within their rights to knock you down.

If destruction exists, we must destroy everything.
Shuruppak Yuratuhl
Slaad Shrpk Breizh