Who Creates Fud In The Seo Market Place? Options

[bwelford]

In writing a recent piece on SEO love and hate, I realized that an instinctive reaction I had was wrong.

You'll see many people who feel that SEO is marketed using FUD, that's Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt. The assumption is that all those spamming emails you receive offering to get you on the first page of Google use this. You must have thousands of web pages and thousands of back links or you will not achieve this obviously important ranking.

I realized in writing that the biggest creator of FUD in this scenario is Google itself. In some ways there was a similar FUD situation some years back when DMOZ.org (remember that) was widely touted to be an important place to be listed. DMOZ was overwhelmed by the volume of requests and given its very human editors it had to work behind an impenetrable wall. You got no feed back and you would only know you were listed when you were listed. Some had really nail-biting times around that one.

Luckily Google now finds so many good links that DMOZ no longer creates FUD for anyone. Unfortunately this now much more important entity is very DMOZ-like in its behaviour. It clearly can only deal with scaleable solutions, which means all significatnt interactions particularly for SMBs and entrepreneurs will only occur via computer communications. People in consequence are now biting their nails back to their elbows. If you unknowingly do something that puts an X against your website, you may not even be aware but the consequences can be disastrous.

To give Google its due, it does provide a full armory of tools to help you figure out whether you should be worrying. Unfortunately once Google has a URL in its index, it is sometimes elephant-like in its ability to keep it around even though it may be erroneous and have been corrected in real life.

Perhaps it's inevitable that such a huge enterprise will create FUD. What do you think? Could they avoid this in some way that would work?

[AbleReach]

Sorry, Barry, I can't get beyond "FUD" being the first three letters in chocolate FUDGE.

I do think that there will be the dynamic of which you speak around anything that is important but hard to control. A lot of advertising uses this, even the warm and welcoming ads. Look for fear, and you'll see it everywhere.

When a business relies on search engine rankings to survive, anything that seems like it might help with SEO may be a real find. Snake oil will happen, as unscrupulous marketers try to take advantage. The same thing goes for cancer cures and any number of areas where we can't do it all on our own, or don't want to.

Every perceived need is an opportunity for someone who has solutions to that need.

The more desperate and naive someone is, the worse their judgment will be. That's one reason why forums like this are essential - we know our stuff, we don't mind disagreeing with each other, we're not here to sell something.

[Michael_Martinez]

Barry, please don't make me think while I'm at work. It's distracting.

[EGOL]

I view Google as the ultimate opportunity. If you make a website and get just one link into it then you are off on an adventure with visitors. If you have done a great job then the visitors will reward you by telling others about what you have built. That can bring links and other kudos that will result in higher Google rankings and even more visitors from Google.

Yes, it is primarily an automated system with Type I and Type II errors. And occasionally people make dumb mistakes that put them at odds with the algo.

Anyone, however, who has an important website and depends upon Google traffic should invest in himself to learn more of how this works so he can take advantage of the opportunity and minimize the possibility that he will make an damaging error. It's part of your duty to yourself. Competent internet marketing professionals can help a person with these jobs.

I think that Google is getting better at hearing appeals and reinclusion requests - and again, competent internet marketing professionals should be able to help in most cases.

[Ron Carnell]

FUD, I think, is just another word for entropy, Barry. It doesn't need a cause; it simply exists. Like entropy, FUD requires a tremendous input of energy to combat, but nothing ever eradicates it. The minute the energy is withdrawn, FUD rushes back in like the evening tides.

People in consequence are now biting their nails back to their elbows. If you unknowingly do something that puts an X against your website, you may not even be aware but the consequences can be disastrous.

What you're describing, Barry, is SEH ... Search Engine Hypochondria. Just like the better known medical kind, people read about a horrible malady and then start seeing symptoms in everything they do. Nine hundred ninety nine times out of a thousand, it's just their imagination running away with them. Unless you're intentionally doing drugs or playing in traffic, good health is more of a rule than the exception. Search engine penalties (barring drugs and traffic) are relatively rare.

[jonbey]

There is also so much bad advice, that many people just get confused. Less fear, more uncertainty. When I started building my first site and using Adsense to generate the revenue, so many people on the forums that was reading at the time were saying that Adsense was useless, and many complaining that their accounts had been closed by Google. Now I know that this is simply because these people were all dimwits. At the time, I really got the impression that Adsense was a waste of time. Places like this forum help to keep people on track.

A lot of the other problems are simple people jumping on the SEO Services bandwagon. Often they know almost nothing about SEO itself, they are just salesman with a pc and an out of date list of methods.

SEO likes its hats, white and black. There should be a new term, Old Hat SEO, for all the people that are still keyword stuffing, messing about with META tags, hidden text and using nothing but link directories. There are still many about it seems.

Regulation. Maybe there should be a body that regulates people that work online, that is separate from any of the major search companies. Then people can use my, I mean our, stamp to show the world that they perform the latest SEO hat tricks, not black, not old, not stupid.

I am rambling, please forgive me.

oh yeah, one last thing, don't forget about the FUDWatch on Search Engines group over at Ning.

This post has been edited by jonbey: Mar 10 2010, 04:23 AM

[EGOL]

Jonbey, I think that you have hit the roots of this topic.....

Bad advice, dimwits, unqualified SEOs, uncertainty.

People don't know who to listen to or who to hire to work on their site.

I have people in my town ask me how to succeed with google and then their designer gets insulted by my advice and he is the one who really controls their site. So all of the good advice in the world is going to get lost on a business who is married to an unqualified designer.

So, really... I don't think Google is the root of this. The root is people who don't understand.

[A.N.Onym]

I agree that lack of information/knowledge among businessmen is what is actually the reason FUD exists. I doubt any seasoned SEO believes what Google has to say.

Then again, how can you scale Google support to millions of business owners? Business owners have to learn the Internet marketing field themselves, not rely on Google and do nothing. That's why I admire Dave (Earlpearl), who knows SEO better, than the majority of the other forum goers, and is pretty confident with Google.