My response to the Verge on SEOs and Alligators.

The Verge, SEO, and Comment Deletion.

Image: Midjourney AI.

I posted this in the comments on the Verge’s SEO Slam piece yesterday. If you have not read it, you can at the link below. Although it is very long, so you may want to go grab your favorite beverage before you begin.

Verge Article: “The people who ruined the internet”

As I was reading the responses to my comment to the piece, it was deleted in real-time. It has not come back as of this writing. Not sure why my specific comment was censored. It was no different in tone than other comments, and it did not violate any terms and conditions. I did post early in the comments (There were very few at the time, there are now more than 100), so maybe that had something to do with it.

Either way, I am posting it here.

The piece, though very well written, was very poorly framed and erroneous in many places. It also had little to do with SEO and was more about Affiliate Marketing, people who use SEO but are in an industry among themselves and though tangentially related with some overlaps, are also mostly separate from the traditional SEO industry now.

Additional Comments.

• My Twitter thread.
  https://x.com/schachin/status/1719771909997641843?s=20
• Danny Sullivan, one of the SEO OGs, now from Google, posted his thoughts after being unfairly attacked in the article. (MY POV)
  https://dannysullivan.com/thoughts-verge-article-seo-6558
• As did Barry Schwartz, an absolute legend in our arena.
  https://www.seroundtable.com/seos-google-didnt-ruin-the-internet-36314.html

My comment.
Copied before posting.

Note: grammar and punctuation are informal at best since it was as intended as a comment not an article, however for the purpose of maintaining its integrity I am not changing those errors here.

Comment.
“I know almost every person you mentioned in that article and some very well. Your take is a poor one. There are things in here that are literally not true or inaccurate. Especially about how Google works. You’re also talking mostly about affiliate marketing which is not the same as regular SEO.

They use SEO tactics to make money I however help companies keep people employed because I make sure that Google doesn’t take their traffic away.

You talk about clickbait and then you create it.

Now I’m not saying everything you said is untrue, but it’s your framework that is broken. You didn’t interview anyone about the SEO person who went and stayed with a SEO and her husband for months because she was paralyzed and they needed help — did you? You didn’t talk about how when I started in 2004 and it was heavily male dominated how they also opened up all the doors for me — did you? No. You didn’t talk about how until very recently SEOs were very much like a family, a dysfunctional family, but a family. We helped each other out.

So many instances of that. But you didn’t cover that either did you?

I can’t tell you how many times someone’s life was going one way and the SEO Community stepped up to help that person and make sure that they didn’t crash. You didn’t cover that did you? You had an angle for this article and you wrote it. Thanks for making our jobs a bit harder for writing about something from one perspective and not a fair one. And by the way EEAT isn’t in the ranking signals you can look it up Google says it themselves. It’s just a concept.

And yes, Search is far worse today. In fact it’s the worst I’ve ever seen it, you’ll see my tweets calling out Google for being so bad just this week.

Google is what changed in Search. Google is the one putting machine learning in Search, which is what is breaking it. Google is the one that determines how the search engine goes. Can you blame people for taking advantage of it so they don’t have to struggle their whole lives? Unfortunately I’m not one of those people, there are a lot of people like me who don’t spam the engine. In fact probably 80% of the industry is like me because we’re not working on affiliate sites. Because what we do is we work hard for clients or companies to make sure they don’t fail. Because SEO stand between people getting hired and people getting fired.

If I do my job well, the company site stays healthy and people get hired and keep their jobs. If I do my job poorly, people get fired. I have rescued so many sites from those devastating algorithms like Panda and Penguin. Giving people back their companies.

In fact as soon as I post this and go get my breakfast, I will be giving an audit to someone so that they can recover their site. They can save their business.

You didn’t cover any of that though did you? No because you had an angle and you wrote from that instead of doing true journalism.

The SEO industry is filled with some of the most fascinating interesting and kind people I have known in my lifetime.

That’s why so many of us are lifelong friends. Now are there grifters and con men? Sure. Just like any industry especially one that works off a black box. However, people making money off affiliate marketing? There’s nothing wrong with that and the people that do regular SEO like most of us don’t make millions. We work very hard, in an industry where you have to learn everything on your own and with your network of friends, to do the best work we can.

And there are very few industries where the knowledge base changes literally every day sometimes multiple times a day. So after I work my 8 to 10 hours I must also read and keep up with what’s going on EVERY DAY. I also speak and write for the industry so most of us are also contributors to the industry. Most of it unpaid.

Now, I do feel very fortunate to be in a position where people will pay for my travel to go to somewhere, like Amsterdam this summer, to speak. However most of our contributions are unpaid and because we want to be part of the group of people that help others in our industry.

Your article took one very narrow narrow slice of 25+ year and made it into a great clickbait piece. But in doing this you ignored the essence of what SEOs do and what the industry is about.

You are a very good writer though. I will give you that. I didn’t even hear about the alligator.”

Final Thought.

SEOs are used to publications writing about SEOs from a negative viewpoint, and as in this case they also usually confuse the Affiliate Marketing industry with mainstream SEO. I am sure it is way more fun to write about. Affiliate Marketing is much sexier.

Now, Affiliate Marketers may be SEOs too, but Affiliate Marketing is not SEO. Affiliate Marketers do use SEO techniques. However, the main business is solely about making money off of websites they create. SEO helps them achieve these goals. SEO however, is about helping companies stay in line with Google’s state best practices so they perform better in Search. This may be related to making money or not. The goal is to create better websites for users and Google, not all sites are ecommerce related.

These are two very different sides of the SEO coin.

This article was not only conflating SEO and Affiliate Marketing, but it also utilized examples from over 20 years ago, techniques that would not work today. The writer presented a very sensationalized version of an industry that does not exist in that form anymore and for most of us, never existed at all.

It did a great disservice to those of us who work very hard to do the best job we can for our clients.

The Verge should do better in the future.
Much better.
__

Verge Moderator’s Response to My Comment Being Removed.

The Verge responded about why they removed the comment. They did not seem to like being called out about writing clickbait in an article full of it or me questioning their journalism in an article with little of it.

The writer writes very well, but this was clickbait and it was not journalism, which to me is about writing what is factual not what is not and fitting facts to fit your narrative.

Please read the article if you have time, so you know what I was responding to in my comment.

For transparency, here is the reason, from the moderators, that the comment was removed.

NOTE: I reposted because I was not told it was removed, so I thought there was a glitch as I was reading it when it disappeared.