This is how I want to go out.

In a giant long-winded incoherent unwinnable flame war against the best minds in my industry, hiding behind a flimsy mask of anonymity and dragging my business empire down further with every post until there's nothing left. Perfect. Beautiful.

I'm just biding my time until the right person calls me out...

I'm sure this gets said by thousands of geeks every day, but Matt Cutts is a cool guy. That was hilarious.

The funny (sad?) part is that I had a lot more material I could have used. The point was clear though, so no need to be mean.

My favorite line from the exchange:

I also was not able to find Matt Cutts in the Google employee directory.

Clearly the words of a true expert in Search...

He will be even cooler if he pushes for the feature to allow you to customise your Google searches and have a user-defined blacklist of sites.

I loved how Matt's response was mocking shady SEO techniques where you keep repeating keywords over and over. He placed the company name / website 10 times in his reply!

I don't know if this will have much effect on the SEO rankings, but it was very funny, and I wouldn't be surprised if the first Google result for "better placements" in a few day links to this story (all the social media attention will also help).

Good catch. The #1 result for "Better Placement" right now is the article this post links to!

bruben25's posts are remarkable in how they string together phrases that seem coherent in isolation, but when taken together are long, rambly, and impossible to follow. Skimming them, I have absolutely no idea what he's talking about half the time.

I would guess that maybe English is not their primary language? I would also imagine that they wrote each reply with their heart racing/eyes twitching as they realized the ship was going down at the hands of Google reps.

Yes, it's almost like auto-generated text.

I think the real take-away from this is to just stay legit. Don't try to do anything shady because it will most likely come back to bite you in the ass. The guy is actually pretty dumb for not realizing they could figure out who he was while using a handle that contains his real name.

I would hope that apart from staying legit, another take away from this be to know the market that you are in, know of some of the key people at those companies, or perhaps being able to find said information?

From the article it seems that the bruben25 SEO guy didn't do any research as to who Matt was, where as Matt quickly found out quite a bit of (public) information on who the SEO guy was.

Now who's the better Search expert?

Seems perfectly reasonable to me. Matt Cutts is an expert in search. B D Ruben is an expert in being found. Hence, Matt Cutts was able to find B D Ruben. No reason to expect it to work the other way around.

(For the avoidance of doubt: No, I am not serious. Yes, Ruben appears to be a dweeb. Yes, Matt Cutts is obviously very much smarter than he is.)

Indeed, everyone should learn who the key people are in their industry. It's almost unfathomable that bruben25 didn't know who Matt Cutts is, though. B Ruben seems to be on another plane of obliviousness. Everyone knows who Matt Cutts is. I think this speaks more to the fact that the guy really didn't do any legitimate SEO. People who are legitimate in SEO generally keep up with the trade publications, talk to people, and make connections.

Did you manage to read through the whole wall of text? Distinct impression of crazypants...

If you're asking if I read the entire article, yes I did. I don't know if the guy (bruben25) is actually crazy, but he certainly doesn't come off as the sharpest knife in the drawer.

Edit: I see what you're pointing to now (bruben25's wall of text in the Google Webmaster Central thread). I didn't actually read that but I'm checking it out now.

I looked at that original thread, and oh boy is that a lot of text. Obviously someone really wanted to defend their position and thought a lot of text would help make their point.

For a second there I thought that google decided to sink Demand Media before the IPO.

Why does this side load assets from twitter for every page scroll I do?

Googler's Exposé Of Sketchy SEO Company

or

Googlers Expose Sketchy SEO Company

Oops, just noticed that typo. Too late to edit that title now though, but either of those two work.

Which "SEO companies" aren't sketchy?

I don't know if this is a snarky, rhetorical question, but there are many legitimate SEO companies out there. SEOMoz is a good example. A general rule is, if they guarantee certain rankings, avoid them, if they offer "directory submission" services, avoid them.

As soon as they start talking about "link building" my spam sense tingles. The same for "social media optimization".

So what is left? Glorified mod_rewrite hackery?

/edit: That's not a flame. I'm just interested what non shady SEOs do. The last time I looked into SEO it was all about rearranging your HTML so the spider would get to the content fast. And to put nofollows on your links to get the juice flowing the way you wanted.

But this wasn't that complex that it justified hiring an expensive SEO company. Sure, they all did that link building stuff too - but as noted above to me that's shady (it was mostly about spamming digg-like sites with top 10/5 articles).

I've started working with an SEO on a few things and I've seen a few things he does. mod_rewrite hackery is a part of it, as is validated HTML,/CSS meaningful titles, reducing load times as much as possible (basically doing well in all Yslow tests), accessibility stuff and other bits & pieces (like generating XML sitemaps, product feeds for Google product search etc etc).

A lot of this should be covered by any half decent site but as you may not find surprising, most sites out there don't know or don't bother.

Link building and social media optimization aren't necessarily spam activities (but I can see why you might correlate the two; there are a lot of shady link building operators out there and a lot of social media charlatans, for lack of a better word.)

While there are a lot of technical pieces to SEO (that go beyond mod_rewrite hackery, as you put it), most legitimate SEOs spend as much time on the marketing side of the equation. There are a few legitimate link building "tricks" out there, but most SEOs doing a good job at link building & social activities are focused on creating worthy content that ranks well in search and gets attention on social media sites.

BTW, nofollowing links to "sculpt" the way PageRank flows through your site doesn't work anymore - nofollow now "evaporates" the PageRank rather than forcing more of it through the other links on your page :)

Link building has all to do with making content that people find interesting enough to link to/talk about on social networks, and designing it to get links from certain types of sites with certain types of anchor text. As far as I know, Google is quite happy with that particular part of the SEO process, and it's firmly white hat.

> Link building has all to do with making content that people find interesting enough to link to/talk about on social networks

Shouldn't that be the aim of any website? Being interesting so people like the site and talk about it?