Gene Marks, BusinessWeek Columnist, Says SEO Not Important

Writing by Nick Stamoulis on Tuesday, 8 of January , 2008 at 10:10 am

I’ve never heard of anyone saying SEO wasn’t important. I’ve met people who had no interest or made no pretensions about understanding it. But I’ve never met anyone who said it wasn’t necessary. Until now.

Gene Marks, SEO Genius Of BusinessWeek
Gene Marks is a columnist for BusinessWeek so even when he’s wrong people listen. And he’s all kinds of wrong in this January 4 article in BusinessWeek.

Besides being wrong about SEO, Gene Marks is also wrong about a lot of other things in this article. But I’m going to focus on SEO. Here’s a snippet of genius from Gene Marks’ brilliance in BW:

You mean for $5,000 I can get my company’s name on the very top of Google’s search results? Where do I sign? Many business owners have been fooled by the allure of search engine optimization (SEO)—and I’m one of them. I forked over a bunch of dough to a firm in California that promised to get my company’s name on “all the major search engines” when someone was looking for products that we sell. How did they plan to do this? I’m still not really sure, but it had something to do with spiders, black hats, and link farms. That should’ve been enough of a hint that witchcraft was involved. After a brief flirtation with page 47 of MSN’s search results, I gave up. SEO probably does the job for companies with oodles of money, but not for the typical small business.

Here’s the problem. He’s right about spending $5,000 for shoddy SEO work. There are way too many SEOs out there who will overcharge, over promise, and under deliver. But I believe most of us pretty good folks who just want to eat and we provide a valuable service for a fair price.

Gene Marks was obviously taken to the cleaners by a black hat SEO. Well, I’m sorry. That shouldn’t have happened. I apologize on behalf of my fellow SEOs and myself. We’re not all that bad. But don’t throw out the baby with the bathwater. That’s almost as bad.

“I’m still not really sure, but it had something to do with spiders, black hats, and link farms. That should’ve been enough of a hint that witchcraft was involved.”

Here’s a clue: Spiders aren’t bad. All the search engines have them. They need them to crawl websites so they can do their jobs of indexing them.

Black hats are the bad guys. Remember those old westerns? Good guys wore white hats and bad guys wore black hats. Well, here in the wild west of cyberspace, we call good SEOs white hats and bad SEOs black hats. If someone calls himself a black hat then walk away.

Even more of a clue: Link farms are evil. You’ll never rank anywhere if you list your website on link farms. If Gene Marks did that it would explain the page 47 listing. If anyone ever tells you that he is planning to list your site on a link farm, get the hell out! That’s a sure way to disaster.

SEO Is Not Witchcraft, Gene
OK, so all SEOs aren’t on the up and up. We’re not witchcraft or charlatans. Not all of us. But neither are all used car salesmen. Neither are all news weekly columnists. But some are. So how do you protect yourself from the bad guys?

• First, ask a lot of questions. Be sure you understand what they are going to do before you hire them.
• Never accept work from someone who calls himself a black hat SEO or who plans to use link farms
• Don’t believe it when they tell you they’ll get you Page 1 or No. 1 listings on Google. That’s the biggest lie in show business - well, the biggest lie in SEO any way.
• Get a rundown of the specific measures your SEO is planning to take to improve your search engine results. Do some reading on your own and learn whether or not those practices are considered legitimate white hat SEO practices. A good source of information are the official blogs of each of the major search engines.
• SEO does not have to be expensive. $5,000? What do you get for that? Make sure the SEO firm you are considering can justify the price they are charging.

Want to see where else Gene Marks is wrong? Read about it here.

Category: SEO, SEO Myths

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