Calling 90 percent of the SEO industry “snake oil salesmen” riled up one famed search professional; Danny Sullivan has hit back hard at Jason Calacanis for his continued attacks on SEO.
There’s enough bad feeling in the world without adding to it with some uninformed commentary. The SEO industry wasn’t happy the first time Jason suggested the industry was bull, and they aren’t happy being discussed as though all of them are swindlers and grifters.
The kerfuffle stems from a really obnoxious video highlighted as how not to do SEO, in a post at Pronet Advertising. Despite Muhammad Saleem noting the video as an example of why Digg and other social sites dislike SEO, Jason took it the next step:
The SEO folks got really pissed off at me for saying “SEO is bulls@#t.” last year, but the truth is that 90% of the SEO market is made up of snake oil salesman. These are guys in really bad suits trying to get really naive people to sign long-term contracts. These clients typically make horrible products and don’t deserve traffic–that’s why they’re not getting it organically so they hire the slimebuckets to game the system for them.
Now Jason wants to do a “Calacanis cast” with various SEO-types. Let’s hope he invites Danny to participate, and that Danny can join in the fun. Because Danny’s response to Jason at Search Engine Land has all the fireworks one would want to see. Here’s a sampler:
…you and other thought-leaders are often too ignorant and too lazy to fully understand something you want to attack.
You’re dead wrong, and you insulted (and continue to insult) a lot of good people with such wide-ranging generalizations.
They might have accepted the criticism if you knew what you were talking about. But you didn’t.
I’ll come back to the it’s just “solid web design” and smack you upside the face about that, which you so richly deserve.
If there is a process to vote for thought leaders, the SEO community probably wants to start a recall campaign for Jason.
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