I think alot of the other posters would agree it’s not the SEO that are slimy it’s the people hiring them. The SEO’s are just trying to provide a service, just like the the neighborhood video store with a porn section in the back. They do it because there are poeple looking for it but they run their business with the real content up front.
Who would have thought so many SEO fanboy marketeers would read this blog? And who would have thought they were such sensitive souls? 
hehe
@Boris -
“But then come up with a name that’s not linked to tainted/gaming/slimy techniques for the “good” people in the industry.”
That’s not really a bright suggestion. The phrase SEO way predates the stigma that the shysters have caused to be associated with it. What do you do afterwards, license out to who can and cannot refer to themselves by this “new name”?
The problem is not even that the mass majority of SEO professionals are scam artists, or the web equivalent of used car salesmen. It is a problem of what sticks out in the average webmasters mind… the bad aftertaste that comes from either getting screwed or reading about someone else who did.
The major glaring flaw with the association being made between porn and seo is that 100% of pornographers engage in what is viewed as a less than moral field. As has been pointed out, making the same sweeping statement about an entire industry is obviously nothing more that a somewhat slimy attempt to garner attention. Attention seeking tactics are not in and of themselves a bad thing, just when they can only be gotten through an attempt to smear others.
Now, all that being said… wtf is wrong with porn?
Wow. You are really making a huge generalization here. I think a distinction needs to be made between Search Engine Optimization as a profession and search engine optimization as a skill set.
SEOs are professionals, many of whom are highly valued employees for respected companies. In fact, I’d be really surprised to hear of any large companies that don’t have an in house SEO these days.
I am not a SEO. I am a programmer/ web developer. I do, however, try to keep up to date on all aspects of search engine optimization, because I know how important it is.
There are also a lot of other people who know and use SEO, including spammers. Yes there are people who just spam for a living, and many of them use SEO techniques to manipulate search results.
On Social Media: If a “SEO” submits a story to a social bookmarking site, and it becomes popular, then maybe it’s just a good article. Otherwise, why would people keep voting for it?
On SEO being useless: Search engines wouldn’t really work so well if people didn’t optimize pages for them:
How many of the 33,700,000 pages here – (http://www.google.com/search?q=untitled+document ) might contain some really great content that will never be found, just because the author didn’t know how to optimize their pages to help search engines rank them.
The early-adopter aspect is really the only part of the comparison that holds up (that, and both SEO-ers and pornographers are scum). Pornographers are producing a commodity, one that’s been in quite high demand for 150 years apparently. SEOs just exploit a market inefficiency. They’re really very different.
Jeff, I think you’re April fools post should have been the most ludicrous comparison you could have cooked up, but then you should have written an actual article for it so that people would have no idea if you were joking or not. Actually, you’re next article should just be a contest for who can come up with the best Codding Horror article title, then you should write a serious-sounding article for the winner. Then get it on Digg.
I’ll kick things off. I know these suck, so let’s see somebody do better:
J2ME Programming as Organic Farming
Web Development as Public Urination
The Open Source Community is the New Catholic Church
This all leads me to one question: Who’s our Gordon Gekko?
Jeff, I can’t believe how wrong you are on this one.
Using SEO as you term it is one small part of the SEO business. MOST people doing SEO are employed, legitimtely, to increase their client’s website exposure, and therefore to get their client’s more sales. And by clients, I mean every day, run-of-the-mill businesses, trying to make money through their website.
Saying that SEOers are pornographers is akin to saying that all photographers are pornographers becase a small percentage of them take porn photos. It’s just plain wrong. You’re giving SEOers a bad name.
I usually value your opinion, but in this case, you need to look past all the big-number cheques and Diggs and do some better research.
There are thousands of perfectly legitimate SEO companies out there doing good work for their customers and helping them grow their business.
By the way, it’s Google that makes the real money from the people you mention - these SEOs just get a cut. Does that mean that Google is the ‘Playboy’ empire of search engines?
ps. if this post isn’t link-bait, I don’t know what is.
SEO isn’t a skill; this is basic HTML Web Development 101.
In that case, maybe you should change the title of this post to:
“HTML Developers: the New Pornographers of the Web” ?
Calcanis’ bitching is hilarious, given I’ve seen the companies internal mailing list for Weblogs Inc. drones. Every other post is “Please digg this” and a link to some worthless post on one of their pointless websites.
Link baiting makes you feel like your in a sewer huh? We this article put you there.
As a developer/programmer who has seen and surely written many “coding horrors” in the past, I have enjoyed and valued your blog as entertainment and a resource. However, this post is just babbling at the mouth of a ludicrous apples to oranges analogy. I hope this is just a perverted test of “link baiting”, and not your true beliefs on SEO, or insight into your lack of true web development experience.
As a long-time “web developer” myself, and I assume to some degree you are as well with your occassional web related post, you must have been asked to write “SEO” type code at some point in your career. You even provided a “SEO tip” in your February post concerning URL Rewriting to Prevent Duplicate URLs (http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000797.html). While you may have not mentioned “search engine optimization” in your post, you did talk about the benefit of the solution and “page rank”. I guess this begs the question if you are a pornographer, or merely the porn star?
The simple fact is, there are alot of HORRIBLE architectured websites with valuable information on them that are never seen in the search engines because the developers of these sites do not understand how search engines and indexing works or do not care. Regardless if you are compensated for your SEO knowledge/skills, it is our duty as web developers to ensure that our sites are properly optimized to be search engine friendly so PEOPLE can find them.
Because I dabble in SEO for clients from time to time, does that make me a pornographer? Only if I build porn websites for them IMO. Personally, I have only built one of the SEO 3 P’s (Porn, Pills, and Poker), and porn was not one of them. Anyone want to “bet” on which one. You have a 50/50 chance of winning 
If someone want to compensate my web development AND search engine optimization skills for cold hard cash, you can call me a pornographer or just a plain whore, I don’t care as long as I can continue to put food on the table.
SEOs just exploit a market inefficiency
SEOs exploit people’s greed. Who needs good, relevant content when you have linkbait and magical SEO pixie dust?
it is our duty as web developers to ensure that our sites are properly optimized to be search engine friendly so PEOPLE can find them
That’s right: SEO isn’t a skill; this is basic HTML Web Development 101. Make sure your pages have title tags… avoid postbacks… use simple URLs.
I’ll agree that many web developers don’t understand this, but many web developers are also terrible developers.
HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA. Excellent! Linkbaiting the linkbaiters! Just look at all those links piling up. Show all those “SEOs” that you know more about “SEO” than they ever will, Jeff. Never let facts get in the way of a great linkbait.
basic HTML Web Development 101. (…) use simple URLs.
For example, not
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000835.html
but rather
http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/SEOs_the_New_Pornographers_of_the_Web.html
I’ll agree that many web developers don’t understand this, but
many web developers are also terrible developers.
Well, yeah… But like the example above, nobody can know everything about web development. That doesn’t make them terrible developers.
It is true, however, that anyone should take a SEO “consultant”'s claims with the same amount of salt that you use for any other consultant. Anyone promising to make you the most visited site on the planet is lying.
The fact is that most of their advice is quite “common sense but not commonly known” when you think about it. I mean, you can surely see that my suggestion about different url’s will give you more keyword matches in Google (as we put semantic content in the url, it will match the url as well as the page contents), but if I had just made you pay $10,000 for that knowledge you would surely feel ripped off.
Finally, there is no silver bullet. (Otherwise every site would end up No 1 for every search.) So no one should expect to get that from a SEO.
I never understand why people pay for SEOs, when all ya need to do is simple basic HTML adjustments that any competent person can do.
Also, in terms of content, how difficult is it to understand that keywords, phrases, and relevant content is utmost important? It’s like writing an essay at University level.
It’s common sense once ya know the very basics.
“I never understand why people pay for SEOs, when all ya need to do is simple basic HTML adjustments that any competent person can do.”
Well clearly, it’s not that simple. There is a lot to know about SEO. That’s why people employ SEOs, and SEOs exist.
im not a seo godamnit!
brilliant
All the SEO explanations I read seem trivial to me. Advertising is scum, yah, and we should all see if you haven’t “The Truth In Advertising.”
Regarding the companies that don’t want to learn SEO and helping them, the helping is really boiling down to, use online tools provided easily by Google to help with Google indexing, put a title on your webpages, this is how robots.txt and meta tags work – Google’s algorithm indexes by number of uses of words and who’s linking to you – all in all, if you didn’t know these things you simply just fail at web development. It’s true that tools like Dreamweaver, even MS Word now can be used to generate a website and everybody wants their own page (myspace’s success) but I see it as peripheral web development services.
I’ve used Google Adsense, and Adwords and MSN marketing and Yahoo! marketing and text link ads to promote some of the projects I’ve worked on but I wouldn’t call myself a SEO guy. Just purchased advertising – and for people who don’t know those kind of things, you really just have A LOT to learn about web development/using the web.
I made the mistake of subscribing to some RSS feeds for these SEM/SEO guys, and it’s just repetitions of basic web development coupled with complete crap on how to manipulate the public. The world changed in the early 1900s as public relations took hold, and the focus groups, and not for the better. Thank you Adblock.
For the 6 years I have been providing search optimization services to clients, I can safely say that while these business owners were all motivated to invest in their websites by the opportunity to avail their businesses of the traffic that Google brought together into a single market, not one of them was of the mindset that they would gladly smear their own reputation for a few more sales.
It strikes me as very similar to consultant bashing when I read these anti-SEO themes. We provide an experienced and valuable service for other business owners whose lives and livelihoods are buoyed by the growing market of search traffic and the potential customers that grow it. We are working with real businesses to attract an interested audience to their place of E-Business and if it was easy or all a big scam, could the SEO industry survive? Find a company that wants to provide a service and you’ve found a partner whether they print your menus or master your website.
Seriously, how are you gonna sit there and badmouth an entire industry of web service providers? Think of mechanics. Do you blame the uninformed repair customer for choosing a chop shop? Remember that good news travels fast and bad news travels faster. The companies on the first page of Google in natural results aren’t the ones complaining about it are they? I feel sympathy for every business that has been Sold rather than Taught, and I offer a bit of my time to show you the difference.