You heard it right.  Fuck SEO all over the place.

I don’t like SEO anymore. “SEO” the term has been vilified and bludgeoned to death because of its constant redefinitions and wacko interpretations.  I’m constantly amazed  at some of the utter tripe I am exposed to in my daily internet meanderings, that I’m not surprised when so many of the general audience think that “SEO” is synonymous with sleaze and snake oil.  When SEO companies are marketing themselves as an ETHICAL firm, you know there is somebody pissing in the industry coca-cola.  Although there are fantastic internet marketing shops and experts out there, the rise in the dufus firms is frightening, if not downright dangerous for the site owners who parlay with them.

My gripe is not new and I am not the first person in the online field to rant about “the state of SEO.” or “SEO is dead.”  For the record, I don’t think that Search Engine Optimization is dead, in fact my business requires my understanding and implementation of it.  I’m a fan of search optimization.  But the “SEO” brand in and of itself is something I’m just not interested in anymore.  How can I care about an acronym that’s completely misused and misunderstood by people who are more interested in the “SEO fame game” than anything else?  In the interest of becoming famous, those partaking  will blog, speak and holler the most bombastically fruity information in their ever-expanding attempts at getting a landing on sphinn.  I’ve got some mad respect for badass Sugarrae, and on an interview on seobook, she hit the nail on the head.

SEO Bloggers are like reality TV stars… Most don’t have the talent, they just have the platform to pretend they do.

Kinda like, “I’m  not real SEO, I just play one on the internet.”

In a sense, I’m glad that more and more people understand and respect the need for a proper search optimization initiative, and that’s due to the awesome work  of some respected authorities in the field informing the rest of us on good practices.  However, the proliferation of get rich quick, adsense millions, easy money scams has enamored a set of misled individuals into believing that they are SEO super heroes.  It’s incredible to me that one can get a blog and a twitter account and suddenly brand themselves as  “expert” SEO and Social Media Consultants who wouldn’t know what qualified traffic is if it came and sat on their face and wiggled.  This flood of inaccuracy is part and parcel to my estrangement from the term.

A few weeks ago I read a post called “7 Red Flags that Reveal to Google You’re an SEO Criminal – Avoid These!“  Now, I think Gyutae Park is a competent search advocate, but this post in particular, in my opinion, completely misfires.  This conversation, in this framework, is all wrong, i.e., aligning search optimization with criminal behavior.

I’m sorry, but WTF?  Spamming the search engines is what one should avoid (unless you have ten thousand urls you can burn, but that’s another blog post).  In my opinion, the whole premise for this post is improper, let alone some of the points made.

While Google’s business is to return highly relevant search results that provide value to users, SEOs seek to reverse engineer the algorithm and manipulate rankings for their own gain.

Not a fair statement, and a little lacking in a correlation to facts.  Although Google indeed might be targeting seo’s, I would trust Michael Gray or Outspoken Media with any of my sites, and I know for a fact that they get awesome results for their clients.  These trusted experts are hired as advocates for websites where the owners know that they have what it takes to responsibly make the argument to the algorithm that their site is authoritative for a set of related keywords.   Or take this analogy, I wouldn’t even dare to go to court and represent myself, so I hire a good lawyer.  C’mon dude?!?  Link bait is one thing, but polluting the conversation is not right.  And there is more of this SEO criminality in the rest of the post, and the ensuing comments did not make matters any better.  When Todd Malicoat, another expert I’d trust with any site I own, makes the following comments on sphinn;

It’s discussions like this, why I decided it was probably best if I didn’t write things for the “seo community” much anymore.  Topics like this really make me want to rebrand “what I do”, even though I’ve always been PROUD to be an seo (little less so, when I read things like this).

I’ve got to agree.  It’s disheartening for this kind of karma to be out there.

A recent series of events has also attributed to my hatred of the term “SEO”.  I attended a local meet-up of search and internet people.  At first, I was really excited about hopefully meeting some interesting people and seeing who is out there in the Miami search and internet industry, and for the most part, it was cool.   Except that I had these two conversations that emphasized my belief that it is becoming too easy for a person to think they are an expert at Super Deluxe Super Hero Rockstar SEO.

In the first one, I meet a young and energetic dude who introduces himself to me enthusiastically to proclaim his prowess and seo stylings.  Telling me he’s been doing SEO for 5 years, he is really experienced at all this badass seo stuff and I should read his blogspot blog to see all the people he’s helped.

Blogspot blog, check.

The conversation turns to research and practices, wherein I mention a cool article by Danny Sullivan on Twitter and business cards.  The response.  “Who’s Danny Sullivan?’  Taking a step back so I could catch up with my shoes, I realize that it is entirely possible for someone to work in the search industry and NOT know who Danny Sullivan is, though if you are interested in expanding your skills past the sandbox, start knowing who he is ..now.  But to work in the search field, supposedly for five years, and not know who he just doesn’t make sense to me.

As a follow up, I also met up with another online expert, this time in website usability factors..  Again, as the conversation progressed, I found a blank stare for the words A/B testing, and an even blanker stare when I mentioned Kim Krause Berg, and a straight admission that she’s (NOT KIM KRAUSE BERG, the girl I was speaking too) never heard of eye tracking or heat map testing.  The usability expertise she proclaimed might actually be effective, but the value of it, in my eyes, went down.

Story time.  When I was a kid, about 14, I picked up the bass guitar.  I actually got pretty good; played in bands, jammed with some stars, got signed to a label on Tuesday, dropped the following Friday, all that stuff.  But when I had just picked up my bass, about a month later I knew who Stanley Clark, Bootsy Collins, Charles Mingus, and this up and coming badass Jaco Pastorius was.  I was intrigued with my instrument and the environment of it best practitioners.  This enthusiasm for the  professional bass – playing community was something I shared when I first started trying to get sites ranked, and I followed forums and articles.  My experience “coming up” was definitely during the internet wild west days,  when industry experts were first making names for themselves, but to be a professional in any industry and not know who the top players are just doesn’t imply validity to me.

Let’s put this out on the table; I don’t consider myself an seo expert, always more of a student and fan.  Search optimization is not something you learn in one sitting.  I’m learning something new everyday, and relearning something every other day.  I’ll even venture to bet that most of the seo rock-star set, those who earned their reputation from years of hard work, learn something new everyday as well.  Search is a shifting art form, with the rules being changed, sometimes on a daily basis.   But it seems that all of a  sudden, one wordpress installation makes someone the chief SEO bigshit at NASA.

And sometimes, people who should know better are the cause of the maligning of search.  I think these individuals have a perceived authority entitlement to either scream out their mistreatment at the hands of search suggestions (IMO because their intelligence suddenly ran out on them), or a whorish attempt to create link bait by outing a technique, pointing out a loophole beneficiary, or discussing in public that which is private.

Other times, it’s booger snot moves from the search engines themselves which makes a rumblepup do a double take.  The “nofollow” debate is over and Google does what it does because it can, and we deal with it and move on, but no one can tell me that the whole thing wasn’t an “Ahhh fuck this shit” situation.

So the acronym SEO has lost it’s luster for me.  I’ve had to correct so many completely backwards programs lately, that it’s no wonder those who need to hire a search advocate feel that the industry is full of badness and idiocy.  Adding in brand spanking new “social media tards”  who further muddy the conversation doesn’t help either.  There is a full, big picture here, that requires a conversation along all lines, search, social and offline, that’s not being heard.

The big picture is lost on some small eyes I guess.

In ancient times, say 1998, when the internet was young and dumb and full of you know what, the web was somewhat limited.

Sure, you could buy books online, you could e-mail your friends, but finding really good information was somewhat of a coin flip. Usually, when you searched for, say, “html best practices,” you’d get a search result that basically told you how cute girls wearing hardly anything where dying to tell you, while they where taking off the hardly anythings and doing questionable things with tropical fruit, exactly what to do with the best html practices, and how much they loved you for it.

Fun diversion, for sure, but darn it all, at the time, I would think, “How come my friends always tell me they find these really good sites with all the information I need about html, or sneakers, or how to train a cat, or the best way to create an independent movie, or the latest news on the political climate in the Midwest, or how to make cheese? How come they find it, and I can’t? How can the web be more about real things?”

Well web technology enthusiasts, companies and pundits have been promising for years about how the web will evolve to a more user driven, or people driven, or whatever cool term they had back in the late 90’s, early 00’s (goose eggs, for the funny names group) driven.

It could be that the promise has of late to pass.

Like a brand new baby with a PhD, here comes Web 2.0 and social bookmarking. And one of the cutest babies of the bunch is also one of my favorites, Ma.gnolia.

Your first stop at ma.gnolia is usually the only stop you need. In all honesty, I was introduced to ma.gnolia from Matt Cutt’s post on Web 2.0 . I know, I know, the phrase “Web 2.0” is sooooo two months ago, but it’s an interesting meme at least, and certainly applies to a web…uhmm…thing like ma.gnolia.

Is it a service? Is it a site? Is it a search engine? Is a community? Is it a directory? I’ll tell you what I think.

Yes.

Well, what else do you want me to say? Mrs. Rumblepup always has a way to make me feel dumb when I’m trying to elucidate on the finer points of potpourri, a topic that does not mix well with my more masculine chemicals, but I’m trying. And the fact is that ma.gnolia, and sites that try to be like it are a new thing that really doesn’t include a history of mechanical know-how.

It’s kinda like a brand new, bad ass mustang that uses solar power instead of a beast 8 cylinder engine. It’s cool as hell, but hard to talk about the cool man stuff under the hood, ‘cause none of your man friends have every seen a solar powered engine before.

How can I relate it? What does it have to do with SEO and SEM? Who invented liquid soap, and why?

So what does a poor rumblepup do? How can a simple rumblepup get the answers these questions (maybe not the one about liquid soap) deserve?

Well, rumblepup goes to the man who helped start it all. I asked Larry Halff, the founder of ma.gnolia, if I can ask him my brand of dumb questions and he said yes.

I’m like, “Dude, you’re gonna love my new mustang!”

He said, “Cool, is it solar powered?”

How, much better can it get?

rumblepup –
Hello señor!

Larry Halff –
Hola!

rumblepup –
In your own words, what is ma.gnolia?

Larry Halff –
Ma.gnolia is a tool for organizing your online life. We often think about organizing our lives as a highly personal thing, and it is in some respects. But our online lives involve a lot of collaboration and personalities, and we give those aspects of online life as much emphasis as we do to the simple bookmarking and sharing. So yes, you can find bookmarks to good web sites on all sorts of subjects, but it’s as much about who is behind those finds, and putting a human face on sharing information.

rumblepup –
You had some pretty heavy hitters help develop ma.gnolia. What was it like working with them?

Larry Halff –
We were really fortunate to work with the people we did in our original design. Happy Cog , led by Jeffrey Zeldman, took on the project and delivered not only a stunning visual brand, but a superbly implemented set of HTML and CSS templates for us to build on. We found working with Jeffrey’s team very interactive while being practical and getting results quickly and regularly, right down to the last pixel.

rumblepup –
What is the underlying technology behind ma.gnolia? Why did you choose to go with that as opposed to asp.net, or php, or other, newer technologies out there?

Larry Halff –
Ma.gnolia is built in Ruby on Rails. It’s a sensible, enjoyable platform for us to develop in, and a happy developer is a productive developer. As we all know, you can find a ton of arguments about what is the best platform, so I won’t rehash that. Ruby on Rails just happens to be the best one for us.

rumblepup –
When I’m using ma.gnolia, I like to go thumbing around the tag clouds. I usually find just what I’m looking for there, or something incredibly interesting. The best part about this is that this is pretty trustworthy content; Reason being that someone has found a really good source of information, a cool “thing”, or cool “on the clock time waster” and I trust the content.

Are you watching how ma.gnolia users actually use the service? Are people using ma.gnolia as a SE?

Larry Halff –
Sometimes…

A lot of what people do in Ma.gnolia does start with using it as a resource for new or forgotten links. But because we also focus on the social aspect, we see people following the bookmarks and tags of others in the community who catch their interest. That ability to discover and share through relationships brings out the third aspect of the service and the one we’re still building, which is to do interesting things with the information you organize in Ma.gnolia and the people you know.

rumblepup –
In the search for IBL’s, web marketers have found social bookmarking. However, spammers have as well. On ma.gnolia, I have found a couple of users that post a bunch of links to the same site. But it seems to me that the community “effect” is that these bookmarks quickly gets lost in the background. They might get a little IBL, but there marks are so down the food-chain, that the SE’s might never find them. I know that your team has had some serious discussions and work-ups to handle spamming, but the real question is this; in this community setting, how do you know what spam is? Is someone who’s listing their T-shirt site, because he/she believes it to be a good source, gonna get smacked upside the head for posting it, just because it’s a personal or commerce site?

Is their anything wrong with posting a site under the pre-text of “look at this really cool thing I did?”

Larry Halff –
The line isn’t as fine as it might seem. We think it’s great that people use Ma.gnolia to make their creations known to the world and to keep others up to date on their own happenings.

When you see bookmarks with completely unrelated (but popular) tags, you’re obviously in spam country, and at that point we feel confident in taking action.

rumblepup –
You guys have a pretty standard T&C (Terms and Conditions for those playing along) but basically, as a person signs up, you pretty much tell them that they are free to post, comment, and add to ma.gnolia to their liking, just be cool and nice about it. Did I get this basic feeling right? Is the democratic nature of ma.gnolia self governing?

Larry Halff –
You have the basic feeling exactly right.

Ma.gnolia isn’t democratic in the sense that we have a voting system, but the value of Ma.gnolia is created by its members through their bookmarks, comments, additions to our support wiki , and so on.

We try to create easy paths to different ways of discovering and sharing for all kinds of reasons. Where we do that right, people come and do interesting things.

rumblepup –
Do you see ma.gnolia as an evolution of social bookmarking, or do you see the success of ma.gnolia as an evolution of the web?

Larry Halff –
I’m not a big fan of the term “social bookmarking.” I don’t think most people are passionate about bookmarks. We’re passionate about the information we bookmark and what we can learn and create from the things we bookmark. Ma.gnolia’s development is driven by the results people can achieve with the information they save, we’re not trying to build a better database application.

rumblepup –
Ok, since your site is touted as a best example of what Web 2.0 is, let me ask you. What the heck is Web 2.0 and where does ma.gnolia fit in?

Larry Halff –
I’m sure I’m starting to sound aloof, but Ma.gnolia isn’t intentionally participating in the Web 2.0 phenomenon.

We’re trying to build a great productivity tool for our members, and along the way some of our techniques intersect with what is called Web 2.0.

Or, to put it another way, Ma.gnolia is not going to be the next YouTube.

rumblepup –
So, why ma.gnolia and not just gnolia, or magnolia, or one whole word? Do you guys have del.ico.us envy?

Larry Halff –
The name mostly comes from the movie, Magnolia by PT Anderson. If you haven’t seen it, it involves a number of complex story lines that crisscross in unexpected ways, and show us different sides to characters and their stories. We look at our experience on the web like this, the way our knowledge evolves by clicking from one place to another, it grows like a flower.

If we could have grabbed magnolia.com we would have, for sure. However, that URL is owned by a big oil company and we didn’t have much hope, so we did the next best thing and dropped a dot in the middle.

rumblepup –
Do you visit, or partake, in any of the other competing social bookmarking or social network sites? Do you think there is room for healthy competition?

Larry Halff –
Ma.gnolia is the only one I use; don’t spend much time checking out other services. Ma.gnolia isn’t intentionally competing with them for market share. We’re trying to build the right tool for our members, and we figure that when people come to us, they know whether we’re right for them. Our success is not tied to being the biggest; it’s tied to providing the most value for our members.

rumblepup –
When did you first discover the web? What where your thoughts on it back then and now?

Larry Halff –
I first started using the web as a graduate student in 1992 or 1993 with a Mac version of WorldWideWeb. I have to admit, there wasn’t a whole lot out there to see back then, Usenet newsgroups where were the action was at.

What I find most interesting about the evolution of the Internet is how we’re trying to find a balance between always connected computing, the mainframe and terminal paradigm, and independent personal computing, which perhaps reached it’s peak with desktop publishing and image editing.

rumblepup –
When did you put up your first website? What was it?

Larry Halff –
I think my first web site was for my graduate school research lab, MERLin, the Multimedia Ethnographic Research Lab at the University of British Columbia. Back then I was working on a qualitative video analysis tool called Constellations. We even prototyped a web-based version, which was very much like a social bookmarking service.

rumblepup –
If I put a gun to your head, what was the dumbest user tag you’ve ever seen used? What was the smartest?

Larry Halff –
Well I don’t think we see ‘dumb’ tags. People tag the words and phrases that are on their mind when they bookmark a site, so it’s about what’s meaningful to them. You see clever, sometimes funny tags like ‘tales of interest’ but you also see inspiring ones that call for people to act on a story or event that is bookmarked. One of my favorite uses of tags is choosing a particular tag for an event; it gives us a great way to gather photo, bookmarks, and blog posts from all of the different services people choose to use.

rumblepup –
Ok, now, for the real big question. What’s your favorite Sid and Marty Krofft Show?

Larry Halff –
H.R. Puffinstuff. Who can deny that theme song?

rumblepup –
I know what you mean. Somedays, I just can’t get that song out of my head. Those are the days Mrs. Rumblepup rubs my head and checks our insurance book for psychiatric coverage. Poor girl, she still doesn’t fathom my inner genius.

Who do you think was the coolest star?

Larry Halff –
Sigmund. What’s not to love about a conical sea monster!

rumblepup –
Yeah, I loved that show. Always wondered how he talked though. His mouth just puffed in and out.

But I always had a soft spot for Joy from The Bugaloos.

Even as a six year old, I knew she was hot.

..

..

And as I’m writing this, I feel the cold stare of Mrs. Rumblepup on my back. You guessed it, bad news is coming. Gotta go.

Many thanks to Larry Halff from Ma.gnolia.

Until next time.
rumblepup.