About a week ago, Kerry Dean published an article on Search Engine Land titled, SEO: The O is for Outing. Dean’s request to the SEO community was to start working together and stop outing each other. I don’t disagree with Dean, but sometimes you hear an SEO story that’s so ridiculous, it begs to be repeated. And so, because it’s Friday, I have a few of those funny SEO quotes to share.
Here’s my disclaimer. I largely work in an industry (to remain unnamed) in which clients hire multiple SEO vendors and let them fight it out amongst themselves. So I’ve had my share of interactions with other SEOs. These four scenarios actually happened within the last 18 months. I’m retelling from memory and paraphrasing. Enjoy.
You can cancel your AdWords campaigns because our SEO will make up for it.
This doozy came from a salesperson. He had no details on the client’s existing SEO strategy and how that compared to the existing AdWords campaigns. He was just trying to close the deal. Sadly, he was successful. The client signed the SEO contract and quickly canceled the AdWords campaigns that were delivering 30% of the website’s traffic.
If you change the homepage content, you’ll shake up the algorithm.
In fairness, this person didn’t actually mean I would change Google’s algorithm by changing homepage content. After some clarification, I realized he meant that changing the content could shake up the site’s rankings. My response? Yep, that’s the point.
Google gives us an exemption for that.
This gem came from a company that builds websites and provides SEO services as an upsell. The trouble is, that every website they build has the same exact homepage content. They do take the step of switching out the company name and address details, but that’s about it.
When asked why they use the same exact content repeatedly, even for the clients who pay them extra for SEO, they said they had a special exemption from Google. Hmmm. How does that work? Maybe Matt Cutts has a special password he uses to log in and add exemptions to the algorithm.
This metadata is formulated to capture millions of searches.
And this is my all-time favorite. Wow! Millions of metadata! Who knew?
