Mike The Internet Guy’s Blog

5 responses so far ↓

• Simon Heseltine // Feb 8th 2007 at 9:08 pm

  All I heard was mumble, mumble, mumble

• Gary Ruplinger // Feb 9th 2007 at 12:25 am

  Hi Mike. It’s nice to see I’ve attracted so much attention recently - not exactly what I had in mind when I recorded the video. Nonetheless, its been an interesting experience getting some honest feedback on my videos. Thanks.

• Everett // Feb 9th 2007 at 11:11 am

  Gary we don’t mean to bash you man. I know it seems like a lot of flames for no reason, but you have to realize that some of us take our jobs, businesses and industry VERY seriously. This is what pays our mortgages ever month.

  Do you have any idea how many times a client has come to me and said they only wanted web design – not SEO – because they tried an “SEO” in the past and “it didn’t work” or “it only worked for a little while” or, even worse “he got our site banned from Google”? I’ll give you a hint – I can’t count them with only two hands.

  So when we see this sort of thing it REALLY gets under our skin. You are messing with our livelihoods here. That’s why I wrote that post and titled it “Guys like this give SEO a bad name”. Because you do. Now, you seem like a nice enough guy. So nice, in fact, that I feel bad for being part of calling you out. The truth is, if we were going to call out every SEO scam, sham or just plain inexperienced “business” owner, we would be doing this all day every day. It just so happens that Greg Boser noticed your video and A LOT of people read his rare, but interesting, posts. He is an example of what a “real” SEO is. You would know this if you ever went to a conference and heard him speak. But what you are doing is NOT SEO and, for reasons described above, some of us take great offense to having our industry name dragged through the mud by people who SELL THE SERVICE OF SUBMITTING A SITE TO DELICIOUS and then call it SEO.

  Now, I’m done. I have work to do.

• Gary Ruplinger // Feb 11th 2007 at 2:09 am

  I’m certainly not trying to make a mockery of search engine optimization - whether you believe me or not, it’s how my bills are paid too.

  I’ve tried to take a step back and consider how that video looks when that’s the only video of mine that you see and if you don’t read any of my other stuff. I’ve come to the conclusion that a knowledgeable person in the industry can poke some holes in my social bookmarking service when it’s sold as a standalone product, so I’ve decided to discontinue it as a standalone product. It will now be only a part of my overall optimization methods.

  But here’s the thing. I was on vacation in Colorado with some friends recently, and the topic of websites came up somehow. When I explained what I did, my friend mentioned how he had some websites a few years ago but got rid of them because he never got much traffic. He didn’t understand that you need LINKS to rank well in the search engines.

  I think that for a lot of new people, they’ll spend hours trying to get their meta tags just right or get their keyword density to an optimal level when because some free article they read, some outdated forum post, or some friend just as clueless as they are told them to. When instead they should be focusing on two things – quality content AND quality links. Now I know my video says nothing about the importance of quality content, so I can’t really fault you or anyone else for not knowing my stance on the topic. I should have mentioned, probably even emphasized that without quality content you’re site won’t achieve its full potential.

  However, most people understand the quality content part if you explain it to them. The quality links part, however, tends to bewilder most. Part of the reason is that high quality links are hard to get directly. You usually can’t just email the authority in your niche and say, “Hey, I’ve got this cool new site, link to me.”

  When I go about getting links, I look at them as the middleman to me getting what I want. I figure that if I put interesting articles in article directories, write press releases, and post sites on social bookmarking sites, I’ll start to get some of those high quality links I wanted in the first place provided my site and the content on it are high quality as well.

  I just think that focusing only on content is way too risky. You might get links, you might not, and since links make up such a large portion of your site’s ranking, it seems silly not to worry about getting them.

  If my logic is totally out of whack on this, then go ahead and straighten me out, I’m listening. But what I do has worked for me so far…

• Viral Video Marketing The Good The Bad and The Ugly // Apr 6th 2007 at 11:45 am

  […] much. He was soon the center of ridicule across the SEO industry in posts like the one above, and this, this, and this. Here are all of Mr. Ruplinger’s […]

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