If you’ve been in the industry for long enough then you have surely had many experiences where someone said something about SEO that was complete and utter bullshit. And not just any bullshit, the type of bullshit that gives some people the urge to punch someone in their face.
Here is my collection of 29 things that people have said to me personally over the years or I have read somewhere that have made me want to punch them in their face.
Note: These aren’t in any priority order of stupidity, I’ve just added to this list periodically until it reached 29.
1. When someone scrapes your whois information and calls you to pitch an SEO service. You’re like “I do SEO son, don’t make me punch you in the face for calling this number”
2. When someone asks the question “What is SEO”
3. When someone asks the question “To be #1 on Google don’t you just buy a bunch of domains and forward them to your website?”
4. When someone asks what your SEO secrets are.
5. When someone asks you to do SEO consulting for under $xxx per hour.
6. When you attend and SEO conference and strike up a conversation with some random person.
7. When you see someone building link wheels.
8. When someone’s website doesn’t have title tags and they are wondering why it doesn’t get any Google traffic
9. When someone asks you if they should use an SEO service from Fiverr
10. When someone is gaming the SERPs better than you
11. When someone tries to get you to do SEO for their site as a “favor”
12. When someone completely underestimates your SEO abilities until they see you making long island iced teas with a bottle of 40 year old scotch
13. When someone asks the question “Isn’t SEO when you like pay Google to come up number 1 for something?”
14. When one of your writers keyword sutffs like they are writing for a drunk and retarded Google spider
15. When a person asks what your secret link building tactics are after Penguin
16. When someone blogs about Link building being dead
17. When someone writes a blog post about the value of guest blog post links
18. When someone tells you that Link building is dead (yes I listed that twice because It pisses me off that much)
19. When a webmaster forgets to remove the noindex tags and goes live with your site
20. When you outrank an aged website with a web 2.0 property and some spam links (wait, thats when somebody else wants to punch me in the face)
21. When someone has more than 7 of the same out bound links on a page (excluding coupon sites)
22. When someone can’t grasp the R.O.I. they will get when paying for quality SEO work
23. When someone link request spams you
24. When someone wants to become your best friend just so you will do SEO for them
25. When someone thinks you can 301 a penalized domain to a brand new domain and get right back on the gravy train
26. When you go to college you will hear more stupid things about the SEO than you can count
27. When someone thinks Google’s search algos can’t be gamed
28. When you start up a discussion about link building on the SEOmoz Blog it shouldn’t take long for someone to say something worthy of a punch to the face
29. When someone tells you that “content is king”.
Have a stupid SEO experience to share? Comment below.
Tell you an experience.. I got a call once saying they do organic SEO and will give me guaranteed #1 ranking within 1 week. My obvious question was “HOW”… And he said we use high quality methods and do you see those light highlighted pink colored top and sidewise RANKINGS on google page 1, you will be THERE…. Ouchhh..
I get calls like that saying “We will get you on the first page of google for all your key words”… I have to ask them “did you even look on google, my website has been on the first page of google for all my key words for over 5 years”. Thanks, but no thanks! :)
Its even funnier when the site they are calling about is for SEO consulting.
OR… When you look up those companies calling you, and they aren’t even ranking on the first page of google for their own key words! Haha.. There’s a red flag. Doh!
Alright, I’m officially a fan. Or how about when you are working for a company and they say ‘yeah, go and use the godaddy seo software… it makes life easier…’ and then you do that for 2 hours only to find out the the SEO spot is limited to 2,000 characters on easy shopping cart. GRRRRRR
or how bout CRAP SEO PRODUCTS that you can get for free through Google Chrome, but yet, almost all internet marketers send you stuff in your inbox claiming to have the ONE STOP SOLUTION TO ALL YOUR SEO WORRIES?
The question, “What is a backlink?”
Answer: you tell them answer and explain difference between spam bots and manual backlinks… then they say…
The question, “Ok…. how do I make a backlink?”
Please go back to SEO 101, do not pass go, do not collect 200.
________
When you hire someone on odesk or elance to do SEO work, and then they give all their little buddies your username, and they all call you ‘hello sir, can you give me SEO work?’ and you are really a MA’AM.
_________
When people, who claim to know SEO, turn around and put question marks and semi-colons, or non alpha-numeric characters in EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THEIR TITLE TAGS. Then wonder why you went 5 hours over budget to get them SEO FRIENDLY.
___________
Or when people say “SEO is dead.” That’s the worst.
“12. When someone completely underestimates your SEO abilities until they see you making long island iced teas with a bottle of 40 year old scotch”
I… wha… It’s not even about the money… Just… I think I’d shed a tear of fury if I saw this happen in real life.
That’s a line from Sterling Archer actually. He’s a boss.
Ah, yes. I should have known. He’s the bossest.
When a client has an outside source redesign the site without your knowledge, and they don’t use the old URLs or redirects, or any of the optimized shit you had in the first place… and they wonder why their rankings plummet.
Still holding true in 2015. I can’t stand the fuckheads at Seomoz & CO… Actually wonder if anyone of them manages to live from IM at all. What a bunch of losers.
My Top 5
1.When clients call and all they care about is the cost of the service. Then explain to me that there are other seo companies who do the work for cheaper.
2. Clients that want to give me advice from there brother best friend sister cousin who does seo as a side job.
3. People that tell me we really need to work on content to obtain top rankings.
4. People who call that cannot speak english and repeat questions they have read online about hiring an seo company.
5. People who say well “I want to do SEO but my budget is very tight right now so can I pay for your services after you obtain top rankings?” That is the worst!!! You want me to do all the work for free and then when you think I have earned my paycheck from all the top rankings you will decide to pay me!!!!
I have about 100 more of these. I love reading articles like this. I rarely comment on sites but this article roped me in for sure!!!
One More !
Can you please give me a list of all the back links that you build to my site then discuss the future back links that we will be obtaining. Then also go over everything else that your doing so I can basically learn your tactics and not pay you any more and do it myself.
Oh gotta love that one, go to any professional and act like that and they will be like what the fuck is wrong with you. With SEO people it’s like since we work online and do some abstract shit you can’t understand, you can just look up our skirts.
Hi Jacob King, name is Pretty much suites You. I think this website deserved my bookmark list.
Okey. Let’s Talk about Stupid thing/people.
When I visited Fiverr, I saw lots of dumb thing. Few of them I’ll mention below :
1. I will build 20000 GSA Ser backlinks for Google ranking in 2 days
2. I will do 600 social signals from pr9 pr10 sites for your url, quality work in 2 days
3. I will promote Your Website or Anything to Million USA Fans And Followers ( For 5$ )
4. I will promote your website on my 4,837 personal friend Facebook page
5. I will answer 5 quora questions on your behalf
6. I will send Press Release 1000 Relevant News Magazine TV Radio ( For 5$ )