« | Home | »

Stupidity you’ll hear at conferences

By portentint | April 26, 2010

I’ve gone to my share of conferences. I’ve spoken at some, listened at others.

And with a few notable exceptions, at least one goober gets up on stage and says things about SEO that make me cringe. Examples from the last year include:

The happily clueless

Some idiots will just spout totally incorrect stuff with a smile on their faces:

“Make sure you optimize your keywords meta tag. It’s a critical way to tell searches how to rank you.”
- unnamed moron who couldn’t even say ‘search engines’ apparently.

“Semantic SEO is when you put more keywords on the page.”
- Wow, really? So I’ve been doing your cutting-edge new form of SEO for years? OMG WHO KNEW I WAS SUCH A F–KING GENIUS!???

“Put text into your images. It helps them rank for blended search.”
- I couldn’t comment. I’d swallowed my tongue.

“rel=canonical is a great solution if you have multiple sites with the same content.”
- …

“Use the rel=cannon tag and you should be fine.”
- If we’d all been drinking, I could forgive this one. But we were all cold sober. And this, er, guru was dead-serious.

“252 links is what you need to rank #1 on Google.”
- Saw this in a conference video. I had to be physically restrained from punching my monitor in an effort to make. the. pain. go. away.

If you hear stuff like this, don’t be polite and sit through the presentation. Don’t make a scene. Stand up and quietly walk out. Otherwise your IQ may shrink as you stand there.

The endless pitch

Then there’s the ‘expert’ who marches up onto the podium for their allotted 10 minute presentation, proceeds to take 20 minutes and does nothing but tell you how they are God’s gift to SEO, their company has had amazing successes, etc. etc.. Half the time this turd and half their clients are either banned by a major search engine or are spouting total, 100% pure bullshit.

By the time they’re done, the rest of the panel wants to kill them, the room has emptied, and all life has been sucked from the presentation.

The only way this guy lands any clients from his 20-minute sales call? If someone in the audience is recovering from a recent head injury.

The SEO naysayer

Want links to your blog? Give a keynote or presentation that says SEO is bullshit! Sure, everyone will hate you, and you may get curb-stomped on the way home, but at least you’ll be remembered.

The recycler

Hey, didn’t you give that presentation before? TEN TIMES BEFORE?

Don’t be a total shit-for-brains. People are paying to come to this conference. They expect to learn something, not get a ‘refresher’.

The buzzword bullshitter

And finally, my favorite: The person who gets up on stage and recites every hot SEO term, seemingly in order. Something like “LSI 3.0 semantic space optimization methodology has really worked well for our clients”.

I’ve been guilty of this myself. Sometimes, you get up there, someone sticks a mic in your face, the lights are burning into your retinas and RIGHT THEN your mind goes utterly blank.

I can only apologize and say that I later burn myself with the hotel iron as penance.

What’s to be done?

I don’t know, actually. The world is full of people who spout off about things they don’t know, or think they’re the greatest ever in their field. Personally, I have an ego with the consistency of damp lint and very little patience for people who, by pretending they’re qualified, give other business people bad advice.

For now, the occasional rant will have to do.

No Bullshit? Then just Share it!
  • Stupidity youll hear at conferences

Topics: Other Stuff | 22 Comments »

Posted on 26 April 2010 by Ian Lurie

has written 1 articles for SEO Bullshit

  • http://www.joshuatitsworth.com/ joshuatitsworth

    I love it! I'm actually gearing up for my first SEO conferences this year. I'll be sure to keep my ears peeled and headphones handy should I sit in on any of these.

  • http://www.ianhoar.com Ian

    Fantastic. I feel better already. This rant can be applied to much more than SEO. Thanks for the laugh.

  • bestchoice

    This rant not only applies to the conferences but the SEO forums out there as well. They keep spitting invalid information out day after day. Meta keywords tag being just one of many.

    I can see why newcomers learning the basics of SEO and Internet Marketing as a whole get frustrated and give up…or get caught in a position where they outsource the work and are let down by the provider which in turns leaves a stale taste in the clients mouth for all who work in the field.

  • http://twitter.com/magicrob magicrob

    I've never been to an SEO conference. I admire your restraint!

  • http://www.search-marketing-answers.com/blog alanbleiweiss

    dude! you're clearly a thought leader who understands the value proposition that's so vital to bleeding edge methodologies in a post-transparency web 3.0 world!

  • http://www.firstfound-blog.co.uk Andy @ FirstFound

    Some of that's really close to people I've met outside of Conferences! I think the best thing to do is perfect a look that says “Excuse me, but you're wasting my oxygen. Would you kindly refrain from breathing in?”

  • http://www.seonoobie.com Maciej @ SEO Noobie

    I think the SEO conferences are about who you can become buddy-buddy with so you enter the all mighty boys club in this industry. Personally I would rather take the 2 or 3 grand and dump into marketing my company a bit more and actually pull in some good clients rather than kissing the industry “experts” asses for two days so I can get a link on their blog. I'm not saying networking is not important but to really make an impact at these conferences you have to frequent almost all of them. What is someone really going to say at the podium that doesn't already exist in every SEO blog out there?

  • http://www.greatwebsitesblog.com Barry Adams

    maybe we should create an SEO Bullshit Bingo chart (I did a web2.0 bullshit bingo chart a while ago – http://www.flickr.com/photos/mwinyd/2670563583/) and take it with us to conferences. Whenever someone uses 5 of the bullshit words, we get up and yell BULLSHIT! as loud as we can.

  • http://www.borisbenz.com Boris Benz San Diego Marketing

    My conclusion – SEO conferences should have a refund policy

  • http://www.propdata.net Robert

    Brilliant! Thanks for the laugh. Sadly there are enough that will still take all the bullshit as gospel.

    Barry, I'm going to keep that Bingo card handy!

  • Ronabop

    My favorites are “duplicate content” and “sandbox”, followed closely by “link juice”. Use of any of those three terms indicates familiarity with popular SEO industry jargon, but also raises flags as to whether or not the person using said jargon has anything more than a rudimentary, cargo-cult, shallow, understanding of the topic they're trying to discuss.

  • Pingback: seo-garage.de » Blog Archive seo-garage.de |

  • http://www.markrushworth.com mark rushworth

    the thing that absolutely drives me up the wall is people who present and in real terms tell you absolutely nothing… Ive been privy to some big names in search doing presentations and i have to day that all bar one talk absolute rubbish. What is needed is detail. take one small part of the seo process and talk about that in great detail, dont waste my time spitting out the same list of requirements/process headlines without giving any real information on how to impliment any of the topics being waffled on about.

  • http://www.the-name-i-wanted-was-already-taken-so-i-used-a-lot-of-dashes.com/ The Domain Naming Dude

    Funny article. But I don't think there is any hope of this changing for two reasons:

    1. No barrier to entry. Anyone can call themselves and SEO expert.
    2. SEO is so fucking simple (not to do well, I'm talking about the fundamentals)

    I don't even know why they have conferences. What is their to talk about? If you've been in the game for a while and done even the most basic research and experimentations you should pretty much know what to do. There is simply not that much to discuss. So if you have a conference about a subject where you can have someone explain the fundamentals in a half and hour and has no barrier to entry, then there's no where to go except the bullshit route. I imagine a conference about making pancakes or tying your shoe would have the same problems.

  • http://www.BullShitWebsites.com BullS

    Excellent —that how BS work in the world of SEO
    bullshitSEO and BullWebsites dot com and BullShitDomains

  • http://garryegan.com Garry Egan

    “Experimental results on two SMART sub-collections and a TREC dataset show that LLSR effectively improves the ranking performance compared with the classical LSI algorithm and ranking without subspace learning.”

    http://www.computer.org/portal/web/csdl/doi/10….

  • Pingback: The SEOBS Questions Supreme Motherload | SEO Bullshit

  • http://www.SEMAonlinemarketingconference.com seo conference

    Hi… that was great stuff.. I really like reading on this subject Could you tell me more on that… I love to explore

  • Griffnut

    Finally a no b.s. site,
    There are only so many 1′st page search results, yet millions of people think that they can figure out the secret to achieving top ranking. And they think spending some money on some trade secrets will help them.All bullshit, but it drives the internet marketing craze.
    I also checked out seobullshit.com on compete.com, you seemed to have leveled off to a 15k to 20k unique visitors per month, not bad SEO ha

  • http://twitter.com/LaurynDollBaby Lauryn Doll Baby

    “252 links is what you need to rank #1 on Google.”
    - Saw this in a conference video. I had to be physically restrained from punching my monitor in an effort to make. the. pain. go. away.

    ——

    Bwahahahah!!!! This is hilarious. I love this blog.

  • http://www.brandviagra.net/brand-viagra-side-effects.htm side effects

    What is needed is detail. take one small part of the seo process and talk about that in great detail, dont waste my time spitting out the same list of requirements/process headlines without giving any real information on how to impliment any of the topics being waffled on about.

  • Admin

    I giggled in public as I read this! Here is some non BS:

    Stop worrying about numbers in keyword research. Aim for multiple keywords in a post and look at your analytics to guide you into niches that are open. Make more posts into that topic.