I just read an article that make me happy ( a response to this). Rand Fishkin disputes the thoughts of Micheal Martinez. The quick recap: Rand loves links, Micheal hates them. Both men have accomplished commendable things on the web. I worked with Micheal for close to a year and I have seen the things that he has done, Rand is more publicly visible.

I want to put my following comment in perspective. I am one of the SEOmoz Recommended Companies and I have been recommended by Micheal Martinez:

“Carlos is knowledgeable and innovative, recognizing the value of going the extra mile for a client account in trouble. He is deeply interested in advancing his knowledge of search marketing and has many times provided me with valued insight and advice.” August 3, 2007

Michael Martinez, Director of Search Strategies, Visible Technologies
worked directly with Carlos at Visible Technologies

I have learned a lot from both of these guys. Most importantly I have learned that there is too much Internet to be authoritative in all areas — so you need to find friends and share in some way.

Here is my response to the posts:

I am a fan of both Micheal and Rand. I have discussed search with both of them, they both make very astute points within their expertise.

They have different approaches to the problems that are set forth by search. I agree strongly with the end of Rand’s disclaimer:

“As readers and as search marketers, you’ll have to decide which pieces of advice and information serve your campaigns best – don’t just take our word for everything.”

I think the most important thing to look at is this:

Micheal:

Blackhat spammers burn out the usefulness of about 10% of all SEO tips, tricks, and techniques that are openly or semi-openly shared on blogs and forums in about 12 months. White hat SEOs, newbies, and SEO gurus burn out the other 90% in 6 months or less.

Rand:

If he’s right, it would mean that linkbaiting, a 3-year old tactic (at least), would have fallen out of fashion years ago. Putting important keywords in title tags is an age-old SEO tactic, and yet I still see great value there, as well. He must mean something else, but I just don’t know what it is.

Search optimization, white hat or otherwise, is essentially taking advantage of the system. We as an industry are 100% counter productive to the goal of the search engines. Whether we are following the rules or not we are gaming the system and necessarily changing that system to compensate.

Whether you believe that you are raising up the most appropriate content the ultimate goal of a search engine is to put up what pleases the masses, not what pleases us as marketers.

The best that we can ever hope for is to better serve the masses than the search engines.

And I continue…

Imagine what would happen if there was sudden Internet equity, if tomorrow 50% of the world were to access the Internet. If tomorrow 3.3 billion people logged on to the Internet everyone’s traffic would double. Who would be happy?

Small site would be happy. Imagine growing for 1000 visitors per month to 2000 per month — nice right? Large sites wouldn’t. Imagine going from 90,000 per day to 180,000 per day — that’s a little scary. Now consider 260,000,000. That would have been Yahoo!’s traffic on December 17th, 2007. Two hundred and sixty million visitors would crush even the most prepared site, and social media is less equipped than search for that kind of traffic.

If 3.3 billion people arrived on the Internet suddenly what you have learned from studying either, or both, of SEOmoz and SEO-Theory will fail you. Every thing you know about search engines will fail you, because either the major search would overload or half of the traffic would circumvent the game we SEO’s know so well.

The reason that usability and information architecture are so important is that they are not derived values — they rely on behavior. Search is always dependent on things that are beyond your control like algorithms and what people search, things that are known to be highly fallible.

Search marketers are forced to make a decision to either shoot in front of the main stream or into the mainstream. Either way you are gambling that the uncontrollable factors are going to fall in your favor. Whether you are betting on the success or failure of any particular search system (semantics or connections) you are feeding one undeniable cycle:

Your efforts will change the system.