[VengefulCynic]

"For many folks outside of our community, the acronym SEO has (unfair) associations with spam or manipulation."

I'm not sure that the association is unfair. There are a lot of honest people out there plying the trade and doing good work in the SEO space, but the same could be said for email marketing. For every good guy, there's enough spammers out there that even now, guys like patio11 have to spend a decent amount of time spelling out the difference between legitimate email marketing and spamming. SEO strikes me the same way: lots of people doing good work and being drowned out by the negative press of snake oil salesmen, con men and link sellers.

It's unfair to the people doing the good work... but I don't think it's unfair that people free associate "email marketer" with "spammer" and "SEO Guy" with "Hucksters, Liars and Criminals". Too many run-ins with the Black Hat SEO crowd have made me wary and I'd be shocked if I was the only one.

[James_Duval]

I think you're entirely correct.

I'd add that SEO is an easy target because it is (or has been until its very recent transformation into content marketing + nice clean usable sites) blatantly a zero-sum game, whereas most marketing is not inherently zero-sum.

There's uncertainty about what SEO is right now which makes the scammers even harder to spot. Many people using harmful practices (harmful to users as well as the company they're working for) genuinely believe that they are helping.

Black Hat SEO is hilarious. Oh, it works. It works very well, and definitely at least as long as it takes for the SEO to collect their check & a recommendation for the next job.

Interesting that this update comes in the wake of Penguin 2.0, incidentally - could Moz have fallen victim?

[ignostic]

Sorry, but not a chance in hell that Moz got hit by Penguin.

1) You can look at their links yourself, if you have any clue how Penguin works, and see that it's not even close to spammy enough to get hit by any Penguin algorithm.

2) Their rankings for key terms remained solid after Penguin. [1] The very definition of a Google penalty includes drops in rankings.

3) In this case the Penguin penalty would transfer across with the 301 redirects they've put in place.

[1] http://suite.searchmetrics.com/en/research?acc=12245&url...

[James_Duval]

I've got to admit, I didn't check whether Penguin 2.0 was substantially different from 1.0 before I made that idle speculation. I thought it might be looking at some different, but related, over-optimisation style stuff.

[ignostic]

Just change (unfair) to (sometimes unfair), and I think he's dead on.

Most of the SEO companies out there are still either link spammers or impotent content marketers. There are exceptions: SEO-centered companies doing legitimate digital marketing - but it's fairly rare for them to do it well.

I use Moz's Open Site Explorer, and I watch closely to see what SEO companies are doing. More often than not, they're spamming links all across the web. This is true even today, even with Google's spam-fighting techniques becoming increasingly sophisticated. SEO companies are often leading their clients to the slaughter. Some companies that preach "great content, great UX" also turn around and buy or blast links.

To Moz's credit, they've really been pushing hard to encourage people to stop spamming and buying links. Their writers constantly argue against link spam, encouraging SEOs to instead create content that people will love. Their message actually meshes quite well with PG's philosophy on start ups, and indeed I know Rand is influenced by PG and HN.

It's possible that someone deeply involved in the Moz community, as Rand is, may just see a non-representative sample of non-spammers. They must realize this to some extent, as they're pulling "SEO" out of their branding.

[MartinCron]

Fair or unfair, whenever I see the letters SEO next to each other like that, I get immediately turned off. The last time I was looking for work, I just stopped reading when I saw SEOMoz as the company name.

[alanh]

Absolutely. 90% of the time I hear about SEO is via spam submitted via my contact form.

As you say, that is unfair to the people doing good work, but also completely… fair… for me to make that association

[a5seo]

This is the same rationale as someone who'd say programmer = social retard. Just because something is true doesn't make it fair.

[znowi]

Exactly! To each few good "SEO" guys there's a plethora of scammers.

I think it's a great move for them and will help to win a more skeptical crowd. Although, I still don't trust them with or without "SEO" :)

[hiddenfeatures]

Any reasons behind this?