Some Clueless But Amusing SEO Whingeing 18 August 2009
A couple who seem to think they are entitled to create their own set of SEO techniques got themselves shedloads of free publicity on The Guardian today with their “saga” on how they have failed for three years to get listed on Google. They are waging an all out crusade (complete with a blog called “The Google Delusion” which – curiously enough – is dated today) against big bad Google and its anti-competitive, anti-business techniques.
…the problem being that they are the worst possible spokesmen for their “cause”. Their business idea (a price comparison site – you know, those obnoxious ones that show up in your search engine results as “Get Cheap Prices On…!”) is a carbon copy of several others. Their web site itself, code and construction wise, is shocking. There are more basic daft SEO sins and mistakes in the bloated code than I have hours in the day to describe, but just as a taster: when I pulled up the code, I saw table layout, no H1/H2 tags, and almost no text – but hundreds of hidden links. The site is so plain, uninviting, and sterile that no one wants to link to it, so they’re suffering on inbound links. If they phoned me up to ask me to do SEO, I would have taken one look at this site, laughed out loud, and hung up the phone assuming it was a wind-up. No joke: I’m a professional and I would not touch this train wreck for any amount of money. Hmm, I think that makes me part of the conspiracy!
In their blog and even in the article’s comments section, the couple behind the site are on a self-righteous mission to blame everyone but themselves. Yes, Google has faults, and Google is too powerful, but I don’t know what it’s going to take for this couple to realise that “pffft yeah I know you are but what am I?!” is not a business strategy. They have been told several times about the structure and coding errors in their site which they are well within their power to fix at any time. Yet they claim they don’t have to fix them because their site “regularly goes head-to-head in rigorous competitive procurements against other leading price comparison sites, and wins. Any assertion that {it} is low quality, therefore, contradicts the conclusions of {our} many prestigious partners.” Pff, yeah I know you are.
But offering a quality service isn’t the point for them, is it. As this comment in the article’s page put it best:
Whilst government etc bang on about ‘encouraging innovation and enterprise’, too many hapless, deluded wannabees are allowed to believe that they’re being entrepreneurial – and for some reason they seem to believe they’re entitled to business success. Sad really – but an article that IMHO misleadingly plays up the ‘big bad google sinks plucky Brit startup’ angle just perpetuates the problem.
Now, place your bets on how long it takes them to start complaining about Richard Dawkins taking their blog traffic away.
Postscript: they have added an entire blog post today (19/08) consisting of almost admirable technobabble and obfuscation to once again deny why they should have to do any page optimisation at all. Totally missing the point, once again, that good page optimisation benefits your site visitors and users as much as it benefits Google. Better to spite the big bad evil corporate monster than make the site into something worth bookmarking, right? Up until I spotted that post I had 10% sympathy for them. I take it back.