Jason Calacanis clearly hates SEO but that doesn’t carry much weight with me as it is just one person’s opinion. He puts his pants on one leg at a time, or so I’m told. Furthermore, Mahalo and Weblogs inc have done little to alter how I personally use the internet in anyway. I would take it much more seriously if Sergey Brin had a blog post on his dislike of SEO. But I question whether Google cares at all. In fact, I think Google encourages SEO provided you’re doing it right and not trying to pull one over on them. Bruce Clay had an interesting post called: Does Google Hate Search Engine Optimization? Bruce makes the case that “…if Google hated SEO, we’d know it. Google isn’t just tolerating SEOs; they’re going out of their way to help them and give them access to more information.” From my interactions with our SEO firm it seems like that really is the case.
I get why people dislike Blackhat SEO tactics. It’s gaming the system, it’s wrong, I get it. But to put everyone trying to optimize their site for Search Engines into the category of people trying to game the system is ignorant. Maybe I just don’t quite understand, but what’s wrong with optimizing your site so that people can find it when they are searching for something? By implementing an SEO campaign you are putting your customers first by trying to make it easier to find your relevant search result. The only problem lies in putting your irrelevant result somewhere it doesn’t belong. Do a google search for “Hate SEO” and tons of results come back.