The author presents an extremely incomplete picture of modern SEO. As an SEO professional for the last decade, I think we can do better in a discussion of the s

The author presents an extremely incomplete picture of modern SEO. As an SEO professional for the last decade, I think we can do better in a discussion of the shortcomings of SEO. The whole article presents SEOs in a similar way to how people talk about 'used car salesmen'; we all know the clichés about used car salesmen, but the reality for any professional selling used car is vastly different. Presenting SEOs as 'the world’s most scruple-free douchebags' is fairly insulting and not productive. His article discusses _some_ SEO tactics used by _some_ SEO practitioners. For the subset he presents, then I certainly agree there are a lot of issues, but he presents it as the complete picture. # Modern SEO Modern SEO is made up of many facets, one part of which is content, but which also includes technical considerations around crawling and indexing of content, as well as advocating for site speed optimisations, and improving user experience and signals. A reputable SEO practitioner should be asking 'does this deserve to rank?', and should be advocating improvements that have longevity (i.e. will be helping next year, not just next week). I spent 9 years in an SEO agency, where these were central and core to our whole approach. # Blackhat SEO Yes, there is a lot of manipulative and shady stuff going down. That is not just content focused, as the author discusses, but there is also a lot of link buying and selling, which is design to manipulate the link graph with the aim of gaming PageRank essentially. There is no denying that this stuff happens, but it is once again the same as the used car salesman analogy -- the majority of modern SEOs are professionals, and they don't deserve to be tarred with the same brush. The line is, I accept, not as clear cut with SEO and there are people who practice manipulative tactics who operate in a grey area, and present themselves as the 'proper' solution. # Google Obviously, people practicing manipulative SEO are to blame for their own actions, and for making the situation worse. However, another aspect is Google's monopoly. I don't see how Google could have done a lot better at preventing some of the shady SEO practices that go down - they actively try. However, their _monopoly_ is problematic as it means that there is only one black box to optimise against, and no real SEO consideration needs to be paid to other search engines. It will be interesting to see what happens if Apple enter the fray, and what the knock on effects are.