SEO Bloggers Step Away From the Keyboard
March 17th, 2007 by Michael Gray in videoIf you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Read my top posts or learn more about Michael Gray. Want more frequent updates follow me on Twitter. Thanks for visiting!
Update
Check out Barry’s response
and SearchAnyway
Sphere It
March 17th, 2007 at 7:01 am
Trying to scare of competition?
March 17th, 2007 at 7:01 am
Somebody got up with the wrong foot this morning
Michael, let people write their blogs. If you don’t like it, don’t read it and certainly not subscribe to their RSS feed.
You don’t want to advice people not to write a diary because they don’t have anything meaningful to write into it anyway, because their lives are so boring and already lived by millions of others before them, right?
March 17th, 2007 at 9:44 am
Gotta start somewhere my friend. Recapping news stories and evolving from there is an effective way to get going. I agree with the regurgitation of news, I like to hear opinions and different ways to look at a piece of news instead of just a recap. Maybe your theme should have been “SEO bloggers: get an opinion”
March 17th, 2007 at 9:44 am
Viral marketing at it’s finest!
Michael, if you haven’t noticed, blogger in general, are not experts. Carsten makes a great point.
The exposure, from others to the field gives the experts value and authority. It also generates buzz and conversation, which leads others to become interested and get involved in the conversation.
These same remarks could be coming from a programmer about the open source guys that think that they can build their own OS, couldn’t it?
March 17th, 2007 at 9:54 am
So what you are saying is that you are taking your own advice and putting down the keyboard and picking up a camera? lol
I agree MG that there sure seems to be fresh batch of them now and they do appear to be in the vein of the parasitic marketing/seo blogs. On the downside, we probably should cheer up about the fact because it is going to get alot worse. SEO blog numbers could triple if not quadruple before the end of the year. Tracking seo related keywords in domain names shows a massive increase in registrations in the last four months. People are going to start developing those domains. (I feel a song coming on…must be something in the Saturday morning air) On the other hand, I think a webmaster has to get their links/kicks where they can, cuz links/kicks just keep getting harder to find.
Remember back when SEO was all about education and not just rereporting what the search engines were doing?
March 17th, 2007 at 11:16 am
You’re wasting your time trying to get through to these people. LOL
March 17th, 2007 at 11:27 am
Yeah baby!
March 17th, 2007 at 12:11 pm
I would step away, but those somewhat original articles we published on SEJ yesterday both made it to top of Digg, so lots of comment moderation to do
March 17th, 2007 at 2:26 pm
Virtually every SEO topic’s been talked to death (duplicate content, hub scores, phrase based indexing, co-citation, bad neighborhoods, TrustRank, domain age, LSI, link pop, topic relevance, data refresh, Big Daddy, authority score, nofollow, keyword density, PageRank, siteLinks, one box, underscores in URLs, keywords in domain names, Company name in the TITLE, Google webmaster Tools — you name it, been there, heard it all), so its only natural that some SEO bloggers gravitate toward regurgitating news.
Even with just SER, SEW, and SEL reporting the same news its too much of an echo chamber.
March 17th, 2007 at 5:19 pm
I agree. I’m tired of “A listers” that do the same thing. I don’t want to read the same article a zillion times. I have to read the same thing several times some days because some bloggers do sometimes give unique content and I don’t know when they are going to do this. Even the ones you say are legit need to calm down. Search Engine Land posts way too much information. I hate that a good portion of my daily reading is a waste of my time. Even if I just have to skip over it in Google reader that adds up after a while.
March 17th, 2007 at 5:22 pm
Brett I remember when there was a day when the front page of wmw was just a link to an important thread and not to a one post news item. There was maybe 1 or 2 new items added to the front page a day and sometimes it would go several days without one. I miss those days.
March 17th, 2007 at 7:07 pm
Nice bait
March 17th, 2007 at 7:38 pm
some of us have a following already in other internet marketing circles and reblog or recap, while also heavily linking out to experts like yourself, WMW, Matt C., Threadwatch, etc.
Essentially, ’some of us’ are sending ya’ll new audience members.
Are you saying that posts prepended with “Greywolf sez:” are not cool anymore?
March 17th, 2007 at 10:35 pm
Michael, you sound like one of those old school yard bullies today. Video Bait anyone ?
SEO bloggers, just keep writing… How else are you going to learn ? You can’t call youself a blogger if all you do is read other blogs.
Anyway, nice bait.
March 17th, 2007 at 11:03 pm
I think Gray just declared war on the the many bloggers out there who feel they have something to say. Calling himself an “a list seo celebrity”. You are kidding me.
Thank You
March 18th, 2007 at 12:07 am
Tetsuto:
- Nobody covers any topic to 100% and includes every angle possible
- Everybody is not on the same knowledge level and new people join the community every day
- The only fact that does never change is the fact that things change all the time and require to revisit old topics and reevaluate statements made in the past
- There is no well sorted reference where everything that was said is being consolidated, aggregated and well structured stored in an easy to use archive
March 18th, 2007 at 12:22 am
So uh… I think i wanna punch you in the face.
March 18th, 2007 at 1:14 am
A little controversy always makes for good linkbait
Although I do enjoy reading SEO blogs that are focused on a single niche (PPC, analytics, social media, keywords), the fact that SEO blogs regurgitate the same news is not a unique issue within this industry. If you don’t believe me, just flip through all the major news channels and you’ll see that they are all talking about the exact same stuff.
March 18th, 2007 at 1:26 am
This discussion reminds me of a post by Cuban awhile back. He felt the challenge was to be a blog with unique and engaging stories and not just republish (parasite) what other blogs have said.
I tend to agree with that, but on the other hand, I am just as tired of the group of first year college students with a blog acting like they are Edward R Murrow or something. The last thing I want to do is read a op ed piece from bambi in barstow talking about how myspace is going to dethrone Google.
@David,
Ya, the times have changed alot. Just 2 to 5 years ago, Micheal wouldn’t have put this on his blog, he would have posted it on a friendly forum near you. Education needs have changed, content in all its forms is more valuable, and more people know the value of that content.
@ seo news blog
relisten to the video - michael is not calling himself an a list blogger. He is going out of his way to say his isn’t one. I certainly don’t think he is talking about you - your stories aren’t so much about the news, but and seo’s interpretation of them. keep it up. Dig around the space right now. You get beyond the 50-70 top seo/sem/marketing/aff feeds that are perking in all our rss readers right now, and you get into a whole lot of repetitive stuff. Some of it almost looks autogenerated it is so repetitive.
It is a fine line, but I really think there are some new guys out there coming up that need a chance the same way alot of us were given a chance. I remember when webpronews started out, their stories were abysmal - inaccurate - misquotes - poorly timed. I can still see Tim Mayer chasing Garrett down the hall at PubCon Orlando to try to get him to correct a horrible mis quote. They stuck with it, and are turning out a pretty good quality product today. I am sure there are alot of new guys out there that is going to be true for as well. Lets not throw the baby out with the bath water…
March 18th, 2007 at 4:03 am
i think gray does regard himself as an A-Lister even with his (false) modesty. otherwise he would be taking his own advice and stepping away from the keyboard. His blog used to be the first i read each day but i have to say the quality and value has dropped considerably over the last few months.
March 18th, 2007 at 5:07 am
Wow ,,, what a way to get yourself removed from my RSS reader.
March 18th, 2007 at 6:07 am
“Nobody covers any topic to 100% and includes every angle possible”
Carsten, I agree with every point you made. My comment was a hyperbole, not a statement of fact. I should have stuck a smilie in there
I also agree with Graywolf to a point - there’s an echo chamber. But unlike Michael, I see A Listers doing as much regurgitating if not more than the rest of the blogosphere. It’s more annoying to have SEW and SER report the same news than to have two D-Lister blogs I’m not subscribed to report the same thing 20 times a day.
Not to mention most of these “news” articles are themselves either regurgitation of forum threads or of news published outside the SEO-sphere. When Viacom sued YouTube, that news didn’t come from any inside sources; the tip came from mundane places like Google/Yahoo Alerts and Techmeme. When an A-Lister blog reports an algorithm update, the source is usually forums like Webmasterworld. So lets just have everyone read Wall Street Journal or SEO forums and be done with blogs, period.
Bottom line - no one’s pointing a gun to your head telling you not to unsubscribe from a blog or else. It’s your fault for staying subscribed to feeds you don’t want to read.
And frankly, telling people working their ass off to carve a niche in the SEO landscape to STFU sits in the same boat as saying “SEO is bullshit.”
P.S. If this post was really good link bait, I’d be linking to it by now. But this post is itself a regurgitation of what’s already been said 26,667 times
http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?q=echo%20chamber&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&sa=N&tab=wb
Instead, I’d link to this post, which is more constructive:
http://chris.pirillo.com/2006/08/18/10-ways-to-eliminate-the-echo-chamber/
10 ways to eliminate the echo chamber.
March 18th, 2007 at 11:14 am
I’d be curious to know how many people unsubscribed to your blog as a result of this one. I almost did, and probably will if the quality continues to deteriorate.
March 18th, 2007 at 11:24 am
I video responded you and posted it also at my personal blog, lots of fun.
March 18th, 2007 at 1:13 pm
Tetsuto: no worries.. I also have to watch my cynic and sarcastic statements all the time to make sure to have enough :), hehe and
added to make sure that people don’t get it wrong. Well, it does not always work as intended, but that is a different story hehe.
I think that lessons were learned and I am also sure that Michael did not mean it in the way some people understood it.
See Michael, Video blogging is not that easy either. You can still be misunderstood, even if a video is worth a million words hehe.
March 18th, 2007 at 1:32 pm
I agree to some extent and believe this encompasses the entire blogosphere. Some great examples are Tech blogs - I can’t tell you how many damn iPhone posts I saw the week it was announced.
However, I do believe there’s an exception. Bloggers serve their readers - not necessarily the Internet as a whole. I’m not an SEO expert, though I do give advise where I can. However, if my readers need to know about a great SEO article, I’ll post it. For some of my readers, I’m only one of a handful of sites that they visit.
PS: Yours is one of those sites that I reference. If I don’t reference your site (and other bloggers don’t), doesn’t that hurt your blog?
Respectfully,
Doug
March 18th, 2007 at 2:15 pm
Don’t do this…
Don’t do that…
You must be related to Matt Cutts.
March 18th, 2007 at 3:20 pm
Your video seems very unprofessional next to Barry’s.
The obvious question is, Are YOU (Greywolf) adding anything worthwhile?
March 18th, 2007 at 3:25 pm
That’s it! - I quit!
March 18th, 2007 at 7:46 pm
If you’re a SEO blogger seeing this and actually stop blogging because of what Michael Gray or anyone else says, then you’re a spineless little blogger and should never have started in the first place.
Do it because you want to, not because of anyone else. Anything that doesn’t add value (subjective) is usually a splog of MFA site anyway.
March 19th, 2007 at 8:54 am
Nice job Michael.
A quick search reveals “seo bloggers step away From the Keyboard” got a lot of buzz (aka links) so mission is accomplished.
A lot of truth to what you said though. I used to be an avid blog reader, but due to regurgitated coverage I whittled it down to 5 or so main ones.
There are still a lot of good topics that remain unscathed, but the same ones keep coming up.
Now if only someone would write about whitehat versus blackhat…
March 19th, 2007 at 11:01 am
Last year I spent an average of about 15-20 hours a week monitoring the SEM blogosphere yet reduced that to just one or two hours a week during January and February to pursue some other revenue channels than SEO and consulting.
In March when I resumed my usual RSS activity I was amazed at really how little I’d missed. Sure there are some great original contributors out there who do share unique and creative ideas but the vast majority repost old arguments and rehashed news that provide little value. Stepping back provided a little more clarity for me to see just how far the overall community had digressed into content for content’s sake.
I don’t begrudge the newer SEM bloggers who often just regurgitate other folk’s information but I rarely read them either. I’ve seen many great bloggers evolve from this style as their confidence grew and they found their voice.
Then again, other than the video format and the extremity of your stance, this post has been done a few dozen times as well.
March 19th, 2007 at 11:11 am
With Barry’s video update, this post is like Deal or No Deal now, with Barry Schwartz as Howie Mandel and Michael Gray as the banker.
March 19th, 2007 at 11:23 am
@ ScottW
Kinda like missing your soap stories.
Not much changes.
March 19th, 2007 at 4:04 pm
Nice Michael, smart piece of “link bait”… create controversy.
I’m an SEO newbie, I have a site and a blog about SEO Practices for beginners, I’m just starting and this is school for me. Also I’m part of your audience and some of us want to write about it. Some one should write an article saying:
“STOP READING SEO/SEM BLOGS”… Just kidding.
March 19th, 2007 at 6:24 pm
The guy from searchanyway had some GREAT points… I think the little person dig he took at you MG prior to giving them devalued them a little bit… but if you ignore that, he had some great points.
My only issue is I think “regurgitated news” is having a different meaning to different people. When I hear that, I think VERBATIM news… 3 sentences repeating a sumaary with a link to SEW. To take his sports analogy - yes, anyone who loves to play sports should do so whether it be major or minor leagues… but, if everytime you play sports, you get smacked in the face with the ball because you cant catch, throw, run or hit - you might want to find a new hobby.
When I hear regurgitated news, I dont think “non a list bloggers” I think crap three sentence post with a link to the real story.
March 19th, 2007 at 6:50 pm
Great post Graywolf!
I like you more and more.
I think you want to say more quality, less quantity.
And you are right!
March 19th, 2007 at 7:26 pm
I think your video shows a lack of understanding the big picture. “Search News” is not the only thing that people in the SEO/SEM blogging realm are talking about. And it’s not all the same niche (as Search Anyway mentioned). My audience is not the same as SEW’s audience. Nor is it as large, but that doesn’t make it null. My audience (for the most part) doesn’t really care who aquired whom today… they just want to know how to create quality content and have a successful campaign.
Think about this…Should a small law firm optimize the same way as a national restaurant chain? Drilling down…should a lawyer specializing in criminal law optimize the same way as one who specializes in family law? Their targets are going to be different.
So what about the bloggers who are covering search (news, SEO, SEM, etc) for these sorts of niche areas? What these bloggers are doing is putting the big stuff in context for their readers. And yes (again as search anyway mentioned), the readers can be clients… should someone not continue their corporate blog which happens to be geared toward search for their clients because you feel their blogging is not adding value for you? It’s a little short-sighted in my opinion.
The content of your video having been commented on, I move on to your presence in the video… rude. Folks like you are what gives the “non A listers” in the industry the idea that they are pointless and should not ask their questions at conferences or whatever venue, etc because they aren’t the “cool kids”. What the heck is the point if everyone can’t be in on the conversation?
I have a right to learn. And obviously you have a right to be irritated by the people who irriate you. So live and let live… so you just be rude, and us unworthy bloggers who are but spittle on your face can keep blogging.
March 19th, 2007 at 9:32 pm
Bravo to Michael for stirring up some controversy, getting people involved in the conversation and allowing response.
Two bravos to Barry for not only being one of the most active bloggers on the scene but for just being a generally nice guy.
Finally, three bravos to Chris from SearchAnyway for speaking up for all of us that are not A-List bloggers. Dude, that was well said!
March 19th, 2007 at 9:51 pm
“but, if everytime you play sports, you get smacked in the face with the ball because you cant catch, throw, run or hit - you might want to find a new hobby.”
Hey Rae, don’t get english rugby into the mix hehe.
This Page grew nicely, a lot of UGC. Well done Michael ;).
March 20th, 2007 at 2:40 am
Personally, I know where my strengths and weaknesses are. For me, it’s definately not in front of a camera. So, my best option, I guess, is to blog, at least for a while.
There are many reasons why one would blog and for many SEO types, it’s not about becoming a expert SEO blogger. Perhaps the main reason should be to blog about things you love doing, in this case, SEO.
March 20th, 2007 at 11:51 am
Hi Graywolf,
Most of all people hate others to tell them what to do, you should know this by now. Even if you are right, Graywolf, and I think you aren’t, you might have to choose another way to convince readers. Now you have one less.
March 20th, 2007 at 2:17 pm
Michael - When I see you talk you remind me of old clips of Keith Moon.
I believe that being in the mist of rockstars (whatever that is) makes graywolf a little over the top in his authority at times but I am glad he is making this point about the “echo chamber” on video; I have tried to make this point several times in the past but had no audience.
If you ignore Michael being aggressive his point does makes sense. It’s simple, pick a niche and expose to others who you are instead of regurgitating news. If you are new and doing “the news” thing it is ok, this will teach you how to write and develop your voice.
Hi, my name is Aaron and I am good at getting inside people’s heads when they spew incorrect, destructive information about SEO and how to rank in Google (my niche). I like to cut giants down just below the knees when they get too big. I also like getting up in it with anyone who trys to supress the conversation. This post comes very close but it was clearly not Michael’s intent.
You may not like what brand of SEO Michael does but it does fill an empty slot. What’s in your wallet?
(turns reader off, promised myself to take a break for a week but this one was much to tasty)
Booyah!
March 23rd, 2007 at 5:48 pm
Michael,
You are my hero.
March 24th, 2007 at 3:57 am
Greg, you are not the only one who is green from envy.
Michael, you have to add paging to your comment section. There is enough content to fill 4-5 pages, easily
March 24th, 2007 at 7:46 pm
I agree with the guy at search anyway. People can blog if they want to.
March 24th, 2007 at 8:05 pm
i had another thought. I think you should stop blogging as well.
March 29th, 2007 at 11:27 am
What an ass! LOL, what a self righteous pompous ass.
I removed your RSS feed and now think of you as a complete assclown.
Blog that a-List boy!
August 13th, 2007 at 9:40 am
Online morning is development of internet and security by webmasters,web developers from India and World for hard security of online information.
September 10th, 2007 at 1:56 am
Long live viral marketing, it is the one form of advertising I actually look forward to! LOL
September 10th, 2007 at 2:02 am
Well done Graywolf! This placed a smile on my face this morning.