We have all seen articles telling us what we can learn about SEO from sports stars, books, and fictional television characters. Today, I hope to knock them all out of the park by telling you what Satan, the lord of darkness himself, can teach you about SEO.

Satan and search engine optimization walk hand in hand. Just look at the lies, self-deceit and misery that both parties have served to America’s small businesses. Without further introduction…
 
Use Too Many Names to be Recognized

Satan, Lucifer, Beelzebub, Old Scratch, The Devil, and many more. Satan uses a variety of names in order to fool the unwary into doing his business, while being harder to track by good people. In SEO terms, this means setting up about a thousand micro sites, none of which shares any branding with the others. This will help you plant link farms on your sites, and fail spectucularly in the next Google update.

Hide in Shadows

Stay anonymous to your clients. Don’t show any self esteem or love for your work. You have none. Just wait for people to leave the light of trusted web sites, then tempt them with your best. Or your worst. It won’t matter since your primary market is now fools, degenerates and society’s leftovers.

Yeah, that God asshole branded himself so well that he turned a common noun into His proper name. And yeah, he gets all the money and best followers. But you’re in this to fail hard and fast.
 
Spread Your Shame

The Snake seduced Eve into consuming forbidden fruit, thus causing her to be self-aware and shameful. You should ensure that your business is populated by similarly wretched nightstalkers. Your ideal staff can only survive in the real world by discovering and exploiting loopholes in any system. This will help you rank well in Google every now and then, and they will be able to help you find the next loophole after the update. Eventually.

Back to that apple: Any remaining staff should feel shame for not belonging to your coterie of sleaze.
 
Never Give Up Your Vanity

Satan thought he could rule better than God. He was cast into eternal torment for his vanity. So, go on. Keep thinking you can adjust bold tags to outrank Amazon.

Stay Stupid

Satan has a large following of semi-literate substance-abusing dropouts. They will probably be dead of their own stupidity well before the average human life span, at which time they can join him in the eternal torment of Hell. If you really want to fuck up your business, learn from the legions of devil worshipping idiots at any Brazilian heavy metal concert. Stop learning. Start thrashing all around. Stay addicted to your rankings at the expense of everything else.
 
Our Dark Lord Satan compels you to do these things. If you follow this advice, you should find that your business is as dead as His black heart in no time.

Now go rot in Hell, every one of you.

Confession.

This place used to be a private, personal sort of venting ground for my frustrations with SEO-or-die small businesses.  That is, because, most of them die.  And, if you have met the kind of sleazy shitbags who run those small businesses, you will know why the businesses deserve to go broke.

Here’s a question:  A business can only get traffic by abusing Google.  I’m not talking run of the mill SEO, but looking for every loophole and nearly-black hat way to shove their sites into Google’s SERPs.  Actual parasitic abuse.  How you do you think that business feels about its other ethics?  How will they treat clients?  How will they treat employees?

Incidentally — why in the fuck do you think most people choose to be customers to a business that is willing to build a brand?  They can smell the slime of someone who gamed his way to attention.

Unfortunately, every goddamn job interview I’ve had in years has been to their type.  I’m fucking done with their infestation.

So.  Remorse.

When I have seen big name bloggers encouraging that kind of SEO-or-die mentality in the past, it has really triggered that rage.  Rather than take to public forums or go kick kittens or some shit like that, I came here to vent.  No one was going to see this blog anyway.

Except, my dumb ass just joined Twitter.  I’m being social there.  I may be making internet pals with people who enjoy being assholes about SEO.  I say “asshole” with respect: it was a willful choice by all of us and not just a side effect of being a sleazy idiot.

Yeah.  I probably just stepped in it.   Oh well, with this introduction out of the way, enjoy the rage.

Danny Sullivan just wrote the article I have wanted to see from a huge name in SEO for a very, very long time.  I actually would have never thought to see him use these words and alienate so many sycophants, but he did.

Google Doesn’t Owe You a Living

I almost wept when I read those words right above his avatar.

Thank you, Mister Sullivan.

Now, spam that fucking page across the SEO community like a novice, sociopathic search optimizin’ intern.  Make sure everyone sees it.  They need to see it.  Not because of your ego, my ego, or the size of our e-peens.  No.  Make sure they see it so that when Zebra, Snow Leopard or whatever the fuck they call their next algo update actually comes to pass, there will be fewer people run out of business.

Happy day!  Google just pushed another notable algorithm change into the wild.  As usual, a lot of people just watched their only source of income dry up.  I now, happily, bring you the April 25 monument to needless yet amusing suffering.

These come from SearchEngineLand, that site I love to hate, and their article called Google Launches Update Targeting Webspam In Search Results.

dudley76 paraded his complete lack of a business plan.

Thanks to Google, my business is ruined…

I performed all of my own SEO work for my business website. No paid 3rd party help. All directory inclusion requests organically accomplished…a little bit at a time. Weekly blog with fresh content based on the ever changing insurance world (especially with regards to healthcare). As of last night, my visibility went from 50% to 5%.

I’m sunk…truly…sunk.

Guess it’s time to go back to my old 9-5 software QA career. Hopefully, it’s not too late as I’ve been out of the game now 3 years in lieu of my once “new” self employment endeavor as an insurance broker.

Thanks Google…way to treat an honest, hard-working American.

Dudley…

This isn’t AOL… or a message board for teenagers… drop the ellipses… If your site was as full of them as your post… it’s no wonder… you have no rankings…

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SEOBook had a misguided article up today about the victims of Google Bowling:

Some people who see their income disappear might have a heart attack, others might have marriages that soon falls apart, leading into a spiral of depression and substance abuse & eventually suicide. Others still might have employees that get laid off & end up heading down some of the same scary paths – through no fault of their own.

Well, tough shit.

As you read the article and fear for your future, ask a few questions:

• Will a competitor maliciously tank your rankings?
• Will a major algorithm change apathetically tank your rankings?
• Will your clients stop searching for your offerings with generic keywords and start searching for your competitors by name, thus making your rankings useless?

Maybe you need to stop depending on rankings.

At this point, Aaron Wall decides to get “edgy” by typing large sections of underline instead of bad words. Fuck that.  Since he leaves it to our imagination, I propose “Pustule Encrusted Undulating Rectum.”

Anyone who outs or link bombs smaller businesses (small enough that Google punishing them destroys their livelihood rather than just giving them a bad quarter) is a _______. Anyone who advocates outing or link bombing such businesses is an even larger _______.

Now let’s be fair. Aaron has a point. Particularly, to paraphrase, “White Hat, Black Hat & Pustule Encrusted Undulating Rectum Hat SEO.” Only someone who loves the filth enough to make a hat of it, pull the hat over his head, feel the sting in his eyes, smell the burning rot and feces, and taste what slime slides down his lips into his mouth could possibly want to hurt others like this.

The business owner who leaves his entire livelihood up to this shaky ground is twice as rotten of a pustule encrusted undulating rectum. With twice as much pus again. He chose to leave himself, his family and his employees at risk of this kind of anguish. He set the policy that demanded those loopholes be left open. This business owner has decided that everyone’s work should be wasted.  He has made the demand that everyone should trust him as it happens.

That is as diseased and disgusting as it gets.

Years ago, SEO blogs were filled with tips to optimize your sure for rankings.

Today, searchengineland published tips to cover your ass when your SEO scheme fails.

This should speak volumes.

I like how SEO people say they have been “doing search” for any number of years.

It conjures the mental image of some balding loser desperately mounting the little g in the search engine’s name.  That is a very appropriate way to present themselves, in my opinion.

Email marketers are starting to annoy me as much as SEO.  Tomorrow is Easter, and I woke up to some combination of this theme.

Subject:  Easter Paintbrush Sale

Body:  Hey!  Since tomorrow is Easter we’re having a sale today!  Purchase oil paints and sable-hair brushes in sizes small enough to expertly capture every pore on Christ’s nipples.  (Mail order only. UPS does not deliver on Easter Sunday.)

…or…

Subject: Easter Egg Hunt

Body:  Are you too stupid to code an HTML form?  No worries!  We can sell you some software for $20, add you to our email list and annoy you with more ridiculous offers in perpetuity!  All you need to do is find some Easter egg clip art on our site!

…or…

Subject: Saturn’s Day Outer Space 3-D Art Bonanza

Body:  It’s Saturn’s Day!  Feel Saturn rising and set all your gadgets to excitement as we finally offer 15% off your outer space 3D character pack!  Make all new pictures with the same all new alien characters that will be all over DeviantArt by Thursday.

Really, guys.  You’re hitting our inboxes with such ferocity that you can only differentiate yourselves like this.  It’s bad enough seeing any one company with only one trick to rely on.  I can’t even count how many emails hit my in-box with the same old coupon code and excited commitment to it being Thursday.

It’s 2012, and the news just learned that there are idiots on the Internet.
People are posting nasty things to Twitter about what skin color the actors were born with. The news is in full shock mode over this. The news is shocked that there are idiots on the Internet.

Okay. Literary idiocy isn’t as mainstream as people saying mean things on Facebook. Also, you would think that people who read for fun would be brighter than the average Internet user.

You would be wrong. Here are some terms to glance over before we get to the important point:

Shipping fiction
Slash fiction
Fanfic
Mary Sue
Harry Potter My Immortal

Take about fifteen minutes to really enjoy all of this. If you didn’t know already then now you may understand: morons, literature and the Internet have been producing some pretty nasty shit for a long time.

More importantly, look at how long it has been going on. Your news sources only now got around to informing you.

Now comes the important question: Do the people you trust to teach you about the Internet really know what happens on the Internet? Do they know who the people are, what they want and how they act? Does your marketing ninja actually know your audience or only see this place in terms of pie charts and algorhythms
Ultimately: What Internet do you think you are on? Can you trust the blogs, your ninja, and the news to teach you what the Internet is without diving into it yourself?

Are you using the Internet your ninjas taught you about or is it the one that really exists?

Good for them. I have only one hard rule for seo:

Don’t count on the search engines.