People who work in Search Engine Optimisation have a mixed reputation. Some people think of them as masters of a mysterious art form while others think of them as shysters who fleece money from businesses with no guarantee of being able to give them anything in return.
Whatever your viewpoint, getting your website to the top of search engine results is hugely important and there’s little chance of SEOs disappearing any time soon. The question is, what does that ‘mysterious art form’ involve?
Well, one part of it would appear to be asking for help on public forums. There’s nothing necessarily wrong with that… unless you get caught by your client.
A thread on the Google Webmaster Help forum has raised a few laughs today. It begins with an SEO named ‘Gary’ asking for help with DIY Doctor, a site he is working on which has dropped in Page Rank recently. Quite a few helpful suggestions are posted in reply… and then the clanger:
“Gary, this is Mike Edwards, the MD of DIY Doctor. Your company have just given me a price of £2500 – £5000 to give me a report which you have obtained from a forum which we use anyway. Not only that but you have asked for that kind of money to look at a problem you do not think you can solve.
From where I stand this is pretty despicable behavior and not what I would expect from a “professional” SEO company.”
Ouch.
To be fair to people working in SEO, the mysterious, ever-changing inner-workings of Google are difficult to navigate and sharing information is often the best way to tackle a problem. Still, the moral of this story is this: if you’re charging for work and need help it pays to use a little discretion!
Heh, Gary isn’t the first one to ask for help for a paid job.
However, there could be exceptions to the rule, when you ask for opinions about nuances, possible shortcomings before or after the job (in usability, copywriting, etc) and you already have your own way of doing things, for example.
Also, if the client is a member of a forum, where a free website review section exists, and explicitly mentions asking for more opinions, wouldn’t it be nice?
Obviously, this wasn’t the case of Gary and Mike, though. Clearly, charging $5000 for something you have no clue about is rather..rougish?
I’ve asked for help when it came to issues I was unfamiliar with, but discretion is key! Also, I didn’t claim to know what I was doing at the time :)
Hopefully Gary learned a thing or two from this.
This reminds me of so many different industries. Sure SEO is always changing- no argument there. However, every industry is constantly changing. Finance, automotive, newspaper publishing, magazines, they are all reaching a massive changing point.
I feel like SEOs and most IT related professionals reach out where they know other like-minded individuals hang. I can’t say Im a master of programming or anything, but the constant quest to know more, or perform better makes us all more efficient. Gary got caught by his employer- thats fine, and funny, but that doesn’t mean its just SEO that rip people off, for instance: Madoff? Stanford? UBS? EnRon?
Hope you see the points. =)
-Swexy
Funny story and very good points. SEO professionals don’t ask information from forums etc, if you know what we ‘re doing you know why you’ve lost PR, positions etc
pretty funny