Not every SEO consultant exploits client ignorance. I’d be surprised if some of my clients would last 2 weeks with most SEO firms… they know what they are doing, and have little tolerance for fakers/posers/impotent SEOs.

As for the note about Google acquisitions, yes. Google has always acquired it’s most successful technologies.

Whether from an SEO (and more specifically SEO agency) perspective or from a Search Engine perspective, both thrive on ignorance in the greater community whilst minor skirmishing occurs between SEO’s and SE’s in the trenches. Ignorance drives pay-per-click revenues skyward and organic search fees travel in the same direction through tapping in to the lack of knowledge out there in the community.

“Qui custodiet ipsos custodies” – or who guards the guardians – hopefully the true innovators. We have had many an internal debate here as to why certain changes are made by the SE’s and Google in particular…and more and more often, the Google catch phrase “do no evil” seems to be becoming a thinner and thinner veneer covering an agenda driven by money, power and influence…the focus seems more and more on the score rather than the overall benefit to humanity as a whole.

And yet all it takes is one brilliant idea to level the playing field…but to do so, that idea has to germinate and survive. With Google announcing “one acquisition a month” and the wallet to back that up…they are buying their continued market dominance, brick by brick…and aggressively using their dollars to do so whilst tinkering around the edges. Will an innovation that will yet again move the goal posts survive? Maybe ask your old lacrosse coach…he seems to know what he was talking about…