SMX Advanced takes place in Seattle on June 8, 2010 and June 9, 2010. That’s Tuesday and Wednesday. I doubt I’ll attend the conference this year, but I am looking forward to meeting up with my search marketing and search optimization friends in between sessions and after hours in and around Seattle.

Seattle has a very rich culture and after hours activity. From Belltown to Capital Hill and many other nearby neighborhoods. Excellent food and wine, clubs, entertainment and most of all people. There is a LOT of search awareness in Seattle, and an enthusiastic web startup community. There is a lot more to Seattle than you’ll see in the official conference program or formal after-hours parties.

There is always a hardcore search conference crowd that likes to find a nearby, non-descript watering hole and plant themselves at the bar to talk and drink all night. I doubt that half the time they even know what city they are in. If you’ve participated, you know how it goes:

YOU: “Hey let’s go somewhere for some good food and drink/wine”

THEM: “yeah there’s a great sports bar downstairs. And they have BEER!”

YOU: “um, yeah, but we’re in (insert city name here) which has great (insert “food” or “wine” or something here). Let’s check it out!”

THEM: “I heard the sports bar on the corner has local microbrews like Alaskan Amber on tap! Awesome! Let’s go…”

And so it goes… 4-6 hours at the hotel bar or local version of  Chotchky’s (TGIFridays) drinking Bud Light, 2 blocks from the conference hotel. At SMX Seattle 2010 it will, once again, be that way for those guys. But it doesn’t have to be that way for you.

It is true that you want to hang out at those bars and buy drinks for experienced search marketers who may give you tips and advice you can use on your web projects. But it may also be true that you can do that and still see some of Seattle, because (don’t tell anyone) there is plenty of smart experienced search talent choosing to socialize out on the town, but NOT sitting at the hotel bar all night. How do you get involved with that crowd?

Watch this space for more as we get closer to SMX Seattle 2010 on June 8 & 9. I’ll add right here in the middle of this Seattle SMX Info page, details of places to go, things to see, people to hang with, including access to some startups, tips for great Sushi or only-in-Seattle foodie options (including vegetarian/vegan and of course wine).

Find the SMX Seattle 2010 Registration page :http://bit.ly/akP7yJ

SMX Seattle Contact Form : http://bit.ly/2H8×5

Conference Registration Fees go up on :  March 20 & April 24

Expo Hall Schedule: June 8, 2010 10am - 7pm and June 9, 2010 10am - 3pm.

Feel free to communicate on the topic through the comments… everything is moderated so I read it before publishing anything.  Let me know if you’re coming, if you want to meet someone in particular, or if you have ideas for places to go, things to do, etc. Eventually there will be Facebook pages etc. as we get closer, but I’m starting now because I totally intend to enjoy some of Seattle’s Best with my search friends during SMX Seattle.

Please note I am not planning parties or events… I’m going to enjoy the after hours of SMX Seattle with you or without you, I can guarantee that. But I would love to share some of it, and of course participate in other great ideas and plans without waiting around the hotel bar for someone else to decide not to go anywhere.

Google has (finally!) come around and validated SEO consultants world wide, acknowledging that Search Engine Optimization is an essential ingredient of a successful web site. This took many years! Some will note that Google continued to deny the value of SEO right up until Google itself figured out how to profit from it.

Initially, in the old days, Google denied SEO even existed. They sometimes referred to a small, disjoint community of fringe webmasters “gaming the system” as if it were an annoyance for Google and something bad for everyone. Of course they did this as they built their massive monopoly on search and advertising. They also did this as insiders at Google (Google employees) build personal web empires to exploit their knowledge of how Google works both sides of the traffic control and ad publishing marketplace.

The SEO consulting field grew rapidly due to the market demand for something other than Google’s promises of riches to webmaster who simply follow the published Google rules. Clearly Google’s claims didn’t hold water. Those who executed on SEO practices outperformed everyone else, often to amazing degrees. Still, though, Google tried to brand SEO as evil (and in some cases, “illegal”). In many cases, Google was nearly forced to rewrite and update its published guidelines, as professional SEO consultants exposed situations where Google clearly didn’t behave as it promised to behave.

Eventually SEO had earned so much respect in the marketplace based on performance alone (even overcoming Google’s significant attempts to brand it negatively) that even Google had to pay attention. Matt Cutts opened a dialog with the professional SEO community, and, over time, Google increasingly acknowledged that SEO existed, was important, and that people needed to learn SEO.

Google started an SEO education channel on YouTube, addressing hundreds of common SEO issues. Matt Cutts and other Google employees contributed expertise about how SEO increased the odds for business success on the web. Google answered submitted questions, and Google employees participated in site reviews at search conferences. Google still didn’t openly acknowledge the SEO consultants, however, choosing instead to continue to warn consumers not to trust SEO consultants. For every few words acknowledging that some could be helpful, Google published dozens of words cautioning consumers of the risks of hiring SEOs or following SEO advice.

These days the marketplace has had just about enough of Google’s misinformation. Every day we read articles admonishing Google for privacy invasions, aggressive unilateral moves against select web publishers, and corporate behavior typical of yesterday’s AT&T, SouthWestern Bell, or Verizon. Google has become the big greedy insensitive corporation, despite its promises of “being good”. We are seeing reports of the equivalent of “insider trading” at Google, where Google employees help select friends and associated with SEO issues, secretly and “unofficially” at the same time that Google the corporation refuses to provide public customer support, or even a communications channel.

But now, finally, SEO consultants around the world can rejoice. Google the corporation has validated the SEO consultant. According to reports of  this Google post, Google will start offering SEO services on a limited basis (starting in Norway). Since Google always tests first and usually runs extended “beta” periods for their new offerings, it will likely be some time before we know how far Google will move into the SEO services marketplace. But one thing we know for sure: SEO is an essential ingredient of any web site, and it takes a  search professional (a respected professional SEO consultant or perhaps a Google employee) to advise business on how to SEO their web sites.

John Andrews is a professional SEO consultant in Seattle, Washington. John has been focused on Search Engine Optimization since before Google launched, and a full-time independent SEO Consultant since 2003.

Updated: The Google post was subsequently updated. I now see this (translated to English by Google):

“When we published this post, we did this in order to reach our target audience: Webmasters in the Nordic countries. Some readers misunderstood this as an indication that we introduce help for webmasters over the review of the pages; imidlertig this is not the case.  A site clinic is an opportunity for us to come up with constructive criticism and share tips on improving web pages, hopefully, can lead to better visibility for these pages. Our decision to keep search and advertising completely separated continues to be a definite fact.We should have made this clearer in the original post, and hope this post clears up any confusion.”

I received two requests to acknowledge this. I also note the language used… despite the fact that this still reads like consulting on seo matters where Google legal has imposed a clarifying statement denying any crossover between search and paid advertising, Google chooses language that claims it is the reader who has made an error (”Some readers misunderstood this…“). Perhaps Google needs to return to finishing school for a bit?

Google makes a market in freely copying and redistributing other publisher’s products. They do not make a deal with the publisher, and they don’t disclose the details of their activities. They don’t respect copyright in the traditional, accepted form, but rather argued for (and apparently won) a special consideration that treats search “snippets” differently than any other excerpt published by anyone else. They have since extended that “permission” over the years. It can be argued that Google has been given a “free pass” by governments, since it is innovating and governments are unsure of the total cost of resisting Google at this time.

Google assumes that publishers will accept referred search traffic from Google as remuneration for the copying and redistribution.

A publisher who does not want to “be in Google” cannot opt out of Google’s program, despite some claims that technical machinations like noindex and robots exclusions are available as options. Each of the published methods to manage your Google appearance has loopholes which Google freely and admittedly exploits whenever the marketplace signals that your content is important. If you mark your content as “off limits” to Google, for example, but others link to it, Google will still show it in the Google index and allow it to be clicked through. Ask any experienced SEO expert how to properly and reliably prevent Google from showing one of your pages to Google’s customers, and you will either be told not to publish it at all, or you will get a convoluted, conditional response that will most likely be very costly to implement at best. The only true way to remove yourself is to block the entire public world from seeing your content, or to engage in spy/counterspy maneuvers with Google’s bots. Why is Google able to get away with that?

Google also, simultaneously, makes a market in advertising on the Internet. Despite the obvious conflict of interest that creates, Google dominates as a profitable company solely because it plays both sides. Virtually all of Google’s revenues come from the advertising side, which is enabled by the scrape, search and display side.  But the conflict is troublesome even for Google. Advocating for what used to be illegal copying and republishing of copyrighted content without permission, while incentivizing publishers who put Google’s ads on such scraped or illegally copied content, Google has created a commercial force that even Google can’t control. Google’s CEO has referred to the post-Google Internet as a “cesspool”, full of junk content. It has become clear during the past year that our public cesspool of junk content is largely funded by Google’s ads.

Google is the hungry snake that has started eating it’s own tail. It can’t stop eating or it will die of malnourishment. But as it eats and eats, the head knows that one day, there will be no more snake to eat.

It sure seems that 2010 will be the year of reckoning for Google. A week doesn’t pass without at least one venture capitalist or entrepreneur showing me a new web strategy designed to exploit Google’s reliance on the cesspool of junk content. Systems are in place to auto-generate massive amounts of junk content with little to no overhead cost nor publishing burden. Dozens to hundreds of “companies” will launch such projects in January alone. Some are capable of achieving a massive scale. All are driven by visions of the millions of dollars in cash their junk sausage grinders will spit out, courtesy of Google’s ads. How can this continue? How can even Google survive such a gold rush?

A few questions the investors in these projects should be asking of the so-called entrepreneurs planning to cash in on the post-Google cesspool we call the Internet:

• If the revenues are expected to come from Google’s advertising, then wouldn’t it be wise to document some sort of business relationship with Google before betting the farm? Obviously Mahalo and Demand Media have formal business relationships with Google to ensure the success of their projects as they scale. Shouldn’t you have similar assurances before stepping in to compete in the cesspool?

• Why has Google worked so hard to prevent the development of cottage industries around Google’s index and search engine, if not to protect its search engine as a stand-alone entity? Won’t such junk content projects similarly threaten Google’s search engine integrity, and thus face a similar resistance from Google?

• What is Google’s hold-back policy for all of these Google Guideline-breaking content plays? It’s one thing to expect Google to continue to allow junk content, but the Google guidelines still prohibit it. Would it not be wise from a risk management point of view, to know if Google can withhold payment for 90 days or whatever, or shut the account and keep the earned revenue without any notice?

• What is the downside risk to building a platform based solely on publishing low-value content monetized with low-value ads? Will the domain get blacklisted in Google one day? Will the company behind the domain be black listed? Will the CEO behind the strategy be blacklisted? Will the venture capital firm, angel investors, or named investors and advisors be blacklisted by Google for future projects?

• How much do other owned businesses rely on the integrity of Google’s search engine and search traffic for revenues? In other words, is poisoning the well with an exploitative fast-money web venture a good idea for the long term?

• What is Google’s personality? How has it traditionally reacted, as an organization, to attempts to exploit its business model on a massive scale? perhaps it would be wise to consider the nature of the shark in the water before jumping in for a swim?

I sense desperation in the hearts of many involved in these ventures. I don’t mean the “we need revenues” desperation of a venture, but a true failure in the creativity and innovation department. A crisis of confidence in entrepreneuring. Maybe that’s an age thing.. is it time for a return to under-30 passionate CEO’s?

Related :

• “Just Make Good Content” is BS http://www.johnon.com/622/seo-pricing.html

• Google’s Brand Arrogance and the Internet Cesspool http://www.johnon.com/617/brand-domains.html