Martin Crockett

Jason v Danny, round one

The gloves came off a few days ago in the battle of search. Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineLand wrote a passionate, constructive response to some rather cheap comments (”SEO is bulls@#t”) made by Jason Calcanis (formerly of Netscape, now of Sequoia Capital).

Calcanis: “The truth is that 90% of the SEO market is made up of snake oil salesman”

A controversial, no-holds barred sounding off from a typically unabashed Calcanis - who recently addressed a room full of search professionals at SES Chicago with similar remarks - but, shown up as misguided and somewhat uninformed by Danny’s response.

Sullivan: “Get lots of VCers all in a room, and I’ll tell you how 90 percent of VC firms are snake oil salespeople who don’t know what they are talking about”)

The comments made by Jason Calcanis - linkbait or not - are reflective of the people “in the industry” who find it easy to dismiss SEO - usually as a result of not taking the time to fully understand it: the knowledge gap.

Also - in my experience, I’ve rarely come across web designers (or developers) with the depth of knowledge that’s alluded to (”the whitehat SEO companies are simply doing solid web design so I don’t consider them SEO at all”). Solid web design? I know a lot of web designers that are proficient but it’s not the same as SEO. In the right hands, the two can be intertwined, agreed, but are mostly mutually exclusive. (I happen to come across a lot of Flash-intensive, content-’lite’, marketing websites where all the title tags are the same, etc. where the SWFs get spidered and it looks like a mess in the Google SERPs.)

Jason Calcanis
Danny Sullivan
The cheesy video which fuelled the Calcanis post - but has nothing to do with SEO NB. amusingly enough, Gary Ruplinger has spelt the domain name wrong at the beginning of the clip.