I hear what you’re saying. Too many people look at SEO from the view of ‘how can we get Google to rank our site more favourably’ and not ‘how can we make our site better for people’.

And that’s a pity! Because while some SEOs may create short-term successes, a shoddy site that tricks Google into ranking well isn’t going to sustain a long-term business.

SEO is easy. And it needn’t be sleazy.

I think you’ve got the wrong end of the stick here. The ‘Panda’ talk you wrote about – the guy giving the talk was an in-house SEO. As such, he has no clients. That means firstly, you perhaps weren’t listening very closely. Secondly, your conclusions that his agency have been giving out bad advise are obviously wrong.

I read your post at the time, and thought it was quite rude to jump up and down on the back of a free conference after just 2 of the day’s 15 talks.

And finally – how dare you post this link to twitter. Good content should stand on its own. Doing any work to affect the likelihood someone else may see it is despicable in the extreme.

dan

Why did you go then?

“Some of our clients’ sites have still not recovered from Panda, 4 months later.”

The reason why I believe you’ve misquoted me, is that your whole presumption about me working at an agency is incorrect (hence I would never have said such a thing). I work inhouse for Review Centre (www.reviewcentre.com) a website affected by Panda.

The other websites that I mentioned that have still not recovered are not my clients. Their web design & SEO are carried out by a whole host of different inhouse SEOs or externally sourced agencies. It’s widely known that very few websites have seen any sort of Panda recovery – I don’t need to work for them to know this fact.

As such, I dispute this statement from your post above:

“Doesn’t the fact the speaker’s clients were still affected by Panda directly implicate them as an agency that doesn’t provide the necessary best practices, guidelines and quality content that Google and other search engines want to see?”

So in short, I feel you may have got the wrong end of the stick with regards to my presentation. I’ve also taken the time to go through your client portfolio, and compare your work against the quality guidelines provided by Google following the roll out of Panda. I can certainly see instances where your own work does not stack up against these guidelines. This isn’t to say that you’re bad at your job, but this does show how Panda has very little to do with common sense web design, and just how important it is to get SEO input on any web build.

I’m happy to discuss further via email if you’d like.