If You Liked It You Would Have Put a Badge On It

“Wuh Uh Oh Uh Uh Oh Uh Oh Oh Uh Uh Oh”

Okay i have not got a big arse, and worst of all i am not the one.

Something is brewing in the SEO sphere <– that`s not really a term but something that alludes to a congregation of minds so from here on in i reserve the right to call it that.

Short story i am currently a lone voice for what i am about to propose.. A Neutral Ground .. The End.

No really, i rattled off a series of tweets that to me me made sense, to others they would have been just the ramblings of a madman, but recent events have brought to the fore something that has larely gone unchecked, unnoticed or largely ignored.

We have been so caught up in trying to achieve the best we can for our own clients that we forgot to monitor our own backyard. What i mean by that is the recent events of those trying to slip in under the radar and leech off those new to SEO or in this instance those that have been in it long enough but still got slapped, me included.

I was one of the lucky ones if you can call it that, i dare say that many hundreds of others were drawn in under “easy link circumstances” and now we are bearing fruit at different levels because of it.

TopSeos.com

For myself i held a basic listing there, never paid for antything more and never paid much attention to it, it was a free listing, a free link. They put all the leg work into ranking themselves (SERP`s wise) and i hung about in the UK version of the site. Hovering between maybe 9th to 11th.

From their leg work in the serp`s i would get a few phone calls and i am talking about a few, literally 3 calls to my memory that were potential leads.

1 of those 3 converted.

Now it comes to the sticky end of this post.

If i am in eleventh spot how well do you think those in the higher spots are fairing?

More often than not we are creatures of habit and the higher the listed/rated the resource the more likely we are to follow through via a click or phone call right?

Yes me included i would as well.

Which brings me on to the crux of the matter. Who gave this site the authority to list me in the first place? Wait a second it was me! So what of the others ranked there? Surely they must have followed a similar patttern of link events to arrive there?

Maybe, maybe not

Either way we now have a site that for 3 years has mooched into spots that we have chose to ignore in the SERP`s. But wait i said 1 had converted, so it must be serving some purpose?

Yes it is, ultimately it is, so there is something it is doing right but from another point of view it is wrong on so many different caveats that it needs a closer look and thanks to Edward Lewis we as seo`s really can take a long hard look at what is going on.

My last point.

I rattled off a series of tweets (twitter) that to me made sense. A sort of rant come question ask! and i will repeat them again here.

Scoff, Jeer, applaud or whatever you like with them. But if we are to come together they make sense to me.

tweet1

The thing that scares me most about TopSeos.com and Edwards sleuthing is the apparent ease of whic you can set up in a less monitored…

tweet2

industry and probably largely go unnoticed and as a consequence rape businesses of their online spend, there has to be a larger monitor

tweet3

We have the capablility to monitor ALL industry for which we are responsible for and we as seo`s should be a port of call to prevent this

tweet4

We all have our spaces which we monitor daily, so surely when a rogue pops up a community effort should be called upon

tweet5

I think it was @netmeg that alluded to other industries that still make $ from a similar net casting to TopSeos slap a badge on it style

tweet6

But all of us are ultimately competing against each other on some level but with a cumulative consensus similar to recent events

tweet7

why can`t we set up a combatitive effort.. a neutal ground? A port of call? an unbiased forum? a self regulated community to combat the BS