The Guardian don’t quite get SEO

The Guardian made an attempt today at explaining SEO, in an article on link-building blog spam. They clearly don’t quite get it at all.

For a start, they begin by saying that there are only three ways to get listed on Google – natural algorithms, PPC and link spam:

To be noticed quickly in search engine results pages, achieving a high page ranking, is essential. That keenly sought and often competitive place may come naturally through a website’s importance (as calculated by search engine algorithms) or via sponsored links such as Google AdWords, which charge advertisers when visitors click through to their websites.

There is a third way: leaving links in the comments pages of blogs – so-called “link spam”. And with the recession biting, link spam, which is almost free, suddenly looks a lot cheaper than AdWords to some companies.

Hmm – I wonder what SEO agencies do all day if there’s only those three ways, when they’re not all blog spamming anyway! They then launch into a tirade on some SEO agency that spammed a Guardian blog, and to be fair this wasn’t some nice friendly social media campaign – this was an SEO agency posting links from completely irrelevant articles to relatively well-branded clients. Not a clever move.

The Guardian get back on track with an interview with Google, which although a little Google-friendly, was fairly balanced. But then they finish with this killer line:

“Being advised to pay for Google AdWords would have saved him much time and trouble.”

Wow! What a fantastic ad for Google Adwords. Don’t bother with SEO – just pay Google to get you rankings and give up on natural search. I don’t think that Google could pay for better publicity.

If The Guardian had been bothered to look into the issue and been a bit more even handed, maybe they could have asked why SEO agencies exist in the first place? Is it because business actually need help to get their perfectly relevant pages indexed by the big G?