So there’s been a lot of SEO talk based on some smarmy video of an expert, sounding like a used car salesman, trying to come up with some good advice after someone’s probably paid him money for it. And it’s annoyed many people, on both sides of the argument (Search Engine Land) (Jason Calacanis) (Ben Metcalfe).

It’s unfair to label a whole industry based on one shady operator. SEO is powerful, important stuff. If you have a site with a legitimate purpose and content, then by all means knock yourself out with SEO and marketing it via digg and other social news sites. I do it.

But I’m just going to offer up my user-centric point of view (since that’s all I really have to offer). I’m certainly no SEO expert.

What annoys me is when I type a search into Google or mistype a URL and I end up on a “splog” – a site or blog that has no good content but is SEOed to the max with ads, keywords, and juicy text designed to get it on top of the search results. That kind of site doesn’t provide any value to me. It’s just a big flytrap set up, waiting for a random web surfer to float by, get stuck, and click on an ad.

Right now there are tons of sites that look like this one, found by Publishing 2.0. It’s basically a husk wrapped around a bunch of advertising. The actual reviews that this site pulls from are stored on Cnet. It’s really borderline. I might just be speaking for myself because I’m so advertising-phobic, but I’d leave fast if it came up in my search results for digital cameras, never to return again.

Looking at that site, I ask myself a lot of quality-related questions. Does this site make me feel good? Or bad? Would I recommend this site to other people? Will I bookmark it with the intent to return? Would I link to this site from my blog? The answer to all these questions in regards to that spammy site are undoubtedly negative.

Most importantly, if I received a link to a site of this type in an unsolicited email, it would go in the spam bin, and deservedly so.

The whole point of Google and its page rank is that it’s supposed to encourage organic linking – links from trusted sources that happen naturally – it’s supposed to be hard. That’s the whole point! It should never be so simple as, send an email or pay someone a ton of money and you can be number one in the search results.

The concept and technology of SEO isn’t the problem. It’s certain people. For example, take email. Email is totally awesome. But somewhere along the line, spammers got in there, and it’s to the point where I get 50 – 100 spam emails a day for every five legitimate emails. It’s ridiculous. Pretty much everybody has filters now, set up to block all the garbage. But all that spam, in the loosest definition of the term, falls under the banner of “marketing.”

I don’t want the Internet or blogs to get to the point where most people think it’s just full of spam, so why bother reading anything, or set up filters to block whole swaths of sites. But on the other hand, this might be inevitable. Maybe it’s already happening.

I just feel that if people took a step back and worked harder on creating quality content that users would independently want to link to, many other things would be so much easier. Especially the SEO stuff.

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