Ignite Visibility and John Lincoln produced one of the first SEO Movies, a documentary about the SEO industry. Well, since I stared doing SEO back in 1996, well before SEO was called “SEO”, I certainly was interested in seeing this SEO movie. I have a bunch of comments after seeing it. It’s certainly one of the first SEO movies, and I commend the producer for putting it together.
While watching the movie, I wrote down some comments and definitely have some constructive criticism about it. There are comments that I don’t want to publish here, as there are some serious inaccuracies that I found. These could be because of the length of time the producer had, or just the fact that they didn’t do enough research into the SEO industry. Nonetheless, here are my comments:
SEO Movie Comments
Pretty well done. There are some inaccuracies, and that’s kind of expected due to editing, etc.. And of course, there’s a lot more people involved than the 6 people featured, but overall, they’ve done a good job at putting this together.
“Back in the day, all they were doing is keyword stuffing and buying links…”. Uh, “back in the day”, Google didn’t exist, and we didn’t have to build links, buy links, or even create links. No search engine algorithm dealt with links, “back in the day”. In fact, it was all about on-page content, and yes, I did build links. But, I got links for traffic. Not because it had anything to do with any sort of search engine algorithm.
“Back in the day”, so to speak, it was about getting the perfect keyword density right. In fact, you could copy/paste someone’s perfect paragraph of text, replace their keyword with the keyword you wanted to rank for, and get the page crawled. You’d soon be ranking for your preferred keyword.
If your “back in the day…” statement includes a mention of links, then that’s NOT “back in the day”. Period. It makes me upset that the “history of SEO” talks about links. The beginning of SEO was absolutely NOT about links. It was on-page content before links ever came along, nearly 5 years before Google came along.
Mentions of Google Penguin in this documentary… keep in mind that many think it was all about Links. Google Penguin, though, isn’t all about links. It was a web spam update: https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2012/04/another-step-to-reward-high-quality.html I continue to see people talk about how Penguin was about links and spammy links from other websites. But, that’s just a misconception. It’s about web spam. Read the original blog post by Matt Cutts.
I totally agree with Rae’s comment about the fact that Google waited too long between Google Penguin updates. Companies had cleaned up their sites, cleaned up their links. But they had to wait for Google to update their algorithm again. It affected a LOT of companies and was very frustrating.
As Danny said, it’s never too late to get started in SEO.
So, if you’re in the SEO industry, it’s a fun retrospective. Many memorable events in the SEO industry have been mentioned in this SEO movie. However, while it’s worth watching, it’s certainly not an accurate historical perspective of the SEO industry as a whole. It’s entertaining, at best.