Please Stop Eating the Shit Sandwich

  By Chris Dyson |

turdwich-776433

2012 was the year that it became clearer than ever that a lot of SEO blogs were just serving up Shit sandwiches:

  • Speculation – SEO’s making predictions on what factors were in the Matt Cutts “over optimisation penalty” and then giving crap advice about the steps to recovery from the big bad Penguin with out any proof or evidence.
  • FUD – Blog Networks Deindexed, Anchor Text devalued, I’m sure SEO was killed off at least 47 times last year. Can’t anyone properly dispatch of this lame horse?
  • Unlikely Pairings  – What your Mom taught me about Reach arounds Outreach – Michael Kovis did a great job of analysing this trend so I’ll let you read his blog.

I’ve been annoyed by this trend of crappy posts for a while now and do you know what I  call this stuff “idearrhoea“. The worst cases of idearrhoea usually occur when you’re struggling to meet your ludicrous posting schedule and will toss up another 500 word post in the hope that you’ll appease the Google gods.

How do you know you’ve got idearrhoea? It’s just like farting, if you have to try too hard it’s probably shit…

Time to Change

So a couple of months ago after a few rum and cokes I took myself over to Twitter to vent my frustrations. I’m not sure which post it was that made me snap but it was probably a day ending in y, as clearly someone had tossed another crap post into the echo chamber. The SEO sea lions had clapped their flippers and barked their false platitudes…

“Great Content… arf arf!”

Less than 24 hours later someone had bought the domain and put the project into development, I need to keep my great ideas to myself in the future because clearly I do have them!

Shitbound’s tagline is “the home for shite that SEOs write” that’s absolute genius. It’s been coming for a while and it’s time for us as a community to call the crap out, and in the words of Jonathon Colman “we can do better than this“.

Don’t get me wrong I’m not saying that every article we write has to be an award winning piece but if you really don’t have something to write about please don’t push out a post just to achieve your twice a week blogging ritual schedule.

Writing takes time, and editing even longer, a lot of people don’t give themselves enough time to write their posts and often very few will spend time editing them. So why not ask your peers to review your posts before they go live.

It’s dead easy, just install this WordPress plugin and ask your friends to submit their feedback. If they are true fans they’ll tell you if your post is a big steaming pile and persuade you not to hit publish.

Make a Pledge

But this isn’t a post offering you a free lesson in writing betterer, this is a request for all my followers (hi mum!) and my fellow professional SEO’s to:

  1. Stop upvoting crap content on Inbound.org
  2. Stop auto-tweeting every time SEOmoz, SEJ, SEL or SEW hit publish
  3. Stop blindly re-tweeting everything that the “influencers” plug (aka the SEO Beliebers)
  4. Sign up to Shitbound.org once it’s open for business
  5. Call out the crap
  6. Don’t be afraid to give feedback in the comments or via email

Until then make a new years resolution to cut down on the Shit Sandwiches they’re doing you no good and are making your breath smell a bit.

 

 

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  • http://www.alessiomadeyski.com/ Alessio Madeyski

    I agree. I tend to ignore a lot of stuff to be honest. A big improvement was to unfollow a lot of people on twitter and to cut my RSS feeds.

    I prefer to try and do mistakes, and learn something. I was reading too much controversial stuff, with no sense at the end.

    Thanks for sharing!

  • http://twitter.com/andreapernici Andrea Pernici

    I absolutely agree with you Chris.

    The vast majority of share and blind and I think without reading/understanding and critical thinking.

  • http://twitter.com/content_muse Anthony Pensabene

    the longer i sit in the seo cafeteria, the more i notice people eat sloppy poos “how would you like some more poopy joes?” the SEO amalgam lunch lady hovers over my table, loose tricep flesh slapping my face. “fuck off, lady. I’m tired of this shit.” throwing shit at influencers ensues, screaming “SEO shit fight!”

  • http://robduckers.com/ Rob Duckers

    Chris, of course I agree with you, because as usual your remarks are applaudable.

    However, the reason for this comment is to ask how many shit sandwich images you looked at before picking the one you did?

    • RootsWebSol

      I looked at my fair share – I was going to a screen grab from 2 girls one cup until settling on an illustration

  • http://www.equotemd.com/ Michael J. Kovis

    More critical thinking, less shite. Most SEOs are too busy stroking their epeen to produce any type of quality or add any value. If most readers would think for themselves after comprehending what they have just read to compose a valid comment we would start to see more publishers worry about accountability.

    Appreciate the shout out as well sir. Thanks.

    • RootsWebSol

      I like your shit

  • http://www.mikewilton.com/ Mike Wilton

    Oh man, too bad its not already up. I have a piece I came across yesterday that talked up the use of the meta keywords tag as the top tag that search engines look at…and it was published yesterday! Looking forward to seeing this site once its done, just hope good content doesn’t get thrown into the fire simply because someone disagrees with it. There’s bad content and then there is just content that we don’t all agree upon.

    • RootsWebSol

      Hang in there Mike & keep them in a safe place the guys announced on Twitter it would be here by the end of January

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