Let me start out by saying that I am extremely non-political, so if I get my political definitions a little wrong, well, just forgive me. Recently, an SEO called a friend of mine a spammer and the guy obviously knows nothing about my friend. My friend is not even close to being a spammer. Nevertheless, the fervor with which this guy and his cronies lambasted my friend without having any facts whatsoever reminded me of extremism, which then made me think of politics. So I thought maybe we should dump the old white hat / black hat / whatever color hat descriptions and see if political party designations fit better.
Sticking to the normal three designations, let's go with Right-wing (conservative), Left-wing (liberal), and Centrist (moderate) as our three choices. Of course, there's probably a dozen or so other choices (surely there are some Green SEOs out there), but no one pays any attention to them. 🙂
On the Right, we've got the most conservative SEOs such as the persistant Doug Heil, and on the Left, we've got the most liberal SEOs such as Earl Grey. While there are certainly large clumps on both ends of this spectrum, I'd guess that a much, much larger group resides in the center of this line, with myself (and my friend who was erroneously labeled a spammer) being within that Centrist group.
The Centrists, I believe, are those who generally follow good practices that would, under normal conditions, never be considered spammy. They probably, however, do not restrict themselves to simply writing good content. No, these SEOs will do crazy things like participating in social media in order to get noticed, perhaps check ranking (that's SERPs ranking, not PageRanking) via a tool on occasion, and even go so far as to purchase a link once in a while.
The Right-wingers would cry foul and accuse the Centrists of all sorts of dastardly deeds, while the Left-wingers would snicker at the Centrists, thinking them nothing but babes in the woods.
Personally, if you are going to accuse me (or my friends) of something, I'd prefer it to be the "babes in the woods" accusation rather than the "spammers" one. Neither are correct, but the first is much less offensive to me than the second. (I'll have to check with my friend...he might prefer being called a spammer than a babe).
I mentioned in the beginning of this post that I'm very non-political. There are lots of reasons for that, but one of them is that I get really annoyed by each group calling out the other groups. I hate all the finger-pointing, name-calling BS that goes on between the parties. For that reason, I hate the fact that the different groups of SEOs engage in this same behavior. Maybe I will change my affiliation from Centrist to Green SEO. That way, I can fade into the background and ignore all the in-fighting.
Or maybe I'll just come out and say what I really feel. Just shut up, already! Stop the judgmental crap and mind your own business.
Nah, that would be too harsh. I'd better just shut up now. 😉