An Unlikely Attempt to Trademark SEO - So: Do We Need SEO Standards?

There's enough material from various analysts for several other articles. I'm going to be sensible about this and let others fry Gambert. That task is in far more capable hands than my own. But however misguided Gambert's approach – okay, calling it “misguided” is being way overgenerous – it does raise a valid question. Does the SEO industry need some kind of standards?

Gambert isn't the first one to raise this question. It has been asked, and answered, in various ways, by Danny Sullivan, Jill Whalen, Ian McAnerin, Lisa Barone, Jessica Bowman, and others. It seems to be one of those topics that won't go away, and for many of the same reasons that Gambert raised: the industry really does have its share of cheats and snake-oil salesman. We've all heard stories of small business owners getting hoodwinked by SEO scam artists. Shouldn't we, as responsible professionals, do something to remove the black eye from our field?

Perhaps we should, but is a body of standards the best way to go about it? SEOHack, writer of the self-proclaimed “worst SEO blog ever,” offered a humorous take on SEO standards and whether we need them. Though the standards themselves were proposed in jest, the point behind them is quite serious. SEOHack thinks standards for SEO are “a horrible idea...if you're a goddamned liar and thief, it'll come out...An arbitrary governing body isn't going to give you that...we have search engines more or less telling us which tactics are kosher as well as a whole heap of laws...you really don't need more than that.”

Besides, search engine optimization is maybe eleven years old – and it was first practiced, in effect, by snake-oil salesmen (how else would you describe someone distributing spam to a forum?). Who would the community trust as members of a body that certifies a person or company is following SEO standards? Never mind that, who would we trust to create those standards in the first place?

Yes, there are respected SEO professionals, but as a whole the industry is young enough to still be a little rough around the edges. Some might argue that this is exactly why we need standards – but consider what would happen if someone tried to create them and enforce them. You'd more than likely get a mess that's even worse than what Gambert is trying to pull.

Or, to paraphrase SEOHack from a different post directed at Jason Gambert and others: will a body of standards prevent people who don't do due diligence from getting scammed? No. Will it prevent those who carry the SEO trademark from scamming others? No. Gambert's trademark claim should be invalidated; let's move on to something else.