Type 1: People that promote themselves more than they promote their clients in the hope be being an SEO cool kid (because they will really pay the bills)

Type 2: SEOs that stay undercover and grab as much business as they can while trying to keep a competitive advantage. You typically don’t see these guys on you tube, but you see their clients sites on the first page of the SERPS.

Type 3: Experts that because of their knowledge and expertise (and proven skill) are forced into the limelight as a industry expert. The difference between this type and type 1 is that type 3 SEO providers are called into the limelight while type 1 SEOs are trying to force themselves into it..

Maybe there is more types.. you’ll have to wait for the update LOL

AWESOME quote….

Jersey power!!!! hahaha

I don’t see anything wrong with following the advice of people deemed knowledgeable when you’re a newb – I do see a problem in following it (and repeating it) blindly… test, test, test…. then you’ll figure out not only which SEO tactics really work, but which bloggers are full of shit. :)

It’s what I was at first, blindly following the more ‘trusted and talked about’ SEOs out there until I got a true grasp on what SEO was all about.

I have to agree that some of the ‘hero worship’ that goes on in the SEO industry does throw me a bit – simply b/c while the many ‘experts’ are damn good, damn reliable, and damn GENIUSES, at some point they started out like the rest of us – wondering what the hell SEO was and how they could make search engines list their website at #1.

Can the hero worship please. They’re normal geeks like you and me.

Also, about Jersey – don’t forget the jug handles! As a Philly native, we sometimes call Jersey the land of “No Left Turns”.

As webwitch noted, there’s different classes of sheeple. Following the posts on this site gets more into research rather than following. There’s not many blogs or sites I read these days for new information, but this is definitiely one of them.

Look to the right at Rae’s blogroll. If you limit your reading to those sources, you’ll be safe from the wolves (with the exception of a certain grey whore – lol)

So – those “bad apples in the industry” — care to name names?

And those answers are really difficult to get because it’s a game of battleship against the engines. “B5?” nope. “F2?” nope. “G3?” — Yay! You ranked for “florida vacation homes!”

A lot of people attempting optimization are not SEO experts going at it full time as their vocation. We/they don’t have the time or resources for conducting double-blind experiments or putting links on a dozen “throw-away” sites to see how they’re indexed and ranked to test a hypothesis.

Many of the “rock stars” aren’t even that scientific about things. They develop their SEO wisdom through a combination of real-world experience (i.e. creative trial and error), intelligence (logic, figuring out how the big machine works), and social connectivity (i.e. call your buddy at Yahoo and get the inside scoop on an algo change).

What do newbs do? Read, read, read, and try what the experts say tends to work. They install some analytics… but all those numbers and correlations can be overwhelming. So when Sugarrae says “build links”, they build links. When Cutts says “submit a sitemap”, they submit a sitemap. When Stuntdubl says “fix your titles” or “change your anchor text”, they do it. Baaaa. And lo and behold – their rankings go up. Wow!

In time, the newb becomes an amateur, and understands concepts like “dupe content”, “canonicalization”, “keyword density”, “PageRank”, “link building” etc. We watch our analytics and try to interpret them. And … we gain a lot of knowledge from SEO bloggers like Rae.

What you’re basically saying in this post is that advice you read from SEO “experts” can not be trusted. That may be true in some cases, but I’ve found it’s not typical at all. SEO professionals – especially those that blog about it – are typically quite open with publicizing interesting techniques and best practices, out of honest good will, with the side effect of gaining respect in their field.

Perhaps I agree with the sentiment of your post – people attempting SEO should actually try to learn what and why and how, by following best practices, experimenting and watching analytics and rankings. They shouldn’t just read the SEO rockstar bloggers and follow in their steps. Then they may make that transition from newb to amateur.

Calling newbies “sheep” is not kind