Dave Pasternack Takes the Cake

"Dave Pasternack is drinking the old-media snakeoil. Unfortunately he has ignored the warning on the bottle which reads 'topical use only'".

When I first became an SEO, I decided to allow Marketing Sherpa to send me a million email alerts so I could be kept up-to-date about goings-on in the internet marketing world. Shortly thereafter, I figured out that it was annoying to have my Gmail clogged up with gigabytes of email every five minutes when I could get the same information, often days earlier, by subscribing to a few SEO blogs. I soon abandoned that Gmail account because it became so bloated with the relentless idiot torrent of emails that I couldn't use it for anything remotely productive.

This was part of how I learned not to pay attention to the hucksters who were trying to sell a service or product I didn't need, and the genuine SEOs/internet marketers who espoused both winning philosphy and airtight methodology.

As human beings, we are endowed with an onboard bullshit detector. This detector acts in a fashion similar to the spam filter in Thunderbird. It must be trained before it becomes truly effective.

Such was the case for both me and my company. We hired some shitty SEOs, got shitty results, and compared that to our experiences when hiring phenomenal SEOs. We attended a few SEO conferences and learned to distinguish self-promotional bullshit from passion and competency. As a result of this trial and error, our company has evolved a network of fine filters through which information passes. The succulent nectar of SEO is absorbed and retained while (forgive me for belaboring this metaphor) the sludgy residue of bullshit accumulates in the filter, where it proceeds to set off an array of sensitive early-warning apparatus and is then removed for scrutiny, analysis and subsequent disposal.

So... because of this my company and I learned to distinguish bullshit from SEO. SEO is not bullshit, SEO is SEO. Bullshit is bullshit. Saying that SEO is bullshit is, in a word, bullshit.

Dave Pasternack is drinking the old-media snakeoil. Unfortunately he has ignored the warning on the bottle which reads "topical use only". Using overly simplistic analogies is good for getting attention, but w

hen the accuracy of any such comparison invites scorn, ridicule, or general invective, then "boom!" goes the dynamite.

Such is the spirit of the Dave Pasternack SEO contest. Not since Jason Calacanis has there been a more deserving target for a reputation management experiment. Actually, Dave Pasternack has been saying this shit for a long time now, whereas Jason just drops the occasional verbal deuce.

SEO is not easy, but check out Google's Dave Pasternack results. This is way less competitive than the Ted Leonsis results page. At least Ted had the strength of the AOL domain to anchor himself at the top, like some kind of freakish robot limpet.

I'm not sure if I want to enter this contest yet. I have a lot of SEO to do and despite what Dave Pasternack might say, it isn't easy.

However, even though SEO is hard, 200,000/some-odd Google results is not a terribly competitive results page. I'm already starting to see a few Dave Pasternack pages indexed in the results, for great justice. I'm curious as to how this page will rank, seeing as I got to #5 for "Ted Leonsis blog" with just minor on-page tweaks and some aggressive pinging, but scant backlinks.