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First and foremost I am not one to bash other SEO’s. For the most part all of the SEO’s that I deal with and know about, I have a lot of respect for (even though they are competition). I would never bash my colleagues unfortunately I do not consider Gary Ruplinger a colleague and I am embarrassed that he is part of our industry.
You may remember Gary as the SEO Youtube douchebag (Hey thats what people called him). Here is his video just to recap:
After he released this video he just added ammo to Jason Calacanis’ SEO bashing arsenal. However disappointed and infuriated I was with Gary, I held back my anger because I wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt. I figured that everyone makes mistakes and even though they may have made mistakes in the past, people change. Unfortunately while stopping by his blog to drop him a comment to stop calling himself a professional and to learn more about SEO before taking on clients I noticed some blog posts that really boiled my blood.
In the first post I read about the software he was using in order to whore Social Bookmark links, isn’t this the thing that got this guy in trouble with the SEO community in the first place (watch video above). After reading this post I went on to the next one about how he is praising a website that pretty much openly sells links on their blog network. This is just more ammo for the anti SEO’s. He also goes on to say the following:
“I only used the Linksvana system to get links, nothing else. I did manage to get some top ten rankings in google despite the on page SEO sucking for this site, so as best I can tell, Google is definitely giving some weight to the links from their system.”
Confirming my theory of him not knowing crap about what real SEO is really hit home when looking at the final blog post that I could look at without throwing up. This blog post was entitled “White Hat Search Engine Optimization Just Makes Sense”. He states methods in his blog that are clearly Grey and borderline black hat, nothing that he has said so far would be considered complete white hat. But he don’t even know this. He is so ignorant to SEO that he thinks the tactics that he uses are white hat.
The tactics that he uses are tactics that small, un-knowledgeable webmasters use before turning to SEO companies to help them get their site re-included in Google. Unfortunately he is not a small webmaster, he is someone that is actually running other peoples websites. He is someone that calls himself an SEO. This is why we have a bad name. Anyone not very experienced with the internet and how to research a company might stumble across his service and sign up for it. After signing up he screws their site up beyond compare and now that person is on every forum posting about how bad SEO’s are and how much of a scam they are. times that by 10000 Gary ruplinger’s and you have the situation that our industry is in now. The good SEO’s must suffer for this, the people who have taken the time to learn about SEO and spent years researching the art.
I’m gonna leave you on that note. Again I really didn’t want to have to do this but I am really mad. Please don’t take this as me trying to bash honest, hard working SEO’s because I would never do that.
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[...] Excerpt from: Gary Ruplinger – This is Why SEO Has a Bad Name [...]
Palapple Blog | SEO Solutions for your Business…
Thanks for sharing. Search engine optimization is indeed one of the most crucial areas in Internet marketing, it is a perfect bridge between technology and business….
Hello – this is Gary Ruplinger – happened to catch this post from Google Alerts. Just a couple things I want to address.
First off, that is an old, old video and I’m the first to admit that not only is the video just plain bad, but the tactics are questionable to be sure. That service was actually discontinued 1 month after releasing the video.
You also imply that if someone were to hire me, I’d get them banned from Google. I find that to be offensive since I’ve NEVER got a singled client site banned. Do I use some aggressive tactics? You bet. I always test everything out on my own little playground of sites to make sure it’s safe before using it on a client’s sites so please don’t infer that I’m going to trash someone’s website if they hire me.
Since we clearly disagree on what constitutes “whitehat” SEO, what is your opinion on it, I’m willing to hear you out…
Gary Ruplinger
Gary I am glad that you have found this post. Maybe you will learn something new today.
First off my definition of white hat is from the Google guidelines along with the various social media network guidelines. One of the main reasons that social media networks hate us is directly because of the stuff that you where (or still are) doing. Because of people like you every time I try to post something useful for webmasters on the main social media sites like reddit or digg I am immediately flamed just because the stuff relates to SEO.
On to my next issue, you are openly promoting link buying (linkvana blog post). Gary this is not a white hat practice by a long shot. Do you know that the links that linkvana posts for you are usually on their network of blogs. It is pretty easy for a professional like myself to spot these blogs. Lets say you are running a campaign for a website we will call this website A and a professional company is running a campaign for website A’s competitor we will call this website B. Now lets say your website, website A is outranking website B. The first thing your competitor is gonna do is check the in links for website A to see how they can obtain some of those links and possibly out rank website A. After a little bit of research your competitor finds that website A has links pointed to it from a blog network which accepts paid links. What do you think your competitor is gonna do? Well let me tell you, if they are, as you call it aggressive they are gonna report that site for paid links. Now you have just risked that client getting banned from Google. Do you think this example is a long shot, well it’s not. It happens everyday.
Lets go into what makes an SEO company great. Currently at my company we have 4 people here. One is in charge of Content Writing & SEO, one is in charge of PPC & Graphic/Banner Design, one is in charge of SEO & Link Dev., and the other is in charge of SEO & Web Dev. as you can see we all have our specific roles in the company. I am not saying that one man shops are not good, on the contrary I know some guys who are awesome such as Bill Slawski from SEOByTheSea. But as far as I can see you are not one of them, your web design is horrendous, your overall SEO is average at best and you use tricks that rookie webmasters use. Let me quote you from your blog post for a minute:
“So what does make a difference?
Only two things. Content and links. That’s it. Everything else is based on one of those two things.”
If you honestly believe this then you are very much in need of help. You should try reading a little bit more. This is not all SEO is. This is what makes the difference in a million dollar company and someone working out of their moms garage.
I could go on but I have work to do. I will follow up on this comment a little bit more later…
Apparently, comment spam works according this video. I wonder if comment spam works equally as well for http://blog.palapple.com/. They seem to do a lot of it over many blogs….
“They want to give you One Way links on their site”. I call Bullshit.
I really like this post.
One thing that I hate the most about the net is people spreading so much worthless and harmful information. Maybe it’s just that I’ve been using the net for such a long time but I remember it as a hub to find great discussion and quality information.
All of these “Internet Marketers” that you see running around proclaiming themselves as “Gurus” are total bullshit. They grab basic information you can find anywhere on the net and then package it at $97, $497 and even their $1997 seminars. WTF is that about?
I feel really sorry for the people that pay for some of these things. That’s not to say all of them are bad, some of them are quite good and taught well but still, it’s shady people selling free information.
Thanks for pointing all this out.