Content is not King. Self Promotion Is.
While I was at the airport last week, Dr. Pete sent me a link to his post on SEOmoz about SEO cliques and asked for my thoughts. The post talked about the various groups that exist in SEO, how not friendly the industry can be sometimes …
Context & Ripple Effects
Outspoken Media's argument lands on a debate the SEO trade press has been circling since at least 2006: how outsiders break into a field run by small, mutually-reinforcing circles. Search Engine Journal's early survival guide for the SEO community treated networking as a skill to learn; ClickZ's push-versus-pull framing had already conceded that attention no longer flows automatically to whoever publishes.
First-order effects
- For working SEO consultants, the piece redirects effort: visibility in the tight-knit circles Dr. Pete mapped on SEOmoz comes from promoting yourself within them, not from waiting for content quality to win on its own.
Second-order effects
- Community platforms like SEOmoz — which built its own web index for the Linkscape tool released in October 2008 — become the de facto gatekeepers, since the cliques that decide which voices rise gather on their turf.
Third-order effects
- If self-promotion reliably outranks substance, the industry's advice economy shifts from publishing craft toward relationship capital, rewarding whoever controls the rooms where reputations are made rather than whoever writes the best material.
The trend: The SEO industry is drifting from a meritocracy of published work toward a reputation network where community platforms and personal promotion determine who gets heard.