Comments on: Why Derek Powazek’s Posts Were Reprehensible

By: PlainTruth

PlainTruth — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 12:49:34 +0000

Derek Powazek is obsolete, has been for a long time. Just ignore him; he is desperate for any kind of attention.

By: 2009 Top SEO Smackdowns: Barone v Scoble | Managing Greatness

2009 Top SEO Smackdowns: Barone v Scoble | Managing Greatness — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 18:26:15 +0000

[...] expected this to be a spoof of Scoble’s post, similar to Ari Ozick’s excellent spoof of Derek Powazek’s anti-SEO rant a few months ago. But no, it was an unrelated piece, with the same title as Scoble’s except [...]

By: Gil Reich

Gil Reich — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 19:22:47 +0000

Yeah, I agree with you Sebastian. Even after reading Danny and others he kept Tweeting things like “Attacking me is easy. Explaining how SEO isn’t either obvious web design or an unethical scam seems to be the hard part.” As you point out, many of the replies to him (not mine of course) were calm explanations, to which he replied with more venom.

FYI: Sebastian’s response to Derek is here http://sebastians-pamphlets.com/detox-your-web-development-team/

By: Gil Reich

Gil Reich — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 19:22:00 +0000

FYI: Sebastian’s response to Derek is here http://sebastians-pamphlets.com/detox-your-web-development-team/

By: Sebastian

Sebastian — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 11:27:59 +0000

Derek’s insults were childish even from a Web developer’s POV. At least after Danny and others politely explained it to him, he could have learned that not everything SEO is a bad thing. Instead, he ignored all constructive criticism and posted an equally childish follow-up. This behavior doesn’t exactly indicate that “he’s not stupid and his heart is in the right place”.

By: Sebastian

Sebastian — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 11:27:00 +0000

By: Gil Reich

Gil Reich — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 19:49:56 +0000

Thanks Anil, I appreciate you taking the time to provide this perspective.

By: Gil Reich

Gil Reich — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 19:49:00 +0000

Thanks Anil, I appreciate you taking the time to provide this perspective.

By: Anil

Anil — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 19:42:40 +0000

Since I was quoted above, I should probably give a little context here: I’ve known Derek for about ten years, and I can assure you that he’s not stupid and his heart is in the right place. I won the first-ever SEO contest on the web, and the reason I did was because I tapped into the blogosphere’s resentment of the impact that SEO (both white- and blackhat) has had on our medium of expression.

The perception that Derek, and many other influential web developers and designers, have of the traditional SEO industry has been shaped by misdeeds that the SEO community has not done enough to try to curtail. I was happy to call out the inaccuracy in Derek’s post because he and I come from the same community, but each community should police its own. That means SEO folks should be taking a hard look inward to see why the perception has gotten so bad.

For perspective, it may help to know that a lot of us were building websites initially for our personal expression, and things like links were made as a nuanced form of adding meaning to content. Thanks to the Google economy and the efforts of the SEO industry, that form of expression has now been completely destroyed by commercial interests. It’s worth a little bit of introspection to think about where the resentment comes from – for Derek, for myself and for many others like us, we were natives to the web whose culture was colonized and destroyed by newcomers who were just doing it for money, instead of for love of the medium. That’s a legacy the SEO community would do well to address.

By: Anil

Anil — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 19:42:00 +0000