Here's nice article where Amex marketing experts call SEO waste of time. They primarily say not to spend money SEO but to create clean pages, readable URLs that don't characters like '?', '&' etc. Interesting read... http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2008/03/14/american-express-guide-calls-seo-a-waste
Basically wtf does American Express know about SEO? Quote: "and once your site has been put on Google’s blacklist, it will take forever to get off." What kind of statement is this, what is this based on where is the evidence. If they don't even know how to write their own context why should anybody listen to them. Quote: "This is the San Francisco firm that developed the Facebook logo." What do these logo designers know about SEO? Also is this meant to be some claim to fame woopty woo? So why should we listen to them? Where are the threads in this section giving advice on what credit card to choose? The only thing i agree on is for small buisness not to invest heavily in SEO as they can do it for FREE as they are a SMALL buisness. I dont even offer SEO services and this post makes me want to attack American Express, this Facebook Logo whoever and the author of the post who writes and refers to this and makes these statements from uneducated idiots famous !!!
Before crying wolf, why don't you sit down and actually read what they're saying? If you actually do that, you'll realize that they're just echoing things I've been saying for two years now. http://www.youropenbook.com/growing.php?p=4 Note that they're specifically talking about "so-called" SEO specialists. Who are these so-called "specialists"? Those people who claim they know what they're doing yet constantly are creating link farms, cloaking their content, creating doorway pages, stuffing keywords into their clients' sites, and then griping on forums such as this one each and every single freaking time they get their sites banned by the search engines. The article isn't saying a DAMN THING about avoiding the real professionals in the SEO industry - the ones who DO know what they're doing and actually care about their clients' success and well-being since the happier and more successful the client is, the happier and more successful they will be. Just my 2 cents - and some food for thought.
my comment on the page: "Yeah, it's easy to say SEO is a waste when you're already a massive credit card firm. There's a point where if your product or website is unique/successful enough, the role of SEO will diminish (maddox is a prime example). For smaller businesses and website developers SEO is necessary to compete, or they'll get crushed by other established companies, brands and pages."
Yeah. good one. start writing about credit cards - Amex is not all that great as a CC so they need some advice. There are so many "so called" SEO experts who just clean up the meta tags, submit to directories and build links and call it SEO (things that we already know). I guess it depends on what level of SEO they are referring to. Pretty dumb news! that's I put it here so that you all can start bashing...
So essentially AmEx is saying: "Here's an SEO tip: using clean U.R.L.’s like yourdomain.com/store/widgets instead of yourdomain.com/store.php?id=42&categoryID= widgets will increase your chances of getting indexed in a search engine. By the way, don't listen to people to have SEO tips." Oops, they need to tell something which we done know-now they say SEO is bad and try to teach their customers SEO techniques ha...dumb Some employee in Amex who has been working his a** off for the company dont know what search engine or optimisation is writing an editorial on SEO's....ha...so much more dumb And then quoting a logo design company which designed facebook logo-hey have u seen that facbook logo-me without any design knowledge can make better ones.....ha...much much more dumb