Comments from strangers

Comments from strangers on this here blog are a new thing for me. The first one I got was more than a tad trollish, and probably part of a general effort to increace someone's standing in the Nigritude Ultramarine SEO challenge. But I'm going to answer it anyway.

It's not that I dislike SEO. I do a lot of SEO work with metadata as a routine part of my job. However, I do it as a public service to help people, not to sell anything.

What I dislike are SEO _Companies_ - the kind of people who charge money for doing things that any good web designer should have done for them in the first place, and pollute search engines with pointless results.

I'm a big beleiver in the semantic web, and best practice for metadata. I don't think it does anyone any favours to click through on a result and be taken to a page that is essentially garbage - having your brand or service associated with that kind of activity is ultimately going to damage public perception of that brand.

So, what I dislike is companies charging innocent souls money to perform a service that will ulimately harm their business model, and the polity of the web.

Spam-related SEO techniques just aren't cricket.

The other comment is a lovely passing comment about my NPR post; from someone who knows their onions. I wonder how on earth the nice chap found me?