StartUpToFinish

Not much love in the SEO blogosphere today, as Aaron Wall slams the most accessible member of the Googleplex over Google’s alleged treatment of SEO as spam.

Considering Matt Cutts and his enormous popularity at search industry conventions, to the point where his swarm of followers have been dubbed “Cuttlets,” it’s surprising to see him being trashed by another prominent person in the field.

Wall has tapped out a lengthy post at Google Blogoscoped, where he discussed the state of the US search optimization market. But after admitting he “was a spammer out of necessity” when starting in SEO, Wall then lambasted Google for what he sees as the search engine treating all SEO that way.

“If you read Google’s official page about SEOs, you will see they paint the field with some ugly remarks,” he said. “Yet if I were to tell you that you should expect a full and unconditional money-back guarantee if your AdWords ad spend did not produce profits, Google would tell you that I am a nutcase.”

The money-back guarantee is what Google suggests clients should require of an SEO firm for that client’s legal protection. That sent Wall into a lengthy diatribe about Google’s recent practices, including the alteration of PageRank scores for sites that sold text links.

There’s no question about Wall wanting his criticism of Cutts to gain attention. He not only called Cutts blindlingly hypocritical at times over his employer’s practices, but highlighted the quote in a separate box. After that, Wall wrote:

Google pushes the concept of fairness, but as soon as they place the financial viability of websites in the hands and judgement of a single individual that fairness is thrown in the trash can.Some large corporations are buying out their competition to own virtually the entire first page of search results, others use a large number of subdomains, and yet both go unscathed by the hands of search engineers. Even when a large corporation gets busted, they rank again in a matter of days.

Cutts responded on his blog by pointing out Wall’s steady increase in anti-Google postings. He also hinted at knowing what has set Wall on this path:

Suffice it to say that in my opinion there is another side to Aaron’s story. I’m on the fence about whether to talk about the specifics of what’s going on with Aaron.

Now it’s up to one or both of these luminaries to either explain what’s happening, or bury it and move on to other topics.

Aaron Wall, Matt Cutts, Google, SEO, Spam

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