This blog post was inspired by a post by Joel about stupid SEO emails from bots.
So, the theory behind search engine optimization is great. There is a lot of bloat on the web, why not filter it out? You don’t want to do the filtering yourself, so a search engine does that instead.
There is just one problem, the people with bad content don’t like that no one sees their bad content. And instead of fixing their content, they fooled the search engines into showing their sites first.
Those with good content didn’t “optimize” and now, the good content is filtered out, not the bad. This is of course a exaggerated view, but true to some extent.
I could conclude this article with a sentence like, “SEO is bad, don’t do SEO”. But that’s a pretty stupid opinion if you ask me.
Instead, I would suggest applying the Open Graph protocol to your website. That should be enough SEO, if your content is worthwhile. Digging deeper might be a really bad idea, you probably don’t want to go down the artificially created rabbit hole by SEO email spam.