I have no interest in the white hat, black hat controversy because I don’t make a living from SEO. But I can say without a shadow of a doubt that anyone who calls Doug Heil a “Charlatan” either does not know Doug, does not know what “Charlatan” means or has a grudge against Doug.

It was ugly back then. It was distasteful, and it was largely just as full of crap as the SEO stuff of today. Just like this thread.

Every time someone on Sphinn surmises why SEO has a bad name, you should bring up another post that acts as a call to arms for old skool SEO egos to show their feathers…

However, only maybe, because there’s still a real huge warning sign about a guy who basically says “I don’t care that you can prove Doug is a liar and a fake, and I refuse to look” – which is precisely what you’ve said above regarding Jill – (which was something Doug brought up in his linked thread, not me).

The link on my name goes straight to a page that declares my working relationship with Fresh Egg. Its right there in print, very clearly.

It isn’t right in with the testimonial, true, but that’s because I wasn’t working with Fresh Egg when I got the testimonial, back in 2003. In 2003 I was working with a rival company named Propellernet, and still got the testimonial, even as a potential rival.

I created that testimonial page around the end of April 2003
http://web.archive.org/web/20030602042330/www.webmarketingplus.co.uk/testimonials.html

You can see that the page didn’t exist yet on May 22 of 2003
http://web.archive.org/web/20030422044016/http://webmarketingplus.co.uk/
and appeared by June
http://web.archive.org/web/20030525125049/http://www.webmarketingplus.co.uk/

I joined Fresh Egg after leaving The Search Works in 2005. Given Adam Stafford’s testimonial, you can see he’d be pretty keen to hire me if he could. Once again, I actually took a significant salary drop to be with a company I felt happy with. Its never been about the money to me.

If you want to question my own ethics and/or experience, then please feel free to dig about as you will. Unlike some, I don’t attempt to divert and distract away from that stuff.

The following all offer insight in the words of others as well as my own:
http://www.cre8asiteforums.com/forums/index.php?s=&showtopic=41446
http://www.seomoz.org/article/ammon-johns-interview 2005
http://www.searchengineblog.com/interviews/interview_ammon_johns.htm 2003

If you ask those with enough years in the business to know, ‘who were some of the first people talking about integrated marketing, traditional marketing values, and holistic online campaigns’ you’ll likely hear my name.

I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt and enabling you to make up your own mind with evidence. Up to you whether you take the offer. Other readers will.

And that brings us back to a point that you seemed to miss along with TinPig and Doug himself. If I think Doug is so worthless, why spend all this time posting here?

Its not FOR Doug, silly.

Just because Doug is eminently worth ignoring doesn’t mean the danger of believing the lies he spreads must also be ignored.

If you look back, you can probably see I mostly respond to the message, not the man, in regards to Doug, and my target audience, the people I am addressing and not ignoring, are readers of this post who may not know better and might believe Doug is what he purports to be without actually checking.

And that’s why Doug always was going to have to bow out of this. He needs to cover up, while I don’t need to convince you of anything. All I require is that you dig for yourselves. Your own mind, once set to asking questions, will find its own answers.

their days are numbered, just like the high paid “web masters” of the mid-1990’s – most of which are working at a local radio shack now.

Okay, so I have one more comment to make (but this wasn’t here when I was posting). It’s called The Source by Circuit City here in Canada, now…is it the same in the States?

Just wondering.

So Doug had nothing to do with this. Let me make this very, very clear, since I don’t think you’ll understand it the first time…Doug didn’t have a thing to do with this, nor has he ever at any point told me what to think, say, how to act, what to feel, or what color Kool-Aid to drink. Like I said, there’s a link to my blog post from this site and that’s how I found out about all this silly crap in the first place. Anyone who knows me at all knows that I say what I’m going to say, regardless of what other people might think or feel about it (including Doug, because there are things that he and I disagree on too…but at least when Doug makes a comment, the comment does generally have a bigger picture associated with it.) I believe they refer to this as “independent thought”…something most of the SEO industry considers to be dark alchemy.

I don’t know about the Jill Whalen thing, and quite frankly, I couldn’t care less. I don’t have anything against Jill specifically…she’s never said or done anything negative to me, and she was actually one of the few people who said something that made sense when the SEO community took a comment on a site of mine completely out of context (not the first time, won’t be the last). And that whole situation is obviously emotionally charged and kind of silly. So…I stay out of it. The situation between Doug and Jill holds no interest to me.

As far as your comment about the commenters to my blog…that’s just too idiotic to dignify an answer, other than to say that there are different comments from different people from different walks of life, and that many of the main commenters have never even heard of IHY.

But if you’re going to talk about lies and fake testimonials, Ammon, and the kind of stuff that Doug gets upset about, take a look at your own site…specifically, this testimonial:

“I’ve known Ammon almost since the conception of SEO and his advice has always been leading edge, I would also say that he doesn’t hold back the punches!! I have seen many sites benefit from his advice and hands on work, often using techniques that lead the market by many months…”
Adam Stafford CEO, Fresh Egg

Your earlier comment indicates that:

1) you work for FreshEgg;
2) you own FreshEgg, or at least a portion of it;
3) you work very closely with FreshEgg.

Personally, I suspect it’s either 1) or 2). In any case, it’s a testimonial that at the very least would be referred to as “artificially generated”, and yet another example of why most testimonials are meaningless. How are we supposed to trust the rest of the testimonials when one had to come from a company that you have way too much of an association with in the first place?

There is even a cottage industry of shills going around posting fake testimonials on blogs and forums. So testimonials ultimately mean very little at best, and this is exactly the kind of crap that Doug will stand up and say is wrong…and he’s one of the few people who will do that.

Another example is the dinosauric and idiotic notion that web designers and SEOs should be able to put a credit link on any page of a site that they were commissioned to build. At a time a few years back when people were openly posting on Matt Cutts’ blog that these links should receive SEO benefits, there were exactly two people who publicly stated that they shouldn’t even be on a customer’s site on the first place, since they do nothing to help a customer and can only hurt that customer. This is how I came across Doug in the first place…he was the only person who had the decency and courage to publicly agree with me, and make a buttload of sense while doing so, when everyone else had their vested-interest sunglasses on. I didn’t ask for Doug to agree with me. It wouldn’t have changed a word I said on the subject regardless. But he is the only person who had the guts to back me and validate my thoughts in a manner that clearly indicated he was speaking with a deeper purpose in mind.

You don’t have to agree with everything Doug says or everything he does. You obviously don’t…and I don’t. I can admit that…I don’t think anyone should agree with anyone else all of the time. But you can’t shut out the opinion of anyone who posts with the greater good in mind. Even if you think he’s doing it for marketing purposes, and under the veil of a whitehat cloak to mask an incompetent retard who can’t promote sites worth a damn (which is a complete crock, or you wouldn’t be still here yapping like a Jack Russell terrier), the message is still generally the correct message and one that isn’t being spread often enough.

And no, I’m not saying this to market myself or because Doug told me to, either. I’m saying it because it is what it is. Doug doesn’t need me to defend him, and he’d never ask…just like I’d never ask him to defend me. I don’t need it, either. There’s a difference between followers and people who agree with each other…unfortunately, the SEO community doesn’t get that.

By the way…why don’t you turn around and call Bill a pack-rat? He posted a shorter version of what I said, too.

Bottom line…you’re wrong and you’re reaching, Ammon.

anyway, i have a theory.

people like ammon are afraid of doug’s message. they’re afraid that, having to play by the rules, they’d be unable to deliver results for their ‘clients’ and so as a defense mechanism they deride what he says at every turn. if this weren’t the case, they’d truly ignore him (as mr. semour states above – well put).

they’re also afraid that their tactics don’t translate from a pure marketing standpoint. so as the nature of search continues to change dramatically and the ability to game the system slowly erodes, they’ll be left with a useless skill set. if they’re smart, they’ll learn a new trade. their days are numbered, just like the high paid “web masters” of the mid-1990’s – most of which are working at a local radio shack now.

Hi Adam, right on cue.

You did mean to disclose that you’re a member of Doug’s forum, right? And that the main comment contributors to your blog are others from the same insular (inasne) community?

So, with several *proven* lies right here, you somehow believe that Doug might actually be ethical? How do you manage that double-think?

Do you believe that Jill Whalen got her ’start’ in Doug’s forum? Have you ever looked at when she started speaking at SES? How do you tally those things?

Doug himself already stated that he first founded his forum in June 2001, on the IHelpYouServices domain, but Jill Whalen was already a speaker at the famous Search Engine Strategies events back in November 2000 (SES Dallas, 2000 – see 11:00 slot http://searchenginestrategies.com/sew/dallas00/agenda.html ).

How precisely can you confirm the entirely ethical stance of a man who has stated publically he made Jill, when the facts are completely the reverse? Does the white hat serve as a blindfold for such convenience?

Having conceded every other point made so far, he finally goes right back to my very first comment about nobody having ever heard a good thing about Doug’s work.

He gives us a link to a thread where he admits that actual genuine testimonials are so unknown to him that he thinks all testimonials are faked.

Doug said “I think what he is proposing is done throughout the SEO industry anyway. Ever notice the numbers of testimonials on SEO websites that are from other SEO’s? LOL”

Doug, just for your own education, feel free to check the testimonials at FreshEgg.com for yourself. Any of your UK members can confirm that they come from well known UK companies, and any of those companies can be contacted. We share them on the site so that prospective clients can do just that, and we really do urge prospective clients to speak to existing customers for themselves to verify.

That’s how it is for genuine companies with genuine clients.

We don’t have examples of unnamed companies we didn’t take because they didn’t pay enough. We don’t trade anything for testimonials. Clients simply often tell us they are happy, and why, and that we can use them as a testimonial.

You could get that too if you had happy, satisfied clients. I guess yours are too scared of the boogie-man you base all your marketing on.

Thanks for letting us know where you stand on testimonials before bowing out, Doug. You are truly one of a kind, (and dear Lord let the mould have been broken).

Before I go any further, I just want to say that I strongly disagree with the idea that Doug uses the idea of ethical, whitehat SEO strictly as a marketing tool. It’s a message you have to believe in order to espouse it for as long as Doug has. So anything I say from here on out is more or less academic.

Having said that, let’s take the idea that Doug markets using the ethical high ground. Let’s assume for a minute that it’s true…because as we all know, anything said online that’s different has to be a marketing tactic according to the SEO community at large. So let’s use that logic.

Is it working? Doug’s been sticking to his message for years. He’s been saying the exact same things since at least 2001, and probably before that. That’s 7 years or more of the same message. That’s an awful long period of time for a snake-oil salesman or a charlatan to stick to the same marketing tactic…and after 7 years, you’ve got Todd Mintz writing a post about it as a marketing tactic and people commenting on it that claim to be “ignoring Doug”. Seems to me that you’re putting a lot of effort into “ignoring Doug”, Ammon. Most people shut up when they ignore someone. In other words, if he’s marketing, you guys just bit down on the worm…again. And you’ll bite down on the worm…again, and again, and again, and ooooooover again.

The other angle is why this message works and attracts attention. It does so because Doug is one of the few online marketers who understands that there is no absolute formula for success online for all businesses (something most of you seem to miss completely). Doug represents a different point of view, and being different attracts attention. Most so-called SEOs are so busy building links and destroying social media sites by creating profiles and submitting their own crap to them that they have completely forgotten, or never fully understood, what it is to be unique. In other words, for Doug’s stance to work as a marekting tactic online, everyone else would have to be following along in a different direction like a bunch of blind sheep.

As far as the email to Danny goes, this is a classic example of why most SEOs are complete idiots who never put things in the correct context. At the time Doug wrote the email, Danny had announced his “resignation” from SES, thus making him a free agent of sorts…and a pretty big one. Why would Doug not go about trying to get Danny to join his fold if he could? Danny has had a name that people recognize within the SEO community for years, and if Danny would come on board and start really talking about issues such as site architecture, what types of links are worth getting, and things of that nature (you know, stuff that should be talked about in the SEO industry but traditionally gets buried in favor of “link building”)…then that’s a pretty big coup. Why would Doug not want that? Doug’s offer to Danny was made in that context…trying to get Danny to work with Doug to change the direction of an industry that Doug “markets” as going in the wrong direction.

But Danny…sellout and egomaniac that he is…turns around and publishes the email. Then he turns around and forms a direct competitor to the business that he had been learning about for the last 10 years…and was compensated, probably quite well, to do so. He effectively gets a paid apprenticeship, then cuts into his former company’s market share by starting up a direct competitor. And in typical SEO community fashion, almost no one talks about the ethics (or lack thereof) associated with that business move. This is also more of the same business logic that makes Doug’s “marketing stance” that much more effective, as it poses that much more of a contrary position as well as providing yet another example of business tactics that could be perceived as unethical by at least enough people to form a customer base for Doug.

In other words, if the statements Doug makes and the ideas he puts forth are strictly marketing tactics, there is still an underlying current of behavior and SEO business tactics that could be interpreted as unethical, and you guys continue to take the bait…especially you, Ammon.