What I hate about SEO often has little to do with SEO itself and more to do with people’s perceptions of what SEO is, or what it includes.

Every so often, someone will write about SEO as if it’s the cause of irrelevant search results, spam found in search results, poorly written or keyword stuffed pages that they come across on the Web, and more. Usually those people don’t know very much about SEO, and categorize SEOs as spammers and scammers, and unfortunately there are people spamming either intentionally or through ignorance on the Web who call themselves SEOs.

The Web is a great source of information and an equally rich source of misinformation about many topics, including SEO. I cringe sometimes when I read some things about SEO, even sometimes from people or organizations that most people would consider authoritative.

Bill Slawski (president and founder of SEO by the Sea) 

The main (and maybe only) thing that bothers me about SEO is that unfortunately some people still understand SEO as spam, a set of tricks that are used to game search engines.

For some reason, even people that are supposed to have some Online Marketing knowledge sometimes have this perception, even if they are exposed to well-known SEOs, SEO resources and information about good practices.

This also causes more misunderstanding and manipulation of our profession… and for me it is really sad that is still viewed like this. We have to change this!

Aleyda Solis (SEO In-house at bodaclick.com)

The lack of respect it receives in the press, particularly compared to Social Media Marketing (which send less traffic, far less conversions, yet receives 100X the coverage by mainstream, tech, startup and marketing sources).

Rand Fishkin (CEO and co-founder of SEOmoz)

Most of all, I hate the reputation the industry has and the fact that a few bad apples can ruin a necessary and valuable marketing service with their behavior.

Samuel Crocker (SEO Associate Director at OMD)

I hate seeing people selling SEO tools that do things like help you calculate the best keyword density for a particular webpage based upon the keyword densities of other pages that rank well for a particular query. That’s pure snake oil.

I hate seeing SEO firms publish codes of ethics that fail to include not doing harm to the general public, and yet market themselves as “ethical” because they’ve published their code of ethics.

I hate seeing people engaging in social media voting clubs, promising to retweet, digg, mix, plus, etc., each other’s content that often isn’t worth any of those actions.

Bill Slawski

Hate is probably quite a strong word to use […] My “pet peeve” is unreliable service providers – agencies that have a template product.

Particularly on the link building side of things, there are still some major businesses out there built on the back of article syndication / distribution networks. We recently reviewed a major high street retailer who wanted to rank well in the footwear market. They had a huge budget and were spending large volumes of cash on an SEO business that were writing terrible article content and rewriting it through an article distribution network. Very disappointing to see.

Bad service providers (or service providers with a bad product) really tarnish our industry name.

Richard Baxter (Director and Founder at SEOgadget Ltd)

I hate the inefficacy of spam reporting. I loathe spam loop holes not being closed down and being exploited for SERP contamination, when there is evidence to the domain holders – and I’m referring to major domains, including ones that rank in the 95+ domain authority scale – that their abject failure to police the loopholes is half the problem of the proliferation of search spam.

Paul Gailey (Online Marketing & Website Development Consultant at MurciaMarketing)

Google + Bing’s continued weaknesses on the link manipulation and spam fronts. I think one of the big things keeping SEO from becoming a more serious process and a more authentic marketing practice is the relatively ease with which the link graph can be manipulated. This “easy win” even if it is short-term, makes many practitioners bias toward short-term tactics, hurting the industry’s perception, reputation and long-term results.

The “shroud of mystery” that Google (and, to a lesser, but still substantive extent, Bing) put around the SEO process and specific ranking metrics and functions. Google claims to love transparent and openness, but doesn’t embrace them in this key area of their business, and I believe that dichotomy is a mistake.

Rand Fishkin

Everyone thinks everything is open to debate. When I suggest common-sense stuff like “Remove the 999 lines of embedded JavaScript” or “Don’t leave the ALT attribute blank”, someone always pushes back saying “I think we should test that.”

Seriously? I still have to test Kindergarten SEO tactics?

SEO has become the global warming of internet marketing. It’s obvious, it’s in front of your face, it’s supported by overwhelming evidence. But hey, we’ll still argue about it.

Ian Lurie (Owner at Portent Interactive)

I think what’s really starting to drive me crazy is the people who only see SEO as a means to an end.

They don’t rank, and you look at their site and all you can think is “Good – you don’t deserve to rank.”

They don’t offer anything of value, not even original content wrapped around someone else’s product.

Marketing is just a tool. It’s an amazing thing when you’re connecting people with what they want, but it can be a destructive evil when you’re just promoting your own agenda at everyone else’s expense.

Dr. Peter Meyers (President at User Effect)

What I don’t like about SEO is that I see a lot of tunnel vision amongst the practitioners. Everyone gets so overly focused on Google’s algorithm, that they almost completely disregard how consumers actually use the web. And it’s not necessarily making the web a better place.

Michelle Robbins (Director of Technology at Third Door Media)

[I don’t like] that so many people think it’s about gaming the system or finding some back-door tactic to vault them up the results.

Truth is, it’s about quality content and a good user experience.

Bing responds to what users tell us about the results we show. Those signals are every bit as important as your typical links, titles, etc.

Heads out of the sand people – it’s a new day for SEO: user experience (UX), depth of content, content markup and search behavior signals are more important than ever before.

Duane Forrester (Bing Webmaster Tools Senior Product Manager)

…just watch all the discussion around social right now…I dunno about most other people but across 40 clients, when I look at our data, I will tell you that crappy directories and exact match domains are MUCH more important than social TODAY, and the hard part is we don’t know how long that will be the case, but I am watching clients who are doing amazing things socially outranked by those who are just loading up on bought links and directories. That’s what is killing me right now.

Wil Reynolds (Founder at Seer Interactive)

SEO is an art and a science, but the science hasn’t been well studied or investigated. Moz works hard to help make this better, but we’re only one organization and our mission is to create great software.

I wish there were more people with true data science and mathematics background working more on making the process of SEO transparent. We’ve seen a huge value in recruiting the mathematically and computer-science inclined to the problem, and I suspect others would, too.

Rand Fishkin

It is my personal opinion that us SEOs many times tend to talk to our own circle only, forgetting that the real world, our clients, probably don’t understand a word of what we talk about. They know they have to act firmly in the Web Marketing competition, but they don’t know how to deal with all the big changes it suffers every day. Sometimes we don’t hear their preach: “Educate us”