Did SEO experts ruin the internet or did Google? - The Verge

As the public begins to believe Google isn't as useful anymore, what happens to the cottage industry of search engine optimization experts who struck content oil and smeared it all over the web? Well, they find a new way to get rich and keep the party going.

Illustrations by Seba Cestaro for The Verge

The alligator got my attention. Which, of course, was the point. When you hear that a 10-foot alligator is going to be released at a rooftop bar in South Florida, at a party for the people being accused of ruining the internet, you can't quite stop yourself from being curious. If it was a link — "WATCH: 10-foot Gator Prepares to Maul Digital Marketers" — I would have clicked. But it was an IRL opportunity to meet the professionals who specialize in this kind of gimmick, the people turning online life into what one tech writer recently called a "search-optimized hellhole." So I booked a plane ticket to the Sunshine State. 

I wanted to understand: what kind of human spends their days exploiting our dumbest impulses for traffic and profit? Who the hell are these people making money off of everyone else's misery? 

After all, a lot of folks are unhappy, in 2023, with their ability to find information on the internet, which, for almost everyone, means the quality of Google Search results. The links that pop up when they go looking for answers online, they say, are "absolutely unusable"; "garbage"; and "a nightmare" because "a lot of the content doesn't feel authentic." Some blame Google itself, asserting that an all-powerful, all-seeing, trillion-dollar corporation with a 90 percent market share for online search is corrupting our access to the truth. But others blame the people I wanted to see in Florida, the ones who engage in the mysterious art of search engine optimization, or SEO. 

Doing SEO is less straightforward than buying the advertising space labeled "Sponsored" above organic search results; it's more like the Wizard of Oz projecting his voice to magnify his authority. The goal is to tell the algorithm whatever it needs to hearfor a site to appear as high up as possible in search results, leveraging Google's supposed objectivity to lure people in and then, usually, show them some kind of advertising. Voilà: a business model! Over time, SEO techniques have spread and become insidious, such that googling anything can now feel like looking up "sneaker" in the dictionary and finding a definition that sounds both incorrect and suspiciously as though it were written by someone promoting Nike ("footwear that allows you to just do it!"). Perhaps this is why nearly everyone hates SEO and the people who do it for a living: the practice seems to have successfully destroyed the illusion that the internet was ever about anything other than selling stuff. 

So who ends up with a career in SEO? The stereotype is that of a hustler: a content goblin willing to eschew rules, morals, and good taste in exchange for eyeballs and mountains of cash. A nihilist in it for the thrills, a prankster gleeful about getting away with something.

"This is modern-day pirate shit, as close as you can get," explained Cade Lee, who prepared me over the phone for what to expect in Florida based on over a decade working in SEO. What Lee said he's noticed most at SEO conferences and SEO networking events is a certain arrogance. "There's definitely an ego among all of them," he told me. "You succeed, and now you're a genius. Now you've outdone Google."

This year, The Verge is exploring how Google Search has reshaped the web into a place for robots — and how the emergence of AI threatens Google itself.

The more I thought about search engine optimization and how a bunch of megalomaniacal jerks were degrading our collective sense of reality because they wanted to buy Lamborghinis and prove they could vanquish the almighty algorithm — which, technically, constitutes many algorithms, but we think of as a single force — the more I looked forward to going to Florida for this alligator party. Maybe, I thought, I would get to see someone who made millions clogging the internet with bullshit get the ultimate comeuppance. Maybe an SEO professional would get attacked by a gigantic, prehistoric-looking reptile right there in front of me. Maybe I could even repackage such a tragedy into a sensationalized anecdote for a viral article about the people who do SEO for a living, strongly implying that nature was here to punish the bad guy while somehow also assuming the ethical high ground and pretending I hadn't been hoping this exact thing would happen from the start. 

Because I, too, use Google. I, too, want reliable and relevant things to come up when I look through this vast compendium of human knowledge. And I, too, enjoy the sweet taste of revenge. 

The first thing that went wrong at the alligator party was the alligator was only five and a half feet long, not 10 feet, as advertised. Classic clickbait! 

The second thing that went wrong at the alligator party was that I found almost everyone I met to be sympathetic, or at least nice enough not to want to see them get maimed by a five-and-a-half-foot alligator. My harshest assessment of the 200 digital marketers taking shots and swaying to a dancehall reggae band was that they dressed like they lived in Florida, which almost all of them did. 

Take Missy Ward, a blonde in an orange bandage dress so tight she told me she couldn't take full steps. She laughed as she explained that she'd ordered the dress on Amazon and hadn't tried it on until the day of the alligator party. Ward had a feisty, wry energy that made me want to root for her. When she started doing SEO in 1998, she said, it was "five girls and all dudes." She eventually sold her company for $40 million. Somehow, in the moment, I was psyched to hear this. She was being so patient, explaining the history of SEO and suggesting other people for me to reach out to. I should really go talk with that guy across the room, who had a long-running podcast about SEO, she said, the one in the sky blue polo.  

His name was Daron Babin, and I quickly learned he was just the kind of "modern-day pirate shit" guy I'd been warned about: thrilled at the opportunity to recount the brilliant trickery that had allowed him to line his pockets. His SEO career got going in 1994, before Google even existed. "The air of manipulation was insane," Babin told me. "We had this weird community of geeks and nerds, and we all talked to each other about how we were beating the algorithms up," he said. "People were trying to outrank other people just for bragging rights." 

We were chatting on a patio overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, between the buffet and the band, when the host of the alligator party, Darren Blatt, came up to say how glad he was that I'd found Daron Babin.

Darren and Daron (pronounced the same way) have been friends for decades, since the era when Darren "D-Money" Blatt would throw rap star-studdedinternet marketing shindigs during the Adult Video News Awards in Vegas, back when sex sites were among the most advanced in technology, and Daron Babin was using SEO to promote offshore casinos and Viagra ("We were outranking Pfizer!"). Together, Darren and Daron managed to milk all three of the early online cash cows: porn, pills, and gambling. 

As the internet became more regulated and mainstream, around the turn of the century, Darren noticed Daron's SEO skills were increasingly in demand. "I told him that he was missing the boat, that he needed to be a consultant and charge a few grand," Darren said. 

Daron took the advice, asking for $2,000 a day, and watched his career explode. "I would wake up in a city and not know what time zone I was in," he recalled. To slow the pace, he upped it to $5,000 a day, but "it seemed the more I raised my rates, the more gigs I was getting." 

Nowadays, he mostly invests in cannabis and psychedelics. SEO just got to be too complicated for not enough money, he told me. Ward had told me the same thing, that she had stopped focusing on SEO years ago. 

I was considering how it was possible that so many people have been complaining recently about SEO ruining the internet if these people were telling me the SEO business is in decline when I met Jairo Bastilla. He was the kind of tall, charming man who described himself multiple times as "a nerd," and he pointed out that even though working directly with search engine rankings is "no longer monetizing at the highest payout," the same "core knowledge of SEO" remains relevant for everything from native advertising to social media. 

Translation? SEO is now baked into everything. Bastilla, for example, specializes in email campaigns, which he called "deliverability." 

As a person who militantly unsubscribes to any and all marketing emails, I suddenly felt claustrophobic, surrounded by people who annoy the rest of us for a living. Why does it always seem to surprise me, even after all these years, that the way we behave on the internet is often quite different from how we act in real life? 

I wandered off to wait in line for a drink, where I noticed several people nonchalantly making space in a corner, as if to move out of the way for a bartender carrying empty glasses. There, squirming along the ground, was the alligator himself, wagging his tail, snout held shut by a thin strip of electrical tape. His handler was nowhere in sight. It was an unsettling vision, a predator pretending to be just another party guest.

"They should untape the mouth!" someone shouted. "I'm not even scared."

As sunset turned to dusk, I found Daron Babin again, and he started telling me about one of his signature moves, back in the '90s, involving fake domain names: "I could make it look like it was somebody else, but it actually redirected to me!" What he and his competitors did was legal but well beyond what the dominant search engine allowed. He never faced any consequences, but in the end, internet users at large felt the effects: "It muddied up Yahoo, ultimately," he said, "but while it worked, we banked."

The situation sounded familiar. But I liked Babin. He was funny and smart, a keen observer of the SEO world. "We're entering a very weird time, technologically, with AI, from an optimization standpoint," he told me. Anyone who thought the internet was already saturated with SEO-oriented content should buckle up. 

"All the assholes that are out there paying shitty link-building companies to build shitty articles," he said, "now they can go and use the free version of GPT." Soon, he said, Google results would be even worse, dominated entirely by AI-generated crap designed to please the algorithms, produced and published at volumes far beyond anything humans could create, far beyond anything we'd ever seen before.

"They're not gonna be able to stop the onslaught of it," he said. Then he laughed and laughed, thinking about how puny and irrelevant Google seemed in comparison to the next generation of automated SEO. "You can't stop it!" 

Once I was safe at home, my alligator attack bluster having deflated into an irrepressible affection for clever scoundrels, mixed with fear about the future promised by said scoundrels, I decided to seek a broader range of the people who do SEO for a living. Perhaps the ones who live in Florida were simply too, well, Florida, and the ones who live elsewhere might be more principled? An old contact heard I was writing about SEO and suggested I find a man he called Legendary Lars: "He was an absolute god in that space." 

I tracked down Lars Mapstead in Northern California, where he was preparing to run for president in 2024 as a Libertarian. Mapstead spent the first two years of his life in a Volkswagen van traveling the Pacific coast before his hippie parents settled on a Big Sur property with goats, chickens, and no electricity. He became a tinkerer and an autodidact, the guy who reads the instruction manual and fixes everything himself. When he first heard about the World Wide Web, it was 1993, and he was working for a company selling computer motherboards. 

"It's like the freedom of information!" he remembered thinking. "It's all just about collaborating and bettering mankind!"  

He learned how to build a website and then how to submit a site to be listed in early search directories like AltaVista, WebCrawler, Infoseek, and Lycos. He learned how to create chat rooms, attracting people spread across the globe, all alone in their homes but together online. It was beautiful. It was exciting. Mapstead saw himself as an explorer in a small but finite kingdom. "I had surfed the entire internet. There wasn't a page I hadn't seen."

And then, one day, a company in New York offered to pay him $2,000 a month to put banner ads on one of his websites, and everything changed. More clicks meant more ad dollars. Higher search engine rankings meant more clicks. So whatever it took to get a higher ranking, he learned how to do. He bought photographs of women in bikinis and made a 60-page slideshow with banner ads on each page. He realized that most search engines were just listing websites in order of how many times a search term appeared on the site and in its tags, so he focused on stuffing his sites with keywords, resubmitting his URL to the search engines, and waiting for the results to change. 

Mapstead started pulling in $25,000–$30,000 a month, working 12- to 14-hour days. "It was how long could I stay awake and how little life could I have because this was more money than I could have ever imagined in my lifetime," he told me. "It was like I won the lottery, and I didn't know how long it would last." 

Around this time, in 1997, an Italian professor published a journal article about what he called Search Engines Persuasion. "Finding the right information on the World Wide Web is becoming a fundamental problem," he wrote. "A vast number of new companies was born just to make customer Web pages as visible as possible," which "has led to a bad performance degradation of search engines." 

Enter Google. The company revolutionized search by evaluating websites based on links from other websites, seeing each link as a vote of relevance and trustworthiness. The founders pledged to be a neutral navigation system with no ads: just a clean white screen with a search box that would bring people off of the Google landing page and out to a helpful website as seamlessly as possible. Users quickly decided this link-based sorting methodology was superior to the existing search engines, and by the end of 1999, Google was handling the majority of online queries.

Mapstead, like many of the early practitioners of SEO, figured out how to adapt. Almost as soon as Google took over, a secondary market emerged for links. For a few hundred bucks, a firm in India or the Philippines could provide thousands of links from blog networks built entirely for that purpose. It was easy: buy links that led to your site and watch your ranking in Google's results rise.

I came to understand that, since the dawn of the internet, there have been people attempting to manipulate search and then people decrying those manipulations as the end of search's ability to be useful. It works in cycles. People doing SEO find loopholes in the algorithm; critics complain about search results; search engines innovate and close the loopholes. Rinse, repeat.

Before our current moment of widespread disillusionment with online information, the rise of SEO had reached a breaking point multiple times. In 2003, as Google approached the deadline to disclose pertinent business information leading up to its IPO, the company quietly released an update cracking down. By 2011, SEO was once again oppressively pervasive. TechCrunch published a story called "Why We Desperately Need a New (and Better) Google," which argued that "Google has become a jungle: a tropical paradise for spammers and marketers." In the next year, Google made two major changes to the algorithm, which came to be called Panda and Penguin.

While the public might have experienced each of these updates as a relief, Mapstead and his SEO compatriots saw them as devastating. "They change the rules instantly overnight, and then you're out of business," he told me. "Here you're trying to rely on this business model to feed yourself and your family, and they're pulling the rug from underneath you, and you've gotta scramble to pay rent."  

But don't worry about Mapstead. This is a guy seemingly blessed with a never-ending mental stream of schemes. He helped start a handful of companies, including the once-ubiquitous hookup site AdultFriendFinder, which sold in 2007 for $500 million. He tried to retire after that but got bored and started a couple of Facebook pages devoted to his passion for hot rods and custom cars. This was during the peak years for social media, and just as Bastilla had described back at the alligator party, Mapstead's "core knowledge of SEO" came in handy. Before long, his pages had 25 million followers. "I was basically just spamming Facebook with cars and articles about cars and sending traffic to banner ads, and that turned into $120,000 a month," he told me. "And that was supposed to be my hobby!"

As I spoke with more SEO professionals around the country, I began to think that the reason I found them endearing and not evil was that while many had made quite a bit of money, almost none had amassed significant power. Unlike the Elon Musks and Jeff Bezoses of the world, who went from geeky teenagers to masters of the universe, the dorks who grew up to do SEO have stayed the butt of the joke, beholden to the fluctuations of the algorithm, frantically pulling levers behind the scenes but ultimately somewhat hapless. 

I mean, have I even mentioned that they call themselves "SEOs"? Really. They say things like, "As the SEO, my job is to get more traffic." This title feels thirsty to be seen as similar to a CEO, to be taken seriously. And compared to the rest of the tech world, SEO has always lacked a certain glamor or a certain messiah complex. Case in point: while many of the tech CEOs claiming to save the world these days live in Miami, the alligator party was an hour up the coast in Fort Lauderdale.

"The SEO people are just trying to make money," said Peter Kent, the author of several dozen explanatory tech books, including SEO for Dummies and Bitcoin for Dummies. "The cryptocurrency people are trying to make money, but they're also trying to overthrow, you know, the existing system." 

Kent has done his fair share of SEO jobs but also has something of an outsider's perspective. For years, he's been telling people that part of the SEO industry's reputation problem is that 80 percent of SEOs are scammers. 

"A lot of companies and individuals out there selling their services as SEO gurus don't know what they're doing or don't really give a damn," he explained. As a consultant, he's often had businesses ask him to vet the work of other SEOs. "I would take a look at their site and determine the firm had done next to nothing and had been charging thousands a month for years on end."

When I ran this 80 percent scam figure by other SEOs, most agreed it sounded accurate, though people were divided about what to ascribe to greed and what was just stupidity.  

"It isn't because they have a scammer's heart," said Bruce Clay. "It's because they don't have the real expertise." Clay is an avuncular man with a mustache who is often credited with coining the phrase "search engine optimization" and is therefore called "the father of SEO." He told me his agency never hires an SEO with less than a decade of experience.

Though Google publishes guidelines explaining how to do better in search ("Make your site interesting and useful"), the exact formula for how and why one website gets placed over another is top secret, meaning that SEO involves a lot of reverse engineering and guesswork. With no clear chain of cause and effect around why a site's ranking has changed, a less talented practitioner can take on the mien of a premodern farmer, struggling to figure out how to make it rain. Should he do that dance he did last year the night before it poured? Or maybe sacrifice his firstborn?

The algorithm is just too opaque, too complicated, and too dynamic, making it easy for scammy SEOs to pretend they know what they're doing and difficult for outsiders to sort the good SEOs from the bad. To make things even more confusing for, say, a small business looking to hire someone to improve their Google ranking, even a talented SEO might need a year of work to make a difference, perhaps implying a good SEO was a scammer when in fact, the client was just being impatient or refusing to implement essential advice. "There's a great deal of effort that's required to do things to move the needle, and a lot of companies aren't willing to put out the money for that, even though it may be worthwhile in the long run," said John Heard, a longtime SEO based in Kansas. 

Of course, some people bristled at the very suggestion that the industry is filled with con artists. "...