Reading the craptastic adventures of SES San Jose 2004 gave me conflicting emotions. Partly it’s just so funny how daft these people are - I have many sites that are built with perfectly valid HTML and which are very well indexed by Google and other search engines - but on the other hand it’s disheartening that people are paying these idiots good money to screw up their web sites.
[Update August 19th 2004] - Well, it seems that maybe the SEO gurus in question didn’t quite say the asinine things originally attributed to them. Eric Meyer tries to dampen some of the flames he helped to kindle and links to a selection of the subsequent debate.
The issue remains that many SEO firms produce really bad web pages that may help with the specific goal of getting search engine hits, but which are actually harmful to human visitors. If this incident does create a decent dialogue between the SEO crowd and the standards/accessibility/usability crowd then everyone would benefit.
