Who speaks for the SEO industry?

When Aaron Wall was sued by Traffic Power the story became a mainstream conversation on the internet.

It should have been a conversation about SEO - Aaron was being sued for comments about the SEO practices of one SEO company.

Instead it became a story about bloggers rights.

The story wasn’t hijacked by bloggers to talk about themselves - it was just that no organisation claiming to represent the SEO industry could be bothered to make SEO a part of the conversation.

Despite repeated protestations for comment, SEMPO finally declared that as the case didn’t involve them, they were not going to comment.

Although Ian McAnerin, behind SMA-NA, provided Aaron with legal advice and recommendations, it was left to people like Danny Sullivan and Greg Boser to actually speak for the SEO industry.

If SEO organisations are going to be seen to represent the SEO industry, they absolutely have to be seen to be speaking about SEO issues when SEO is a mainstream topic of conversation.

In the meantime, Danny Sullivan continues to be the voice of search in general, and despite the traditional resistance to setting any kind of industry standards among SEO’s, Danny has managed to get even famous “blackhats” to renounce automated link-spamming techniques as not SEO.

In drawing together the SEO industry into a broad consensus that automated link-spamming of third-parties is not acceptable, Danny Sullivan has created a potential basic platform for setting agreed industry standards.

When Aaron Wall was SLAPP’ed by Traffic Power, I had thought it could be a defining moment in SEM. It would be very interesting indeed is if the result of this is that long-time industry commentator Danny Sullivan is the one who has voice enough to shapes the industry for the future.