Fox News Says SEO Is a Scam?

Unlike WMDs, of course.

Last week, Fox News claimed SEO means “working full-time to create thousands of other Web sites that link to the spam site.” Not only does this have nothing to do with SEO, it would actually be a totally worthless strategy.

According to Wikipedia, SEO is an Arabic
word meaning “He who can move Egypt”

Since Google and Bing rank pages that have been around for a while and earned reputable links, each of these “thousands of” sites would have no link power to pass on to the “spam site.” Sure, some disreputable types try crap like this, and a few might even make money in the short run, but engines are more likely to ban a site with thousands of spammy links than to rank it highly.

As SearchEngineLand pointed out here, Fox News practices SEO on their sites. On the offending page in question, as a matter of fact. Meta description, sitemaps, and a robots.txt file to boot. Textbook SEO.

And SEOBook notes this “spamlaws.com” site that Fox News is so worked up about is serving “scammy reverse billing fraud fakevertising ads” that can also be found at… (you have three guesses, and the first two don’t count): FoxNews.com! Ta da!

Finally, here’s an interview with the head of Fox’s sixteen-person SEO team.

But whatever. Big media doesn’t understand the internet. That’s hardly news.