LifeInSearch.com

Note: I drafted this over a month ago, but I wasn’t sure that posting it would go over too well back at the office. I have since tendered my resignation at Geosign Corporation, so fuck it! Enjoy!

Allow me to begin by stating that the following is my own personal opinion and in no way reflects the views of my employer, Geosign Corporation.

Things have been moving ahead at breakneck speed over at Geosign. In the two years I have been with the company, we have grown from a small staff of 20 people into the internet publishing powerhouse we are today. In one of the biggest technology success stories in recent Canadian business history, Geosign recently announced the closure of a HUGE investment deal. American Capital Strategies Inc. has purchased a minority equity stake in Geosign, to the tune of 160 million dollars. As a consequence, Geosign has been the talk of journalists, bloggers, and businesspeople everywhere.

I have been monitoring the chatter in the press and in the blogosphere over the days surrounding the announcement, and overall it has been very positive. Tim Nye, our founding father, gave a very enlightening interview over at Frank Schilling’s blog, and the folks over at WebmasterWorld seemed very excited about the news. Our press release was picked up by CNN, and we had stories in two of Canada’s national newspapers; the Toronto Star and the Globe and Mail. We even got a mention on TechCrunch, one of the most widely-read tech blogs online today.

While reading the story in the Globe and Mail, however, I was taken aback by one peculiar statement. Apparently, Geosign has developed “software to optimize” our sites to rank high in the search engines. As the SEO Specialist for the Publishing division, I was completely blown away by this absurd and astounding claim. All this time, I have been optimizing our sites and doing organic link development (with the support of an amazing team of Link Ninja’s) and (according to the Globe and Mail) we have bit of software that performs these functions for us.

I want to go on the record as stating that, to my knowledge, Geosign does not engage in any shady, blackhat search engine optimization tactics to make our sites rank higher at the major search engines. Our primary focus is on providing exceptional user value and a positive web experience for our visitors, and this cannot possibly be accomplished by programatically optimizing our sites.

The implication made by the Globe and Mail is that we are search engine spammers, and that could not be any further from the truth. We take a very straight-forward, honest approach to promoting our sites in the search engines. We write great content, we structure our sites in a way that pleases the search engine spiders, and we do what we can to gain exposure for our sites through organic link development and social media optimization. Our approach to site promotion is a far cry from the programmatic approach taken by push-button spammers and their made-for-adsense web graffiti. Frankly, I am surprised that the story has not been corrected. Geosign should start giving some more thought to reputation management. Seriously.