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I joined the Dark Side, or This In-House SEO went to the Out-House!

So, as many of you noticed in my online profiles or heard about at the recent SES Conference, shortly ago I resigned from my post as Head of the Technology & Advanced Development Department for Idearc’s Superpages.com (Idearc was spun off from Verizon in November of 2006).

Yes, I’ve moved over to the “Dark Side” and become an external agency Search Engine Optimization consultant! 😉

Read on for more juicy details!


Well, it’s not at all “Dark” of course, because my new work home, Netconcepts, only engages in ethical SEO. I kid about moving from “In-House” to “Out-House”, but I don’t see a whole lot of need for agencies and internal company experts to feel/operate at odds with one another. Some SEO firms like to publish a lot of histrionic diatribes about how internal resources can’t keep up with the industry and how dangerous it is to try to rely on internal resources. They play into the bias that some companies have against respecting their own employees.

Likewise, a lot of in-house SEO/SEM managers are highly skeptical of the hype and promises made by external consultants.

From my perspective, SEO (and SEM) tends to work better for a company/website when both internal and external resources are working in collaboration. Neither side is generally “better” than the other, though this is one industry where people who only have a cursory knowledge or understanding can be dangerous to a site’s traffic/rankings. I’ve seen ignorant people in agencies and inside a company execute practices which are clearly against the policies of the major search engines, so neither side of the industry can really lay claim to perfection. Likewise, I’ve met people on both sides of the coin who are highly advantageous to work with.

Here I am just a few weeks into my career change, and I’m really pleased with my decision. I wanted to do something new with my career, and I wanted to work in a small company for a change. Netconcepts is pretty visionary, and it’s got a great dynamic amongst employees.

I’ll be primarily working upon what I call a “near turnkey” SEO solution which optimizes dynamically generated websites, practically overnight. This solution is called GravityStream [1].

I wish my former company and friends there well! It was hard to go, but no growth happens without a few growth pains in the process.