This afternoon I am watching a video on SEOmoz and reading a post on Shoemoney.com about the ramifications of giving away tactics that work effectively on gaining higher placement in the search engines like Google or Yahoo!.

I posted a comment on SEOmoz so I will follow up on that.  In my opinion if you are a search engine marketing and you “out” a tactic that you are using for a client and it gets “fixed” by Google and harms their rankings then you are a fool and your client should fire on the spot.

Personally I only give away valuable information like this in a 1on1 situation with someone that I know and trust.  This is a billion dollar industry so you have a market that will try anything to get on top of the rankings so if someone posts a tip that actually works, people are going to not only copy it over and over again for their vertical they will also pass it too all their buddies as well or even blog about it.  At that point Matt Cutts or one of his minions will read it and he will whip out is “Easy Spam Block” button and kill it like Ludacris at Summer Jam.

I already mentioned a cool trick for a social media website at the SMX Advanced after party and I had emails in my inbox the next morning asking me to email instructions on how to reproduce it.  It dawned on me that maybe I should STFU as well.   I am going to sit down with my buddy and explain it too him but it will not be written down and I will ask him to use it for his personally projects only and not never discuss it period.

In this type of environment there is way too much upside for keeping your mouth shut and only sharing with trusted friend then too openly talk or blog about tricks and tactics that work currently.  I know some will say “well, if you so good then it shouldn’t matter”.  Well my answer is “I like to work smarter not harder”.

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Dal