I got an e-mail this morning from Nana at Technobloggie. I have a sneaky suspicion that it was a mass-email to more than a few bloggers in the search space, but that's OK. She's got a nifty tool that scans a page and returns the potential AdSense ads it will display - which works nicely for those folks who are into running AdSense (I'm personally not a fan).

What I did notice while testing it was the screenshotted ad for SEOmoz.org, an ad that recommends doing SEO yourself, rather than hiring a firm. The site itself (which I'm sad to link to) is one of those horrid, long scrolling pages with lots of bold yellow background text and quotes from people we've never heard of. It's a sad attempt to pull the wool over the readers' eyes - practically disgraceful. But, what makes it worse still, is that the advice itself isn't completely without merit.

If I were, for example, to write an article about how to conduct SEO for yourself, without spending money on consultants; it would provide real, valuable information about how to do the work, how to get involved in the community, where to learn the basics and the advanced techniques and more. All I found at this site is a shyster trying to win folks over by saying that SEOs are shysters. My favorite piece has to be this:

Don't listen to people who tell you its takes years of experience to get a top search engine ranking. This is pure B.S. - the engines constantly change so past experience does NOT play any role in getting a top ranking today.

I love writers who use the highly professional term "B.S." in their advertising, and he's right - my SEO skills haven't improved a wink since I started working in this industry. What a fool we've all been.