What Is WTFSEO?
WTFSEO is a bleeding edge SEO and inbound digital marketing news site that growth hacks the dissemination of industry buzzwords through a series of paradigm shifting synergistic blog posts and interpretive dance videos.
Ok, Seriously, What Is WTFSEO?
WTFSEO is a parody of common types of SEO and marketing articles that are popular on the web these days. It’s basically buzfeed meets mashable meets search blogs. It’s a satirical take on “content marketing.” The same trends keep running rampant across the web,
What Is WTFSEO’s Mission?
To make SEO great again.
Who made this site?
The Reverend, Baron Ryan Jones of Ladonia maintains and owns this site. Ryan’s posts are from the author “wtfseo.” Currently, there are 6 or 7 other writers besides @ryanjones who write for WTFSEO. Each has their own author name on their posts. If you’re a fan of our Facebook or Twitter you can probably figure out who they are. Seriously follow @wtfseo on twitter. You’ve seen all of our writers speak at conferences or read their weekly columns on the real search publications.
Any similarities to actual blog posts or SEOs is purely coincidental and is only intended for entertainment and parody. We don’t hate SEOs, and we don’t have any personal issues with any publications, vendors, tools, agencies, etc. We like most of them. Many posts are collaborations between several SEOs (ironically, we have editorial standards that might just be higher than some other sites we satirize.)
Do you think all SEO posts are bullshit?
No, of course not. There’s a lot of good SEOs and journalists out there creating tons of useful content and actual news. We urge them to keep doing that. For every quality post with cited sources and data however, there seem to be several fake or biased posts like the ones we’re satirizing. This is what happens when people try to constantly create fresh content on a schedule. You get sites like buzzfeed, upworthy, mashable, and their clones. The real goal of WTFSEO is to prevent our industry from turning into clickbait, and have some fun doing it.
Do you guys hate women? What’s with some of these posts?
Of course not. We parody and satire the SEO industry. There’s a big sexism problem in our industry – and many people like to pretend it doesn’t exist. Some try to fix it by writing “top 20 females” lists, and we feel that this only adds to the problem. Some of our posts are aimed at drawing attention to the issues our industry faces, but rather that do it with anger we attempt to do so with humor. If we can make you think deep about our industry, AND laugh – then we hit our goal. If we didn’t, we’ll try harder.
It might also shock you to know, but several of our female slanted posts were written by a female SEO (trust us, you’ve read her articles) who is all too familiar with the sexism in our industry. This is her way of channeling some of her frustrations.
Can I Submit Something?
Sure, if you don’t mind us doing some fun edits and picking what/where it links to 😉 Seriously though, we won’t post your spam but if you have something interesting or funny you want to share, hit up @wtfseo or @ryanjones up on twitter (or Facebook if you’re his friend.) We also have a slack team that anybody can join and submit posts, and we have a Facebook Page too. We’d love to share your submissions if they are in good taste. A few guidelines: make it funny, don’t call out any company or person specifically, don’t share anything confidential, don’t be a dick, and don’t include spam links.
How Often Do You Update?
That depends on the industry. Since this is a satire blog, we rely on you to be our muse. Currently we post a couple of articles per week because it’s just so damn easy right now – but hopefully it becomes much harder and we update less frequently. If there’s less for us to make fun of, that will be a good sign for our industry – but we don’t anticipate that happening anytime soon. Keep it up SEO industry, you fuel us.
What’s With The Ads?
The original plan was to create parody ads, and while Ryan is pretty awesome at photoshopping Matt Cutts and other SEOs he kind of sucks at drawing/creating images from scratch so he threw up some Adsense and called it a day. In Hindsight, there’s no better parody of SEO ads than the real ads for link building and paid posts that actually show up. We’ve been toying with the idea of converting the site to a slideshow format with 1 sentence and 14 ads per page – however unlike actual news sites we just can’t bring ourselves to do that to our readers.
Rest assured, 100% of the profits from this site will be spent buying food or beer for non-bullshit SEOs at conferences or in other hilarious ways. (in 2015, we donated 400% of our ad revenue to EpicDinner and Dana’s Fund. Yes, 400% – as several WTFSEO contributors and editors threw in from their own pockets as well as our Adsense earnings.) If you’ve got some extra Adsense money lying around, we’re sure they’d appreciate it too. In 2016 we spent our ad money on some site upgrades and some “Make SEO Great Again” hats that you’ll be seeing a lot more of at your favorite industry events. Lately we’ve been doing awesome stickers that we hand out at various industry conferences.