Dear SEO Industry, We Need to Talk About Elitism and Sexual Harassment

A few weeks back, I noticed a series of strange tweets that were popping up with the hashtag #YoastCon, tweets like this one here:

The only thing I knew about YoastCon was that it’s a conference organised by Yoast, which in turn is an SEO plugin for WordPress. The owner is a guy named Joost de Valk and he is well regarded in the SEO community.

The tweets came out of nowhere and they didn’t make sense in the context I had of YoastCon so I followed the hashtag to find out what was going on.

That’s when I learned about the videos from SEOktoberfest where Playmates were invited to make male attendees happy, I read the inappropriate tweets from Joost to a series of women back in 2008 and 2011, and I saw the Christmas greetings post from Marcus Tandler and the slutty Santas.

What happened next was a few weeks of passive aggressive tweets, public fights, news articles, men defending men, women shushing men, and a lot of private messages behind closed doors.

I read the statement from one of the women who received tweets from Joost de Valk where she clarified that the situation was taken out of context and that it wasn’t harassment. I read all the news articles, all the comments, all the tweets from David Cohen, Tom Rayner, Barry Adams, Jenny Halasz, Joost de Valk, Kristine Schachinger, Rand Fishkin, Gianluca Fiorelli, Cyrus Shepard, Anthony Randall, Dan Callis, Zeph Snapp, Carol Forden, Martin MacDonald and many others. I asked people who might have known about all this. I talked to David and Tom. I discussed the situation with my husband.

Then I decided to write this post.

While everyone is fighting, in public or via DM, there’s a big fat elephant in the room that we seemed to have forgotten.

This is not about me and it is not about you either.

This is bigger than us. It’s bigger than the SEO royalty and the SEO trolls. It’s bigger than friendships and business. It’s bigger than your personal story and mine.

What happened in our industry — whether it was in 2008, 2011, 2015 or 2018 — is most definitely wrong and should never happen again.

I’m coming out to say it because it seems that everyone else is too scared to do it and because we need to bring this conversation forward.

It’s not about us or our friends, it’s about the new generation not making the same mistakes we made.

So here’s what I’ve got to say about all this.

Being a woman means men will treat you like a piece of meat sometimes

I don’t know the story behind the “friendly and consensual sexual banter” (as someone called it) of those tweets so I’ve got zero context on how the conversations led to Joost saying things like:

“I bet you’d look good, even when pregnant ;-)”

“Ahem, why are you not naked indeed?”

“Nothing beats a yummy young mummy :)”

But I’m a woman so I’ve had men saying things like that to me out of nowhere just because I’ve got a vagina — even when I was pregnant, carrying my child.

I’ve walked past construction workers who would scream things like that to me when I was a teenager. I’ve commuted to work in a packed train with a guy saying things like that to my ear while pushing himself against me.

When I read those tweets, that was all I could think of. Decades of obscenities been pushed on me by men who thought that was normal, acceptable behaviour.

I thought about how much it would have crushed me back then if someone I respected were to have said something like that to me. I wondered if I would still be part of the SEO community had that happened.

I imagined how would I have felt if before or after that tweet, I were to have been an attendee at SEOktoberfest surrounded by Playboy escorts who touched themselves looking at the camera while I was having a beer in a corner, trying to network my way to a job interview at an agency I loved.

Then I realised I’m lucky that didn’t happen to me so early on in my professional life, but what about the women who have not been so lucky?

To those of you who have come out saying that we don’t need men’s help and that we know how to deal with this: you should know that not everyone is that strong.

If you come from a world like mine, you sometimes find it hard to know what’s appropriate and what to do when you feel unsafe.

I’m from Argentina, a country where men will rape and kill thousands of women every year without any repercussions. It’s a world where it’s the woman’s fault that she’s dead because she shouldn’t have gone out that late, she shouldn’t have worn that dress, she shouldn’t have danced with that guy, she shouldn’t have dated an older man, she should have known better.

Argentina is an extreme example of how society has conditioned both men and women to interact; boys will be boys and all that jazz.

You pair that upbringing with a toxic male-dominated industry and you’ll get scarred women who feel guilty for something they didn’t even cause.

I read that Joost has restored his image, learned from his mistakes and is now investing in making his company a better place for women. That is great, we need that.

However, it doesn’t make it okay that a few years ago he was tweeting that stuff to anybody. And it’s most definitely not okay that a handful of people who have the ability to change things in our industry were aware of all this happening and did nothing about it.

I should be able to say that without being scared of someone coming after me and trying to bring me down for pointing a finger at Joost’s behaviour.

To those of you who are defending the SEO personality that is Joost: remove the so-called SEO trolls and #YoastCon from the picture, go through the tweets and ask yourself how would YOU feel if someone you look up to says those things to you on a public forum. Would you feel comfortable attending a conference knowing this person would be there? Would you want him to be your boss? Would you feel safe around this person? Would you have anybody to talk to about what happened and how you felt? Would you even bring it up?

And more importantly, what could you do now to make sure this doesn’t happen to other people?

This crap is not okay.

Let’s talk about that and stop arguing about who was a feminist first.

Tales from the land of trolls and rockstars

I’ve been part of the SEO industry since 2009 so I didn’t just show up. If you haven’t heard about me it’s probably because I am busy working and I don’t really do conferences or round-ups so I’m not on any list saying you should follow me. But I’ve been here ten years and I know some of the people involved in all this mess.

I’ve never met Joost. Last time I read something from Rand was probably back in 2013 and I don’t follow the guy so I’m sure he doesn’t know who I am. I’ve met Barry a few times and he’s always been good to me. I’ve never met Tom but I’ve read his posts and he always struck me as a knowledgeable guy who seems to be a good egg. I’ve bantered with Tony over Twitter many times, mainly about link building. I know nothing about Callis other than the fact that he works in our industry.

Now, the person I do know is David Cohen.

I used to read his articles back in 2012 when I was less than someone and he was a team lead for one of the top SEO agencies at the time. If you’ve never heard of David before #YoastCongate and you’re curious about him, you should read Alessio Madeyski’s interview with him for his ‘Meet your marketer’ series, here’s the link.

David is a good man. He’s helped many people in his career and today he’s just trying to help many more.

I wouldn’t be here without David. He might not know this but in conversation with others from the industry, I refer to him as my mentor. His advice when I was disenchanted with the SEO industry and the agency life back in 2013 is the reason why I’m still here. The questions he asked me back then kick-started a series of events that led to me being a director at NeoMam today.

I’m proud to call David my mentor and it hurts to read all the nonsense that has been said about him over the past few weeks.

I know that I would go to him if someone from the industry did something inappropriate to me. I can imagine many women would feel like that about David so I believe him when he says he’s been receiving messages from victims who want to remain anonymous.

David is not an angry man but he is angry right now.

He’s been trying to get people’s attention for years about dark things that are going on in our industry that not only reflect bad on all of us but also hurt people. He’s been shushed for a long time and now he’s being harassed because he took the battle to the public eye.

I know most people in this battle mean well. I imagine none of them would want to see anybody hurt, whether it’s a woman or a man. But all this drama is not helping anybody.

Using your SEO rockstar status to defend the indefensible is not helping anybody.

Directing your thousands of followers to join a war against an important member of our industry because he outed your friend is not helping anybody.

Keeping your mouth shut because you’re scared that the SEO elite will retaliate against you for speaking up is not helping anybody.

Jumping into this mess just to stir the pot and cause more bad blood among people who already dislike each other is not helping anybody.

Keeping the important conversations that will help our industry grow up hidden in DMs, private Slack messages and closed Facebook groups is not helping anybody.

Deflecting from the issue of sexual harassment and branding anybody who asks questions about it as trolls is not helping anybody.

Making all this about you, your friends and your enemies is not helping anybody.

These actions are not helping the women who have been victim of sexual harassment, women who can’t move on with their lives pretending that nothing happened. It will take more than a half-hearted apology to make them feel good about themselves and their careers again, to make them feel safe.

This childish war between the ‘rockstars’ and the ‘trolls’ is not helping the women who might be experiencing sexual harassment right now and don’t know what to do about it.

All that I’m asking today is that instead of making all this about yourself, you go out and tell the world that these things happened, that the victims are not lying, that David is not lying, that you knew about it and you didn’t do anything, that you’re sorry you let it go on for as long as it did, and that this behaviour stops today.

Stop showering all of us with statements about how you’ve been a feminist for longer than David has been doing SEO.

Stop excusing yourself by tweeting about how we need more women speaking at conferences and tagging ‘women SEOs you should follow on Twitter’ once a month.

Stop pretending that your number one objective in life is to protect women from this very abuse David has brought to light if all you’re going to do is to attack the messenger and change the subject.

Healing from abuse starts with acknowledging that it was not your fault and that what happened to you was wrong.

If we as an industry are not going to acknowledge the sexual harassment and objectification of women that has been going on, regardless of who was the one partaking in it and who was the one pointing it out, then shame on us.

Shame on all of us.

We’re teaching the new generation that it’s okay to treat women like a piece of meat as long as:

1. You surround yourself by powerful friends who will help you cover it up.
2. You delete the evidence of such harassment.
3. You publicly join in the conversation about equality in the workplace.
4. You make some grand gesture later on in your career to clean up your image.

We’re teaching the new generation that if you’re aware of anyone who is currently harassing women in the workplace or at events, you should:

1. Bring it up behind closed doors as many times as you need to, even if it takes 10 years for that person to stop.
2. Continue to support their rise to SEO stardom by sharing the stage with them and recommending them to others.
3. Give them an award later on in their careers, even if they’ve been making people feel uncomfortable for years.
4. Make sure to mute anyone who ever points this behaviour out and recommend others to do the same — pro tip: block them altogether.
5. Never apologise if you ever get caught knowing about what was going on and doing nothing about it.

And if you’re a woman who’s suffering from any form of sexual harassment today, your lesson is this: shut the fuck up about it, we don’t want to hear it.

Is that the legacy we want to leave behind?

The obsession with our personal brand is killing the SEO industry

Back in 2013 I wrote a blog post about our obsession with the idea of someday becoming influencers and the dangers this carries, for our clients and for our industry as a whole.

Six years later, I’m reading the arguments between self-proclaimed ‘SEO rockstars’ and ‘SEO trolls’ and it’s obvious that the quest to be someone not only continues but has in fact gotten worse.

It got so bad that right now many people are too scared to come out and say what they think for fear of retaliation from either of those two groups.

We have fed the gurus to the point where they have become gods. They can bring us to the light by befriending us or they can destroy our careers by publicly shaming us.

Nobody wants to stick their name to this mess, no matter how crucial this conversation may be.

Even I felt I had to consider all the possible outcomes of writing this article:

• I could be publicly branded as a troll by people with thousands of followers on social media.
• I could be banned from the conference circuit by speakers who are highly valued in the eyes of conference organisers.
• I could be denied industry awards by judges who are SEO personalities themselves.
• I could be bad-mouthed in private circles that might be frequented by someone who could become a client one day.

Luckily for me:

• I’ve never being involved in any petty dispute or public shaming so it would take a rational human being only a few minutes of reading my articles and my Twitter feed to know that I’m not a troll.
• I don’t speak at conferences so I’ve banned myself from the circuit a few years back.
• I don’t put my work forward for awards, never have and never will.
• I have zero control about what people will say behind my back and there’s no way to know whether I’ve not been bad-mouthed already.

I can’t believe that saying that we need to address sexual harassment in our industry is equivalent to professional suicide these days.

So here I am, setting myself on fire in defence of David Cohen and the message he’s trying to share with all of us.

We want everyone who knew about these behaviours back then to come forward right now and apologise to all of us who entrusted you with our industry for so long.

We won’t allow for all this to remain behind closed doors any longer. This might be the way in which the SEO industry used to do things back then but that’s not us.

We won’t shut up about any wrongdoings moving forward. This is our industry too and we reclaim the right to make it a better place for those who are coming behind us.

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