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The screaming and shrieking have reached crescendo volume. Search engine optimization’s dirty little secret — that highly experienced optimizers don’t like to divulge their “real” secrets — has almost gone mainstream. This perception is approaching the status of SEO myth — not necessarily because it’s not true (although it’s not) because it is being used in classic myth-like fashion to explain why the SEO advice people find on the Web seems to suck.

Why the SEO advice you find sucks — Really

There is certainly plenty of bad SEO advice being hammered into naive people’s heads and hearts every day but I think a more common occurrence is that people looking for SEO advice are just getting hammered for asking for help.

On the one hand, many people are willing to offer an occasional quick glance at a Website. Some SEOs do this regularly in an attempt to drum up business, I suppose. I do it so that I can see what is actually happening on the Web “out there”, beyond the circles of experienced SEO.

On the other hand, many of the most helpful SEOs resent being treated as a free service pack for some stranger’s Website. They get a little testy when they see a message like, “Hi, I just launched a Website. Would someone please review it and tell me if I’m doing this right?”

People looking for that kind of help are setting themselves up for failure. Experienced hands usually don’t like to give free SEO reviews, and the people most eager to provide such reviews in response to those kinds of requests usually lack the experience you’re looking for.

So while people like me will complain about bad SEOs giving out advice, the apparent dearth of good SEO advice is really not a dearth. After all, there are thousands of pretty good articles and blog posts still available through many archives.

All the SEO bloggers have stopped blogging about SEO

While it’s true that some people get burned out on a topic, most people in the field move on to something else. It’s a natural part of the personal evolutionary process. Many people who start out learning search engine optimization move into social media optimization and some of those folks move into Web business marketing and strategy. The pathways unfold in many directions.

But there comes a point where after you’ve proved your SEO chops on your blog you have to acknowledge that there is more to Web marketing than search engine optimization. Search is not the only source of traffic on the Web. It never has been and hopefully it never will be.

There are relatively few people in the industry who can keep saying something about search engine optimization without drifting off into another social media escapade. SEOs have coopted social media prerogatives in so many ways it could be argued that most of us should now call ourselves Social Media Marketers rather than Search Engine Optimizers. Many people have made that transition already.

I think a new generation of SEO bloggers is emerging and that group of people will flower into something brilliant. All it takes is time. There is still much to be said (and learned) about search engine marketing, but you’re probably going to have to look for the newer voices to find something that hasn’t been said before.

It’s not that all the SEO bloggers have stopped blogging about SEO so much as that there is a new set of SEO bloggers who have found their passion for the topic.

The times, they are a-changin’

It’s hard for me to remember which search year I’m in. Today’s search results look like the results from last year. Today’s grave SEO doubts about what is happening on the Web sound like those from five years ago.

Google is getting bigger, faster, pickier, and I can’t get my site to rank in Google and how many links do I need to succeed with Google?

With all the innovations in search that we’ve seen through the past five years, people still seem to grouse about the same old stuff: their sites are penalized, not indexed, not being crawled, not ranking well for all keywords, etc.

Search engine optimization is being called on the carpet every year for promoting smarmy sites. The SEO industry leaps to defend itself every time someone criticizes it. And we cannot agree on which methods are “white hat”, effective, or the best practices everyone should be using.

So why are the times a-changin’? Danny Sullivan is still running search conferences — he’s just using a different company to do that, now.

Rand Fishkin is still trying to get everyone to share their SEO thoughts on his site — he’s just got more money to work with now.

Todd Friesen is still having a blast with all his buds at the bar — he’s just living in the U.S. now.

We have no standards, no trustworthy certifications, and no means of reining in unethical SEOs.

I don’t see that all that much has changed in search engine optimization. We’re still batting away noisome flies with nothing to do and building Websites and planting links and looking at search results.

It’s the people that have changed, not the times, not the process.

Understanding that will help you cope with all the change you’re seeing today and tomorrow. Change is the only constant in this industry.