Earlier today David A Utter, author for WebProNews, posted a article about American Express Guide Calling SEOs A “Waste”. The article quotes two eBook PDF’s from AMEX’s OPEN book program that are targeted at small business owners. One of the PDF quotes clearly states:

“Finally, don’t waste money on so-called Search Engine Optimization (S.E.O.) specialists. Search engines are very quick to penalize sites that try to trick their filtering techniques…”

This quote seems like American Express is telling small business owners that all SEO specialists are just tricking search engine filters and causing sites to get banned.

This is certainly not true. American Express needs to qualify their statements a little better before publishing these documents. Small business owners already have enough things to worry about in and around their business that they do not need “Authoritative Figures” such as AMEX providing them with such false information.

There are many different types of SEO professionals including white hat and black hat specialists. White hat specialists are SEOs that provide clean and natural search engine optimization results. Black hat specialists will do just about anything, including spam in some cases, to get forced search engine results.

If AMEX was to qualify their statement a little better and inform small business owners to be wary of black hat SEO specialists then it wouldn’t be a big deal. Plainly stating that small business owners shouldn’t waste their money on SEO specialists is just ridiculous.

David’s article goes on to mention another AMEX OPEN book PDF that actually promotes the idea of SEO and just to be wary of black hat specialists. This is the real message that AMEX should be sending. It also shows that the author of the first book mentioned is unclear about the message that they should be writing about.

The fact that there are two books promoting clearly different ideas from AMEX goes to show that small business owners probably should not be getting their SEO advice from the credit card issuer. It also shows that AMEX should invest in a editor for these books to keep their message and company image clean and consistent.

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