The joke’s on her

An alert popped up on my screen today that looked interesting. Wait, I understate: it looked, well, world-changing, at least within in the environs of the SEO community. Google was to enter the SEO business, charging the cool US $25,000 per month to optimize websites.

The woman who wrote the piece was concerned – very concerned. So were her commenters. And me? Well, I just couldn’t understand why news like this wouldn’t have been on the front page of every news site across the net.

A bit of searching brought the answer. 27 days previously – April 1st, to be precise – an SEO company posted a story that turned out to be just that little bit too believable. Thankfully for all of us (for small SEO companies like us, and for the clients who don’t want to pay hefty amounts for their SEO) it really was just an April Fool’s joke that someone took a little bit too seriously.

What can we learn from this? Well, first, the oft-repeated lesson that you shouldn’t believe everything you read online. Second, that humor has to be very broadly signposted online, or it will be missed. And third, we should all be grateful that small agencies such as ourselves exist, and will charge you much, much less than 25K for your SEO needs.