American Express Is A Waste

This is a classic case of a business - with no clue - giving advise about search engine optimization.

Recently, American Express created a guide for its small business program called OPEN as part of its Business Gold Rewards Cards program. AmEX claims this "guide" is a "practice guide for business growth." The guide is available for download from the AmEX Meetups page.

The guide claims:

"Search engines, like Yahoo! and Google, are usually the first place people will look for you. Make it easier for them to find you. Yahoo! and Google offer tools to let them know the site map structure of your Web site."

"Also, using clean U.R.L.'s like yourdomain.com/store/widgets instead of yourdomain.com/store.php?id=42&categoryID= widgets will increase your chances of getting indexed in a search engine."

"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, and once your site has been put on Google's blacklist, it will take forever to get off."

But it gets better.

Also on the Meetups page, American Express posts another document which promotes the idea of search engine marketing. This document advocates SEO and gives advice on what to do and provides a brief primer on SEM.

Don't you just love two opposite opinions from companies that are totally clueless about a particular topic? How about sticking to credit cards? OK?