Now how do you prevent that?
Accreditation? Would that prevent them from simply lying and saying they had it?
Dont get me wrong – I think they’re certainly should be standards and qualifications in our industry… but how do you prevent the above?

Shame list / public black list?
Fine’s from an industry body (would have to be v.official industry body, so might put off many from joining)

Drives me mad…..

Search engine optimization is not all about Google and GOOD SEO is definitely about ALL search-related functions.

Any attempt to establish standards that focuses on one search engine will be a dismal failure. Such “standards” would have no credibility.

I’m a fan of service level assurances but the IPA apparently is coming out with this qualification in February according to the SEMPO rep at iCrossing. Qualifications are coming whether we want them or not.

Something is needed and as @Terry Van Horne said this sort of thing has been tried before. I wonder, though, if having the IPA behind it will give it legs. If some of the community would also endorse it, it might be the first step towards a university course of some sort.

Whatever comes of it, things are certainly changing and in a positive direction.

From a client side I don’t think that having “exams” is going to be the sway, as exams unfortunately tend to prove only that you can pass exams, plus in SEO they would be quickly dated.

The key thing as a client I’d be looking for something that gives “trust”. I’m not talking about trust in terms of tactics used, just purely that the company i’m buying services from will follow through on their promise and not rip me off.

It means openness and honesty, there’s nothing wrong with a company offering a service which the engines may consider breaks the TOS as long as the client is aware of the risk/reward ratio and is fully signed up to it.

So to me the key points that any accredited firm/individual must adhere to are:

- openness (we’ll tell you what we’ll do)
- honesty (we’ll educate you of the risks and likely rewards)
- trust (we will follow through and actually implement the work)
- measurability (we will track and measure our success – or lack of it)

So accreditation should be more along the line of a company signing up to a set of professional operating standards. Customers with complaints could take their complaint to the accreditation body and companies that are found to be in breach of standards would be censured and/or have their accreditation removed.

So in summary, to me the greater value would be in managing professional values rather than skill sets or tactics.

Of course unless the large organisations, conference speakers liek Judith, and well known industry names get on board the accreditation will fail before it starts. So there is the catch 22. The people who need to get it in order for it to succeed won’t benifit from it.

In terms of what it should be, I think it needs to be more about service level guarantees, and being able to demonstrate work done than it is about qualifications. But even that wll prove a little sticky with such an intangible process

“The beauty of the CNE and MCSE programs is they only last a few weeks or months, so workers can become experts on a particular technology (and not at all on competitors to that technology) without having to take years of college-level training. MCSEs and CNEs don’t have to go to college at all. They just have to pass the tests. This sounded great until I remembered my days 20 years ago investigating the Three Mile Island nuclear accident. One of the underlying reasons for that fiasco was that the reactor operators were trained not to run the reactor as much as to pass the test.”
– Robert X. Cringely, “I, Cringely”