I am a long time SEO. I do a lot less consulting than I used to because truthfully I can make more money SEOing my own content than what most companies would pay me.<p>Commodity SEO outsourced to India hurt the reputation of the industry. The Pump and Dump link building made people stop trusting SEO. With good reason in general, but the companies like mine that offered good results based on things like helping companies construct quality pages that worked for the bots and the humans alike suffered.<p>But I can tell you SEO isn't dead. Not even close. We are all just too busy to mess with telling all the Social Media Experts how to rank, because they don't invite us to their parties.