fantomaster - 1:43 am on Jun 10, 2000 (gmt 0)

seth: From what we have seen to date even on VERY major sites, the SEO situation is pathetic, to put it very mildly.
We lost all but one page of a client's site (no small player) on AV recently because the SEO people before us had stuffed it with machine generated doorway pages of the very worst kind, white text on white background, spamdexing, absolutely no content and a revisit-after meta tag set to 2 days. Not that the latter is of too much import, but it does boil down to asking for it. When we took over, I omitted to check out the existing doorway pages (they're still ranking pretty well on some engines) - not a mistake I'll care to make again.
In any case, major companies' overall SEO is really a salesman's job: most CEOs just won't be bothered with the gory technical details, and even if you get good to excellent results, more often than not you're well advised to let your salespeople sell those again to them because they neither understand the whole process from scratch nor to they want to. So it's a mix of ignorance, carelessness, overblown ego ("why can't you simply tweak those pages to put us in position #1 tomorrow?"), overworkedness and a general aversion to "all this search engine voodoo stuff" ...