Sphinn has an excellent discussion taking place on if the SEO industry needs certifications and standards.

To be honest, there are various certification programs out there. None of them are backed by a centralized non-profit agency such as SEMPO. There is SEO training with certifications led by SEO companies and SEO conferences but not a accredited SEO certification from an organization that represents the SEO industry.

At the same time, there are no real standards for the industry as well. There are best practices, mostly laid out by Google but no standards to say what is allowed or not allowed.

The question is do we need them for our industry? Some may say we do and some may simply not want it for good reasons.

Here are two polls asking if we should have SEO certification and SEO standards. They are two different questions and thus require two different polls: