What do scientists make of SEO "experts"?

SEO pundits and experts are two-a-penny at the moment: their articles, blog posts, tweets and reports are easy to find and championed by the major SEO/ SEM sites.

A lot of articles contain what appears to be opinion, rather than fact, dressed up as fact. Citations (except for the occasional white paper or marketing report) are few and far between.

As someone with a light interest in Scepticism, I come across the occasional homeopathy or anti-vaccine article, which is often absent scientific evidence or facts. I can't help but feel a lot of these SEO articles are similar - lots of assertions, but no scientific evidence to back up what is being stated. I think this is important, considering that SEO touches on several areas of maths, science and technology - algorithms, computer science, statistics, information science etc.

So my question is to anybody who works (or has worked) as a scientist, mathematician, scientific researcher etc and has an interest in SEO or interacts with it as part of their work: how do you perceive these articles and their authors?