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SEO Spam - Why you should hate it as much as I do!
This week, for some reason, several less than reputable search engine promotion companies have been brought to my attention. People ask me about them (why are they so cheap?), people tell me how they have been burned (I had average rankings for 2 months and now they're gone!), and some people even wonder why I discourage them from trying it. Here's why.
These so-called search engine promotion companies are causing more harm than good and are ultimately wasting everyone's time and money. If you ask a search engine optimization company to see a sample of their work, you can spot this junk a mile away. They typically create hundreds of pages for you for a very minimal amount of money. These pages have no content. They are simply pages that have lists of nonsense words and lists of links connecting all of these nonsense pages.
These kind of pages are frightening and terrible on so many levels. Search engines state outright that they hate these pages because they add no value to the engines. These pages typically have very low clickthrough percentages -- meaning that few people move from these pages to the main pages of your site. The reason for this is obvious. These pages provide no information to visitors. Also because search engines are continually on the lookout for these pages you must constantly manipulate them to stay indexed.
Not only are these pages useless and ultimately ineffective for the client, they also play a significant part in search engines now charging to spider your site. HotBot stated that before their pay for spidering plan, upwards of 95% of pages submitted to their engine were spam. It became impossible for them to weed through thousands of pages to only find the 5% that offered any kind of content. As you pay your $30 for HotBot to look over your site, remember that useless spam is the reason you are now paying.
AltaVista had the same problem and now uses a code that must be entered by hand before submitting pages. It is impossible now to use any automated submission program at AltaVista.
Spam email is highly known to be unwanted and gives a negative impression of the company using it. Search engine spam does the exact same thing. But it simply isn't as well know as its email brother. It wastes search engine resources. It wastes your potential clients' time. And because search engines hate it so much and are constantly throwing it out, it is wasting your money.
As search engine promotion continues to move forward into the mainstream marketing world, SEO spam will be shown for what it really is and will quickly be discarded by anyone who is interested in doing legitimate business.
Until then, please, if you're looking into SEO work, do your homework and don't hire a spammer -- for your own sake and for the sake of all of us doing searches (and doing legitimate SEO work) on the Internet.
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