Everything But The Weed

Approved by:
Linda Maze, a Wedding photography Gainesville FL in Gainesville Florida

From Graywolf’s “How to Be a Dirty Digger” to Greenberg’s “The Saboteurs of Search” we learn that online marketing and politics play on similar grounds.

In the real life presidential election campaigns run behind closed doors and their actors often play dirty tricks on each other; for “All’s fair in love and war.” The final purpose of the game is political supremacy. Power. In SEM… the top of Google’s SERP.

The the search engines can be manipulated is no secret, but most SEOs try a positive approach and define their strategies as ethical or “white-hat.”

In Aaron Wall’s dictionary, there is no such thing as ethical SEO, because, no matter how you look at it, once you employ a technique (any) to manipulate the search engines, you “SPAM.” The only question is what kind of spam is acceptable from a Google perspective.

Part of the answer comes from Google’s Webmaster Guidelines (quality guidelines – specific guidelines), more comes from Bruce Clay’s SEO code of ethics, and if that’s not enough you could always rely on an answer from authority SEO professionals like the owners of this very blog, and all the reputable gurus out there.

Now back to SEO as a dirty business.

Strangely enough in the real life it is a lot easier to harm than to heal. Somehow supremacy and power are achieved faster through war than peaceful negotiation. No surprise here: peaceful negotiation takes time to find a compromise, which, in many situations, is not what the parts involved hoped to achieve.

Google bowling is pure evil and it deals with how to frame a competitor’s site as a spamming site to convince Google to drop its rankings. This type of negative SEO deals with links. Many links at once. These links are generated automatically, over a short period of time, with a special software. They’ll mostly come from bad neighbours and they’ll have the same anchor text, to make the spam picture complete. Google is just a machine, so there’s no real way for this machine to know who is behind the link spam. The “guilty” site might lose its position in the SERP or even get banned. Some sites never recover after a Google ban, others see their rankings vanishing and their pages landing into the supplemental results and they never learn why. If something like this happened to your site, all you can do is to find out who hates you so much.

There are simpler ways to harm competition. Scraper sites harm writers by copying their content. And it is not that difficult to understand where the “harm” lies.

For example, when a scrapper copies the content of your site, your rankings are harmed, especially if the scraper site happens to have more authority than yours. There is not much you can do to protect your rankings and your copyright. But if you decide to report the guilty site to the search engine (file a compliant) the search engine will remove the site from its index for 10 days, to give you (the copyright holder) the time to sue for infringement.

The Google ban theoretically lasts for just 10 days, but the trust rank of the accused site will lower. Another similar complaint and the site’s integrity will be seriously questioned. Just remember: what goes around, comes around.

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